Gubernatorial spokesman Jeffrey Sheridan says Gov. Tom Wolf supports legislation that offers more clear-cut guidelines for ride-sharing services such as Uber and Lyft.
Government officials “should be finding ways to help these companies grow across the commonwealth,” Sheridan said.
But the only proper way for government to do that is to get out of the way.
Anytime anybody is required to seek government permission to compete in a free market system is a pretty good indicator that government has a perverted vested interest in protecting a monopoly.
The free market is a wonderful thing. Millions, if not billions, of multiple, independently made choices work in concert to make the marketplace work. But that marketplace also can be a humbling thing. As Giant Eagle is discovering.
The big grocery store chain, based in O’Hara, says it is offering voluntary buyouts to about 340 corporate employees. That represents one percent of its total workforce.
The reason? Giant Eagle cites, among other things, “deflationary trends in food pricing.” (That is hard to digest, given the price of beef lately, but the statistics do bear out the contention.)
That, coupled with increased competition from lower-cost grocers (outside of Greater Pittsburgh, it is reported), has pinched Giant Eagle’s bottom line.
One analyst suggests Giant Eagle has priced itself out of certain markets with its upscale Market District Stores; the buyouts should make the grocery giant “leaner meaner,” the analyst offered.
While that might be true, if Giant Eagle fails to adapt to the increasingly competitive grocery marketplace — at the store level — management streamlining might prove to be for naught.
Twenty-five. The number in and of itself might not seem very significant. But when you attach it to the number of natural gas drilling rigs operating in Pennsylvania as of last count, it’s very encouraging news for an industry that has suffered from a glut of product, low prices and perennial attempts by state government to quash it with regulation.
The commonwealth rig count, as of mid-October, stood at 25, up 10 from just the past August.
Drill, baby, drill.
That said, drillers certainly can’t be anything but buoyed by a Beaver County Times report that suggests the region “could draw as many as six other cracker facilities.”
That’s in addition to the Shell’s ethane cracker plant now under construction in in Beaver County.
The newspaper cites an analysis by Topline Analytics of Philadelphia.
“Shell will build an ecosystem (in Western Pennsylvania) … that will support other crackers (here and in neighboring Ohio and West Virginia),” Topline’s Tom Gellrich, a former chemical engineer, told The Times.
Gellrich cites “cheap feedstock, existing infrastructure” and the proximity to customers, in addition to a ready-made workforce (once Shell’s operation is up and running in 2020.
That’s great, if true, of course. But it also would negate the “need” for any more taxpayer incentives, the likes of which government officials insist were “needed” to “prime the pump” with Shell’s coming Beaver County facility.
Colin McNickle is a senior fellow and media specialist at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
