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When California’s Proposition 14 was debated and passed in 2010, thereby creating primary elections open to all voters regardless of party registration, activists on the outside of mainstream politics worried that it would amount to a death sentence for third parties. By graduating only the top two primary finishers to the general election, they warned, the new system would lock in the advantage of Democrats and Republicans.

So how did the outsiders fare in yesterday’s California primary? Just eight—five independents, two Greens, and one Libertarian—advanced to compete for one of the 166 electoral positions in November’s general election. And of those, only one finished within 30 percentage points of the front-runner.

The top vote-getter of the group actually won the first round: Steve Poizner, California’s insurance commissioner as a Republican from 2007-2011, ran for his old job this time as an independent, getting 41.3 percent of the vote to Democrat Ricardo Lara’s 40.6 percent. But Poizner will have a fight on his hands given that the third place finisher (with 13 percent of the vote) was also a Democrat, Asif Mahmood. Rounding out the insurance commissioner vote was Nathalie Hrizi of the Peace and Freedom Party with 5.1 percent, which was higher than any other third-party candidate for California’s eight statewide elected offices. (The best of the four Libertarian Party showings for those posts was Gail Lightfoot’s 2.4 percent for secretary of state, good for fifth place.)

Three of California’s country-topping 53 seats in the House of Representatives will be contested in November by candidates without a “D” or “R” next to their name. Independent Ronald Paul Kabat should be chum for Rep. Jimmy Panetta (D-Monterey), the Green Party’s Rodolfo Cortes Barragan will tilt at the windmill of Rep. Lucille Roybal-Allard (D-East L.A.), and Green Kenneth Mejia beat out Libertarian Angela McArdle, 12.1 percent to 8.5, for the opportunity to get clobbered by Rep. Jimmy Gomez (D-Los Angeles).

Two other Libertarians lost close races to non-major-party finalists for State Senate. In Sacramento, rising start L.P. activist Janine DeRose finished a close fourth, with 10.4 percent of the vote, while independent Eric Frame moved onto the gold medal round with 14.6. In the South Bay, Mark Herd fell just short of independent Baron Bruno, 11.4 percent to 13.2. In State Assembly contests, aerospace engineer Alan Reynolds, a self-described “independent moderate centrist,” finished second with 28.4 percent in a race against two Pasadena Democrats.

So is all hope lost for the Libertarian Party this November? No! L.P. State Secretary Honor “Mimi” Robson advanced to the knockout round for State Assembly representing the great city of Long Beach with 17.4 percent of the vote, elbowing out a Democrat (13.6 percent) and Green (10.1) for the right to go up against incumbent Democrat Patrick O’Donnell. And Calimesa Mayor Jeff Hewitt, arguably the most effective L.P. politician in the state, made it to the finals of the Riverside County Board of Supervisors election, running on a platform of reforming public-sector pensions.

Having 166 electoral slots contested by just eight non-traditional pols—seven of whom are massive underdogs—does not sound like much. And as the great Richard Winger of Ballot Access News points out, “It appears that in November 2018, there will be only four states with no third party candidates on the ballot for any statewide race: Alabama, California, Maine, and Washington.” That latter state pioneered the top-two open primary back in 2004.

Still, I recall in many election years past looking at a map of California districts and being able to draw a path for hundreds of miles before arriving at a contested House election; yesterday, only three of 53 House races featured just one candidate, and 25 had at least some third-party or independent challenger. I still think (unlike my former colleagues at the L.A. Times) that the law is a bad deal for third parties, which face obstacles enough in a system whose rules are largely crafted by our two 19^th century holdovers. But the results are interesting to chew on.

In their haste to condemn the negative, unemployment-inducing effects of minimum wage laws, some free-marketeers are giving these forced pay hikes undue credit for spurring technological innovation.

Witness the reaction to McDonald’s CEO Steve Easterbrook’s recent comments that the fast food giant would be rolling out self-serve kiosks in 1,000 stores each quarter, with the hopes of having them in all their American locations by the end of 2020. Several websites were quick to pounce on this as another example of minimum wage increases displacing the workers they are supposed to help.

“McDonald’s introducing self-serve kiosks that don’t need minimum wage,” says the headline at Fast Company. “Workers complaining because McDonald’s would not raise their wages might want to start looking for other jobs sooner rather than later,” cautions Hank Berrien over at the Daily Wire.

“The Fight for $15 [campaign] has been proclaimed a success everywhere it brought about an increase in the minimum wage but, as almost anyone could have predicted, the end result is going to be more automation and, probably, fewer jobs,” writes Hot Air‘s John Sexton, himself a former McDonald’s employee.

Similar articles in Forbes and ZeroHedge have greeted past rollouts of these self-serve kiosks. Conservative Twitter is happy to reiterate the point with memes and sarcastic hashtags.

The minimum wage does indeed fuel unemployment, and these commenters’ hearts are in the right place for lampooning the policy. But fingering these kiosks as an example of the minimum wage’s ill effects gives the regulation undue credit for an otherwise positive development while ignoring the real costs of the policy.

For starters, McDonald’s has stressed time and again that its adoption of these kiosks is less about avoiding the costs of human workers and more about capturing the benefits that come with the new technology. As company spokesperson Terri Hickey told Buzzfeed yesterday, customers appear to be more likely to place larger orders when interacting with one of these kiosks.

Hickey adds that the “restaurants are transitioning some roles to more customer engaging positions like Guest Experience Leaders and table service.” James Wehner, the chain’s director of global digital experience, said much the same thing to the trade publication Kiosk Marketplace last year, arguing that self-service kiosks were either having no effect on staff levels or in some cases increasing them because of the boost the machines were giving sales.

That is, of course, the sort of thing you’d expect them to say. After all, replacing workers with machines is bad PR. But marketing material from kiosk manufacturers also suggests that the main draw of these devices is not savings on labor costs.

When the kiosk maker Zivelo touts the advantages of its products, for example, it cites more accurate order-taking, easier upselling, faster ordering, and enabling companies to “redeploy the workforce to more strategic customer retention and dining room management initiatives.” Notably missing is any mention of reduced labor costs.

If you’re trying to discern the negative consequences of the minimum wage, you should focus less on flashy new machines and more on mundane responses, like job losses, hours cuts, and higher prices.

Seattle, one of the nation’s early adopters of a $15 minimum wage, is a great example. In June 2017, the University of Washington found that the city’s wage law had actually cost low-income workers $125 by reducing the number of jobs and workable hours available.

At the time I asked Mars Maynard, general manager for the Seattle bookstore Ada’s Technical Books, how his business was responding. “We have changed our store hours a little bit, we have changed our staffing hours, we’ve reduced staffing hours, and we have raised prices,” said Maynard. Automation did not come up.

When Minneapolis was preparing to raise its minimum wage a couple weeks later, Steve Minn—the owner of several affordable housing complexes in the city—told me he’d likely compensate for the new costs by reducing the frequency of janitorial service, not by buying more Roombas.

Minimum wage laws do a lot of bad things, but those new kiosks at McDonald’s are not among them.

Social Security will be insolvent by 2034, three years earlier than previously expected, and one major fund within Medicare will run dry by 2026, according to a report released Tuesday by the trustees of the two programs.

If you’re like me—a 31-year-old who has never harbored any expectation of receiving benefits from either program—then you might have greeted the news with a small degree of cynical relief. This means you’ll only have to spend another decade or so throwing a portion of your paycheck into the black hole that is Social Security and Medicaid, right?

It’s fine. You can have a moment to celebrate. Go ahead. I’ll wait.

OK. By now, that feeling of relief should already be settling into the pit of your stomach and transforming into pangs of fear and loathing. The people responsible for solving this looming crisis—and for mediating what’s sure to be a nasty debate over the future of both programs—spent yesterday acting like there is hardly anything more important than a bunch of rich jocks showing appropriate fealty to the president’s opinions.

In other words, we are screwed.

Let’s review. Social Security is a $900 billion program that provides income to 67 million Americans. About 47 million of them are over age 65, and the majority of the rest are disabled. If you’re within 15 to 20 years of that threshold, you might not be relying on that income yet, but you’re likely to be depending on it in your future financial plan—if you have one.

Medicare provides health care benefits to about 57 million older Americans—more than twice as many people as had their health insurance disrupted by Obamacare. And you remember how big of a deal that (rightly) was.

It is important to remember that insolvency is not the same as bankruptcy. By 2026 and 2034, respectively, Medicare and Social Security will not have enough money to pay the full cost of their obligations, but that’s not the same as saying they’ll have no money at all. According to the trustee report, Social Security beneficiaries will face a 21 percent across-the-board benefit cut when insolvency hits. Medicare’s insolvency will hit first in the program’s hospital fund; without changes that will only be able to pay for 91 percent of costs. And then that number will steadily decline, barring serious reform.

None of this is to suggest that these programs are in themselves worth saving. They are dinosaurs that were designed more than half a century ago for an entirely different workforce and population. For example, when Social Security launched in 1935, the average life expectancy for Americans was 61. Yes, that means the average person died four years before qualifying for Social Security benefits.

Today, the two programs function mostly as a giant conveyor belt to transfer wealth from the young and relatively poor to the old and relatively rich, allowing the average person (who now lives to be 78) more than a decade of taxpayer-funded retirement. Entitlements are also the primary drivers of our national debt, which just hit $20 trillion and is on pace by the mid-2020s to reach levels not seen since World War II.

They are not working. They should be completely revamped.

But do you really believe that Congress and the president are up to the task? They might not even pass a budget this year. Nothing on entitlements will be done before the midterms, and the 2020 presidential race will begin as soon as the last votes are counted on November 6 of this year. Normally, a presidential race could be a good opportunity to debate the future of two of the federal government’s biggest expenditures, but these are not normal times.

By the time 2021 rolls around, maybe someone will be ready to do something about Tuesday’s news. About the entitlements, I mean, not about whether football players stand for the national anthem.

When that happens, both programs should be restructured to take care of the truly needy, rather than being benefits for anyone who has reached an arbitrary age. As Reason‘s Nick Gillespie and Veronique de Rugy wrote in a still-very-relevant 2012 feature on the future of America’s entitlements, “Focusing on those truly in need instead of automatically shoveling out larger and larger amounts to well-off senior citizens is the best way to avert looming fiscal catastrophe and restore some morality to an indefensible system.”

The catastrophe part is pretty unavoidable, thanks to basic demographics. As The Wall Street Journal notes, there were 2.8 workers for every Social Security recipient last year. That’s down from 3.3 in 2007, and that’s way down from the 5.1 workers per beneficiary that existed in 1960.

Those demographics are destiny. As America ages, this year will mark the first time since 1982 that Social Security has spent more money than it takes in. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a nonpartisan think tank that favors balanced budgets, notes that the gap will continue to grow, leaving the program with a $900 billion combined deficit over the next decade. (For some useful, if morbid, information, check out the committee’s calculator to see how old you’ll be when Social Security goes kaputt.)

In the face of that threat, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin issued a statement yesterday promising to do nothing and hope everything turns out okay.

“Tax cuts, regulatory reform, and improve trade agreeements will generate the long-term growth needed to help secure these programs and lead them to a more stable path,” Mnuchin said. “Robust economic growth will help to ensure their lasting stability.”

This has been a go-to play for the Trump administration. Last year, when various independent projections showed that the Republican-backed tax bill would add $1 trillion to the national debt, even after accounting for economic growth, the Treasury put out a one-page “analysis” promising that future economic growth and politically impossible budget cuts would somehow make the whole thing balance.

“A well-functioning democracy would, by now, have had a mature national discussion marked by a recognition of the need to set priorities among finite resources, as well as the intergenerational unfairness of the status quo, the ethical wrongness of borrowing for current consumption instead of investing in the future, the feasibility of alternative remedies if only we would start now, and so on,” writes Mitch Daniels, former governor of Indiana and the current co-chair of the CRFB, in today’s edition of The Washington Post. “Regrettably, but realistically, our republic at this point doesn’t seem capable of discussions like that.

“What we’re seeing is a fast slide down a very slippery slope toward designer babies,” warned Marcy Darnovsky on NPR’s Morning Edition today. She portentuously added, “We could see parents feeling eager to give their children traits like greater strength, needs less sleep. Some people are saying that, ‘Yes, there are genes for IQ and we could have smarter babies.'”

What has alarmed Darnovsky, a left-wing bioconservative from the Center for Genetics and Society? The fact that specialists at the Nadiya fertility clinic in Ukraine have used pronuclear transfer to help some parents to give birth to healthy babies.

First, a bit of biology. Every human egg cell contains between 100,000 and 600,000 energy-producing mitochondria floating in the cytoplasm outside the cell nucleus. While the vast majority of the DNA that makes up our genomes resides inside the nuclei of our cells, each mitochondrion has its own small genome consisting of 37 genes. Mutated mitochondrial genes can can cause disease. It is estimated that mitochrondrial diseases are one of the most common groups of genetic diseases, with a minimum prevalence of greater than 1 in 5000 in adults.

Pronuclear transfer is used in cases where the mitochondria in a woman’s eggs are mutated in some way that would produce disease in her children or cause her infertility. The procedure involves removing the two pronuclei, or unfused nuclei, of the egg and sperm from a day-old embryo and transfering them into an enucleated donor egg containing healthy mitochondria. Babies born via this technique thus have genes derived from three people: the nuclear genes from the mother and father, plus a comparatively tiny number of mitochondrial genes from the egg donor. Hence the sobriquet “three-parent babies.”

Since mitochondrial DNA is inherited from a baby’s mother, female children born using this technique will pass along the healthy donor mitochondria to their progeny. Bioconservatives like Darnovsky decry this as germ-line genetic engineering.

“It is pioneering work,” the Columbia biologist Dietrich Egli said in the NPR story. Not exactly. The real pioneers were fertility specialist Jacques Cohen and his colleagues at St. Barnabas Hospital in New Jersey, who successfully used a similar technique back in 2001 to help women give birth to 17 babies. Instead of tranferring the pronuclei, as is done in Ukraine, Cohen transferred ooplasm containing mitochondria from healthy donor eggs to the eggs of women experiencing infertility. This prompted some similarly overwrought worries about designer babies, and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 2001 essentially banned the procedure by asserting that ooplasm transfer was an “investigational new drug” requiring agency approval.

In 2016, the National Academy of Sciences issued a report endorsing the use of mitochondrial replacement therapies (MRT) in embryos to help parents have healthy babies. One catch: The report said it should only be used to produce boys, thus mitigating the possibility that the donor mitochondria would be passed along to future generations. But even that cannot proceed in the U.S. Since 2015, Congress has included provisions in its annual federal appropriations laws that prohibit the FDA from accepting applications for clinical research using MRT. Therefore, clinical research using MRT in human beings cannot legally proceed in the United States.

In light of this prohibition, American fertility specialist John Zhang in 2016 performed a successful pronuclear transfer in Mexico for a Jordanian woman burdened with the mitochondrial mutation associated with Leigh’s Disease. The illness causes brain lesions, which killed her first two children. In August 2017, the FDA sent a letter to Zhang ordering his Darwin Life Company to cease marketing the MRT treatment on its website in the United States.

Now NPR is reporting that the Ukrainian scientists have formed a company, Darwin Life-Nadiya, with a New York clinic to market the service to U.S. women willing to travel to Ukraine. Ukrainian women will pay about $8,000 for the procedure; for foreigners, it’ll be about $15,000. Hopefully the FDA will be more tolerant this time. So long as our Congress, our regulators, and the majority of our bioethicists continue to stand in their way, Americans suffering from the burdens of genetic disease and hoping to give birth to healthy children will be sadly forced to engage in this kind of reproductive medical tourism.

But what about Darnovsky’s claim that MRT is the beginning of a fast slide down a very slippery slope toward designer babies? Bring it on. Parents using modern biotechnology to endow their children with longer, healthier, smarter, and perhaps even happier lives? It’s hard to see any ethical problem with that.

For more background, see my lecture in Moscow on “Designer Babies and Human Enhancement”:

Within hours of President Donald Trump’s declaration last week that the United States will begin imposing steel and aluminum tariffs on Canada, Mexico, and the European Union, leaders of those countries offered sharp criticisms of Trump’s protectionism and defended the importance of free trade.

Those remarks stand in sharp contrast to the actions those same leaders have taken in response to Trump’s tariffs.

“The government of Canada is confident that shared values, geography and common interests will ultimately overcome protectionism,” Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau proclaimed. Then he took steps to impose a 25 percent tariff on American steel and a 10 percent tariff on several other American goods, including maple syrup, whiskey, and various aluminum products, effective July 1.

The Mexican government’s statement was equally high-minded: “Mexico reiterates its position against protectionist measures that affect and distort international commerce in goods.” Its actions, meanwhile, were equally irreconcilable with that anti-protectionist rhetoric: It announced new tariffs on American steel and various food items, including pork and bourbon.

The European Union—whose foreign policy chief, Federica Mogherini, promised “no protectionism” back in March—now promising $7.5 billion’s worth of tariffs on various American goods beginning June 20.

Trump could damage the American economy by leading the country into a trade war with some of its top allies and trading partners, but those other countries’ responses are self-destructive too. America may be shielding itself from greater competition and lower consumer prices, but that doesn’t mean that the E.U., Canada, and Mexico should do the same.

Free trade is beneficial even when it’s unilateral, points out Veronique de Rugy, a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center (and a Reason columnist).

“The only argument for retaliation is to remind the world that trade wars are neither painless nor easy to win, but it is going to be a high price to pay,” she says. “The thing that people don’t seem to understand is that, based on the studies out there, when you retaliate, you take a policy measure that hurts your own people, with no exceptions.” Through their retaliation, these governments are forcing their citizens to pay higher prices for the same goods and services. They’d be better off if they abandoned the absurd games of tit-for-tat that have long dominated trade policy, and instead embraced the prosperity that comes from genuinely open trade over national frontiers.