Excellent video, but let me focus on Gavin Newsom's use of the old analogy between lawmaking and sausage making. The idea is you like the results but you'd be disgusted to see the process. So I guess Newsom's best argument for the bizarre exceptions in California's minimum wage law is that we'd be grossed out by the details if we saw them, but the final product is something we love. But with sausage, the final product has all the strange ingredients blended into one coherent-looking whole. The law Newsom is defending has unexplained exceptions right there in the text. It's more like sausage that has visible chunks of weird things that don't seem to belong and you want to know what the hell is that... and that... and that? You don't eat that sausage. And that's another thing. With sausage, if something about it makes you suspicious, you don't eat it. You're not forced to eat it just because the sausage-factory made it. Don't buy it. If it's served to you, don't eat it. Laws, we're forced to eat.What happens when the minimum wage goes up? Well, California is getting an experiment in that right now. Just ask @gavinnewsom. Reason's @BessByers shares what happened after AB 1228 implemented a government-mandated pay raise for all fast-food workers. 🍔 pic.twitter.com/FFL7hkMOKk
— reason (@reason) December 31, 2025
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The oldest version of the law/sausage analogy seems to be: "Laws, like sausages, cease to inspire respect in proportion as we know how they are made." I'm told that was written by the poet/lawyer John Godfrey Saxe, in 1869, in an article in the Daily Cleveland Herald. You probably heard that Otto von Bismarck is part of the story, but stories are like sausages: Everyone's always imagining what's in there, how it got in, and whether it belongs there.
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