If you don’t pay them more, then you as the business owner or middle manager have broken the employment contract. (Remember the part about performance and raise and bonus?) Many middle managers and business owners get amnesia when raise and bonus time comes. Funny how that works, isn’t it?

The beauty of daylighting is it goes back to a meritocracy in its purest form. I serve clients, I smash deadlines, and other people, either customers, or other clients, pay me money. There is no office politics. There are no broken employment contracts. For my side business, every hour I side hustle at my day job translates directly into more money. And the amount of money my side hustle gains me is more than any paltry raise or bonus you middle managers will ever produce.

Daylighting is the natural byproduct of middle managers abandoning the meritocracy due to laziness or greed. I bet middle managers are out there right now saying, “Why should I give a programmer a 20% raise? It’s too much money! No matter how much they pump out.” But these same middle managers never do a dollarization measure of what the extra output gains their company.

The state has impoverished its subjects through its ruinous burdens and meddling, and it has used democratic demagoguery to shift the blame and pit its victims against each other. It has divided America up into rival ravenous tribes, and the crowds we see facing off in the streets of Berkeley are the vanguards of those hungry hordes.

I did not have an initial number at the start of the quarter other than “I’ll take the under, way under” in response to initial estimates from GDPNow.

I expect I will be saying the same thing again.

The only things holding up the economy are housing and aircraft orders. I believe the latter has skewed many of the soft data regional Fed reports.

Hard data is starting to look ugly. Autos have rolled over, bank lending has rolled over, retail sales have been weak, and credit card defaults are up sharply.

This is also, as abolitionist Frederick Douglass noted, the definition of slavery: “I didn’t know I was a slave until I found out I couldn’t do the things I wanted.”

You want to know what it means to be a slave in the American police state?

It means being obedient, compliant and Sieg Heil!-ing every government agent armed with a weapon. If you believe otherwise, try standing up for your rights, being vocal about your freedoms, or just challenging a government dictate, and see how long you last before you’re staring down the barrel of a loaded government-issued gun.