'Cocktail,' Coughlin, and California's Fast Food Council Disaster
California’s “groundbreaking” Fast Food Council’s inability to convene a simple meeting should offer lawmakers a much-needed dose of economic humility, something even Doug Cogline eventually acquired.
In September 2022, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed legislation creating a new regulatory framework for the state’s fast-food industry. It included a first-of-its-kind body known as the Fast Food Council.
The council, a 10-member board housed within the Department of Industrial Relations, included representatives of labor, employers, and state government. And it was empowered to set industry-wide standards for fast-food restaurants operating in the Golden State, including wages, hours, and workplace conditions, for chains with 100 or more locations nationwide.
“California is committed to ensuring that the men and women who have helped build our world-class economy are able to share in the state’s prosperity,” Newsom said.
If this is commitment, one wonders what neglect looks like. For nearly a year and a half, the “groundbreaking” Fast Food Council has been dormant. Leaderless since May 2025 and inactive since February of that year, it has failed to perform even its basic functions.
As Restaurant Business noted in December 2025, the council is legally required to “meet no less than every six months.” One would think that the story might have prompted action, but it did not. Recent reports show the council is still in limbo. The only thing that remains operative, apparently, is the body’s $1.1 million budget of taxpayer funds.
Sure, a million dollars isn’t much these days, but this isn’t really a story about wasted tax dollars. It’s a story about regulatory hubris. The same people who believe they can set wages, hours, and working conditions for 630,000 workers can’t even manage to hold a meeting — even though the law requires it.
To be fair, it’s human nature to think we can run things better than others. We watch a football game and question a coach’s decision to punt. We look at a struggling business and imagine a few simple changes that could turn it around. From a distance, things often look easy.
I’m reminded of the popular Tom Cruise movie Cocktail. Bartender Brian Flanagan’s (Cruise) wise-talking pal Doug Coughlin (Bryan Brown) dreams of opening his own place and getting rich. He finally gets an opportunity when he marries a wealthy socialite, whose father stakes him on “the most luxurious joint Manhattan’s ever seen.”
Things don’t go as planned, however. It turns out owning a business is tougher than slinging drinks.
“The only thing I know about saloons is how to pour whiskey and run my mouth,” a drunk and suddenly humble Coughlin tells Flanagan. “I knew nothing about insurance, or sales tax, or the building code, or labor costs, or the power company, or purchasing, or linens …”
Hours later, Flanagan finds Coughlin dead. It’s a sad ending for Coughlin and his venture, but at least it was one freely undertaken with private capital.
Government planners operate differently. They believe they know how to run private businesses — but they have no stake in the losses if they are wrong.
The Nobel laureate economist Friedrich Hayek explored this problem. He called it The Fatal Conceit: the belief of central planners that they possess the knowledge and wisdom necessary to successfully manage not just businesses but entire economic systems. This is not merely the intellectual foundation of socialism, but a recurring temptation within progressivism: the assumption that complex social and economic orders can be consciously designed top down.
Hayek understood this to be a fool’s errand. No authority can ever possess the knowledge needed to manage an entire economy, or even a small sector of it. That knowledge is dispersed across countless people and reflected in their daily decisions, individual preferences, and local conditions. Markets, by contrast, are not directed from the top down — they invisibly coordinate the decisions of millions of people through prices, competition, profits, and losses.
For Hayek, who was writing in the waning days of the Soviet Empire, the primary task of economics was not to impart vast amounts of knowledge to planners and regulators, but rather to remind them of what they cannot know.
“The curious task of economics,” he wrote, “is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine.”
Hayek was offering a lesson in economic humility, but the California Fast Food Council never got the memo.
The council believes it has the knowledge and moral authority to set wages, hours, and working conditions for thousands of restaurants and the 600,000-plus workers employed there. Newsom, the legislature, and members of the council believe this tiny board can anticipate the shifting realities of local labor markets, consumer demand, and business costs better than the people who actually own, operate, and patronize them.
The council’s inability to convene a simple meeting could offer lawmakers a much-needed dose of economic humility, something even Coughlin eventually acquired. But don’t bet on it.
Great bartending scene!!! CHEERS 🍻
right on.