Don’t mean to cause a debate, but if his ideas about common sense are directly related to his moderate conservatism then I take issue.
As far as I’m concerned my very liberal politics make sense. Hitler probably thought he made sense too, at least for a while. All I’m saying is the only way to distinguish whatever an individual feels is sensible from “common sense” is to somehow apply the “common” in a literal way (which in the colloquial sense of the phrase it isn’t). In which case common sense would go from meaning “universally sensible” to meaning “generally sensible to the majority of residents in a community,” which obviously could quickly get out of hand as “common sense” is enforced and a community becomes more and more partisan and dogmatic, which from what I can tell is basically what happens, and is why people resort to party politics in order to forcibly decide what common sense will be for the next term of office or bill in question.
tl;dr: “Common sense” is a misnomer and people’s differing perception of what is normal only more clearly defines their differences in opinion, resulting in even more partisanship.
See? This is what’s wrong with politics now. Thomas has said virtually nothing about what he actually believes, but got back a pretty long comment that mentions Adolf Fucking Hitler in the 3RD SENTANCE.
That’s zero to Hitler in under 40 words.
Amen, brother.
I said I didn’t mean to cause any ruckus. I could’ve as easily mentioned Mao, Putin, Stalin, President Carter, or even President Kennedy. Hitler is just the easiest historical figure for people to put into context.
Also not I didn’t talk about his politics at all, I merely object to the use of the phrase “common sense.” I could hold nearly any political belief and have the same opinion on the phase.
I don’t mind a ruckus, not that this is one ayway, but the point I was trying to make is that people hold their political beliefs so dear that the rhetoric is instantly hyperbolic, rather than working up to it over time.
At the end of the day, you’re still taking up an issue against a fictional character… Mao, Putin, Stalin, Presidents Carter and Kennedy, etc. all real historical figures. J. Thomas Blackwell, as real as he may seem, is not.
Personally, I belong to the “Throw The Bums Out Party”. Don’t for the incumbent. For that matter, the challenger isn’t likely to be much better. So I usually vote for the sacrificial goat party candidates rather than the Demublican or Reprocrat.
I am very much a “right wing” conservative, and this is my viewpoint on modern liberalism.
Evan Sayet has been a top Hollywood writer and producer for more than 20 years. His credits range from The Arsenio Hall Show to Politically Incorrect. After the Sept. 11 attacks, Sayet decided to step from behind the camera and speak out in his own voice, that of one of the nations top political satirists. At Heritage, his entertaining yet quite serious lecture will examine the modern liberal mindset and how it can lead to siding with evil over good and behaviors that produce failure rather than success.
Alas, “common sense” is anything but common these days.
Politically, or otherwise.
Judean People’s Front or People’s Front of Judea? Can’t I pick another?
I want to talk about economics a little.
Keynsian economics is close 70 years out of date. PreKeynsian (Austrian) economics is more like 150 years out of date. Nothing else has a following. This is a great big problem.
I will describe the problem with overstated examples.
Say I own a town with 50,000 people in it. Everybody rents their homes from me. Everybody buys their food in my stores. Etc. But I have only 3000 jobs for those people. I will pay some of them to dig me an olympic-size swimming pool in my backyard. I will pay some of them as security guards. Etc. What should happen to the extra people that I don’t need? They should go someplace they can get jobs. I have no responsibility for them.
And if I own the whole country and I have 30 million jobs for 300 million people? Same thing. If I don’t need you then you can go someplace where you can make a living. I don’t owe you anything.
But people want to survive. They want handouts, or at least jobs. One approach is the government can take stuff from me. They pay people to make stuff the government wants,and then the people who got paid can buy stuff from me so I get the money back. Then the government takes it away from me again and pays people to do more stuff…. How is this good for me? They cut down my forests to provide paper for the government and homes for government workers etc. I prefer forests. Paying jobs for lots of people doing things I think are better not done at all. I am deadset against the government taxing me to give people jobs.
OK, how about the government borrows the money from me. They promise to pay interest on the loan. That’s better. When they can’t pay off the loan (unless they collect it as taxes from me and then pay me back) then the government will owe me. I’ll get a great big say in all their decisions.
A third way — I put my money in a bank. I don’t want to invest it, I want it to sit there quietly. But the bank lends the money to businessmen who think they can make a profit. My own money is getting used to create companies that compete with me. But sooner or later the banks find they have lent more money than their debtors can pay off, and the whole thing collapses. They create lots of jobs for awhile and then they lose big.
As long as I own the country and I get to decide how many jobs there will be doing what I want done, everybody else has a big problem.
If we had a decent system, it would not be built around crony capitalists deciding what to sell us and then 15% of the price goes to the marketing that persuades us to buy.
But then, the only alternative that’s been tried much was to set up communism, where they threw out the owners, and then a small group that was in a position to control things became the new bosses, no different from the old bosses.
So here we are. Obama is trying to be a Keynesian. He wants to increase aggregate demand, failing to notice that these days the government mostly *is* aggregate demand. Take GDP. Subtract what the government spends. Subtract what government workers spend and what government contractors spend. Subtract what people spend who got their money from government workers and government contractors and their employees. How much is left?
Meawhile Romney talks like a pre-Keynesian. Make sure the rich people keep their spending power, and they will hire as many people as they think they ought to. They will hire everybody if the government stops spending.
We’re ripe for a new idea, if it isn’t already too late.
Wow. You’ve summed up the current economic climates espoused by the two major parties in a very eloquent fashion. Well done.
I’m sure my response will look like a train wreck by comparison, but please bear with me.
The most basic problem with the worldwide economic climate is that there are far more people populating the planet than there are jobs. At the current rate of expansion, we’ll be out of some very important resources before too long, though I think that’s only tangential to the current discussion.
Barring drastic and inhumane practices, overpopulation is one significant reason that most nations have a huge force of largely unskilled labor. Comparatively few skilled positions are required by contrast. So, in the short-term, economic prosperity is brought about through large-scale ventures such as construction, public works, and mass-manufacturing. When you have so much labor available and so few jobs, pay rates and basic amenities on the job take a nosedive.
But that’s only looking at the industry in a single nation. When you look at commerce and industry on an international scale, what you find resembles a series of living cells. Each nation has factors which contribute to the flow of money in and out. These include federal laws regarding job safety and employee treatment, the minimum wage, and that country’s ambient living expenses. We in America have seen the phenomenon where our factories and much of our customer service jobs have been outsourced to China and India. They can work for significantly less in China and India than Americans can and still make enough money to survive. This makes the parent companies more competitive because of lower overhead, allowing them to post higher quarterly profits and inflate their stock prices, much to the delight of shareholders. Jobs moving from one country to the next is very much like osmosis to my mind. And, like osmosis, there comes a point where so many jobs have left a country that its inhabitants can no longer afford the products that are being manufactured elsewhere and sold at home. Too many jobs in China, too much American money there, not enough of either in the US, results in a severe imbalance.
How that imbalance works is something to be speculated upon. Rioting in the streets. Warfare declared by a bankrupt US. Mass migration elsewhere. Or just people starving in the streets. I have no idea how it’ll happen. But it’s happened to other countries before. And, just as the US was once the world’s economic rising star, that title will be passed to those countries with all the jobs and money. Right until they become more profit minded and start outsourcing jobs and manufacturing gigs to other nations in order to establish a lower overhead. Then the cycle will begin anew.
The only way to avoid this osmotic imbalance is for the nations of the world to establish a single currency, a single minimum wage, and a singular code of employee’s rights. I know. It’s incredibly high-minded. The logistical implications are mindblowing, even if we were to allow ourselves to believe that the nations of the world could agree on anything for one laughable instant.
Short-term, attempting to maintain the rights to American intellectual property is just not feasible. And though intellectual property represents a substantial portion of America’s income, it’s about as stable as trying to build your house on quicksand. My thoughts on the matter involve re-establishing heavy industry in the US and trying to balance out our imports and exports. We import everything because it’s cheaper, but what can we theoretically produce in house that’s cheaper than anyone else?
Paper goods and clothes, believe it or not. I’m not a pot-smoker, but legalizing marijuana in the US for recreational use would have profound effects on business. It would drastically increase the amount of incoming international tourism the US receives.
Also: Low THC content hemp is legal to use for making paper and clothes in several countries. It’s legal to import hemp paper and clothing products, regardless of THC content, in every first world nation on the planet. But producing hemp with a low THC content is costly, making it an ineffective business venture. The benefits are that it grows much, much faster than pine for paper and flax or cotton for cloth. It also uses fewer nutrients. If we start cranking out paper and clothing made from regular THC hemp, we can not only look to ourselves for clothing once again, but we can undercut the market elsewhere to such a degree as to bring all those textile manufacturing jobs back to the US. In theory, it would balance America’s imports/exports for at least a few years until other nations follow suit.
In conjunction, public works. I’m sure many people are familiar with the drought that’s parched almost 70% of the US’s corn crop. That represents a huge loss in bio fuel and animal feed. With the loss of the animal feed, cattle ranchers and other livestock owners can’t afford to feed their animals, and are faced with selling them off en-masse to keep them from starving to death. Obama’s plan to fix this, last time I checked, is to buy all the livestock on the taxpayers’s dime, butcher it all, then give the meat to various charitable organizations. Since the meat isn’t going to end up at your local supermarket, meat prices will still skyrocket. That’s a huge expense, and it doesn’t change the fact that since cattle herds have been decimated there won’t be enough left for next year’s breeding stock. It’s an insanely stupid plan which doesn’t address the cause of all this: drought.
Public works programs like this would keep people busy while re-investing into the nation’s infrastructure. Off the top of my head, using the money Obama was going to waste on beef to pay for the construction of an inter-state irrigation network would ensure food shortages in this manner would never happen again.
Thoughts?
There is no necessary relationship between the number of jobs and the number of people. It’s arbitrary. The better we automate things, the less work it takes to provide for people’s needs. Then there are jobs if the people who control the resources want there to be jobs. If they decide to build pyramids then there will be as many jobs as they want to provide, building pyramids.
Traditional economics would say to reduce the supply of people until it matches the demand for jobs. This is madness. But if we let individual people decide how many children they want, it will be kind of random. In general poor people have more children (because having a lot of children will make you poor if nothing else) while rich people tend to be infertile. (Because one way to get rich is to inherit the money your ancestors didn’t spend on more descendents.)
There is no possible way to get a democratic solution to the problem when the public is so thoroughly in disagreement. We have a lot of people who believe that if you re poor it’s a moral failing on your part and you deserve to be punished for it. If any solution has to satisfy them, what kind of solution is possible? Nondemocratic approachs are unlikely to work either — if you take over and do things while ignoring their complaints, they are going to try to take over themselves and we blow things up and kill people during the fighting.
So I want to propose a collection of minor improvements that might help some. I like your idea of legalizing marijuana. It would make the unemployment problem worse because all the people who are currently in jail on those charges would otherwise be out looking for jobs along with their prison guards etc. But that’s not so bad.
1. I want a federal stock exchange. The stock exchange would be run fairly, with limited opportunity to manipulate prices. Give people a tax incentive to bet on that market instead of private markets. Sell at a profit after 1 year and you pay no tax. Sell at a profit within 3 months and you lose the entire profit. You can make bids or asks and your offers will be publicly known to anybody who wants to look at them on the internet.
People could invest for retirement etc and not be subject to much manipulation by people who make their living off market manipulation.
2. Put a maximum size on corporations. A maximum number of employees. A maximum capitalization. A maximum income. When a company goes over the maximum they pay fines and have a limited time to get back under. One way to stay under the maximum size is to spin off companies.
Each year make the maximum size for corporations smaller, until we get down to whatever we decide is the right size. To start with we would require only WalMart to split up into smaller competing corporations. Then the WalMarts would be split again. Then WalMart would split a third time along with McDonalds and IBM. Then Target, Hewlett Packard, Krogers and UPS.
A corporation that does something right can gain market share. But once it has a great big market share it can make everybody else adapt to it, and then it gets a competitive advantage *because* it’s big. So split it into two competing companies that both have the chance to do something right and gain market share and split again.
3. Start using acceptance voting or something similar for political party primaries, and eventually for general elections. As it is, you vote for the better of the two candidates you think can win. The better of the two might be pretty bad. If you aren’t one of the top two then you’ll only get votes from people who consider those both too bad to vote for.
With acceptance voting you vote for all the candidates you would accept. All your votes count. Of all the candidates that get a majority, the one with the largest majority wins.
This way third candidates get to see just how much support they have. Each time, the winner will be somebody who positions himself somewhere close to the center, and that’s how it should be. We don’t want radically-opposed candidates who slug it out and then one wins with a minority of the vote. That’s how we got the Civil War. If you want something radical, persuade people until it’s mainstream and until a majority want it. If you get the government to push things on people that they don’t want, it will likely backfire.
Well, that’s three.
Not sure whether or not you’re being sarcastic about the drug legalization issue, but I’ll continue on as if you’re being direct. The American penal code is already more extensive than any other on the planet, which doesn’t inhibit crime so much as increase the number of inmates we have mooching off the system. The cost of housing someone in a prison, if you include utilities, guards, food, and medical expenses for when they get shanked, is significantly greater than just handing someone an unemployment check now and then. If you legalize, tax, and regulate drugs like the ATF does with their responsibilities through over-the-counter dispensaries, you have less federal and state money tied up in the entire criminal justice system. With the money earned in luxury taxes, we might actually make a dent in the budget. As for the argument that it will turn citizens into junkies, my counterargument is that we already have junkies since people who want to abuse drugs will abuse drugs regardless. It’s a free country supposedly. The freedom to self-destruct in this respect should be available too.
Moving on, the number of jobs available is related to the population, but only when there are more jobs than people able to perform them. Otherwise, you end up with an employer’s market and an overall reduction in the quality of the jobs because of the general population’s desperate want to remain employed. If we want to control the population, offering a 5-10 year tax credit for anyone who volunteers to be sterilized would take care of that problem pretty darned quick.
That being said, I like your proposed changes, and I believe they will never be enacted if it comes down to a vote. Nobody in office would willingly limit their power or dare anger a wealthy constituency. And that’s the inherent problem with any form of government: any leader is looking out for himself first at all times. Establishing a democratic ruling system simply slows down government by engendering infighting amongst its members while they look out for themselves.
“Not sure whether or not you’re being sarcastic about the drug legalization issue, but I’ll continue on as if you’re being direct.”
There’s so much hypocrisy about this stuff that if you say things straight it sounds sarcastic. I agree with you about drug legalization right down the line. However, one of the “advantages” of the current system is that people who are imprisoned don’t count as unemployed. So it brings the official unemployment rate down and makes the government look good. Also it provides jobs. Construction workers get to build prisons. Prison guards etc get to work in prisons. That also brings the official unemployment rate down.
People who have been in prison cannot expect to get good jobs. They will settle for low pay and hard work until they are sent back to prison. Employers like to have people available who will work hard for low pay. Employers like to have lots of alert people looking for work, as opposed to druggees who are likely to make stupid mistakes on the job. If you figure the laws are designed to help employers then it makes a lot more sense.
Speaking for myself, I don’t want to try to control the population to fit the number of jobs the economy has available. Adjusting the birthrate for that would mean we must predict the job market 20 years ahead. I can’t begin to figure a solution for this which could become socially acceptable within my lifetime.
You say we can’t get the changes I propose. These are the weak watered-down changes that don’t handle our fundamental problems. I think we might eventually get something like acceptance voting for party primaries. The way it works now, sometimes a dedicated minority in a political party (often with some deeply held minority opinion) manages to drive through and win the nomination. And then they see that the rest of the party doesn’t campaign much for them. They beat everybody else and got the nomination, and the people they beat don’t really care whether they win the general election. Dole. Mondale. McGovern. Goldwater. There’s a long list of almost-forgotten candidates who lost elections partly because they won the nomination but they didn’t win hearts doing it.
Acceptance voting or IRV would make it much more likely that whoever wins the nomination will at least have most of their own party behind them. It will tend to win elections. Political parties that want to win elections might start using it. Eventually.
I doubt anybody much would much object to WalMart splitting into competing corporations. If we started something like that it would take a long time before it affected a whole lot of other corporations. Of course solutions that take a long time to act won’t solve much in the short run, but it might be possible to at least get it started.
Ew, really? It’s hard to believe that his sexually liberated girlfriend shares his views.
What do you think he meant when he said that? They seem to be doing fine.
My political stance is Progressive liberal. Im not above politics and I dont believe anyone is above politics or below it. Politics is a social thing, and sometimes it doesnt fit well with some peoples ideas.
Main reason Im political is my favorite band:Rage against the machines: is highly political.They value intelligence and justice and both are key themes in their music.So naturally I thought Id discover those values myself. Now I am an atheist, Pro-Gay marriage, Pro-choice, and economically I want to shift Defense to education and Scientific research.
The most important issue to me is equality for marriage and sexuality. I wanna live in a world where the only sexual conversion camp is for pedophiles. Which need the help and quite clearly are getting ignored and treated as evil. And Religion can’t influence who I can marry, or where. as a bi-sexual and transgender person I want to be able to be who I am and date comfortably.So obviously Not having social politics snag my life is a must.
Beyond that I value truth, even if its negative. I understand the importance of not pretending to think greater or worse then the country actually is. We are after all A society and society is not perfect, we do evil things sometimes, and we need to aknowledge and teach them so the next gen doesn’t make those mistakes.
Social conservative and Catholic here. Thought it would be cool to let the author know people of a wide range enjoy “Between Failures”
While I do believe in objective truth, I also accept that our understanding of it is flawed, so we can disagree with respect and humility.
Religion can influence. That’s a given, but Christian religion is not a legal device. It in and of itself does not create laws that compel or set itself up as a device of government. Its core is free will and the choice to do good or evil. Much simpler than politics.
When actions are characterized as good or evil, then you have disagreement, but Christianity simply declares; governments rule by force either direct (jail) or coercive (taxation).
It’s amazing how much vitriol there is for Christianity, which you can disagree with with temporal impunity, as opposed to governments (I’m looking at you, Putin) who use force to solve problems, more often than not with disastrous consequences.
In God I trust. Politics, not so much.
I tend to stick with pretty standard totalitarianism. I should have all the power, and everyone else should fear my robot army. Now to get to work on them robots…
I agree with thomas and have a similar viewpoint. I’m Scocially Liberal and Fiscally Conservative. I believe in Small Government, Pro-choice, Seperation of Church and State, Pro Gay Marrige, Against inceased welfare, etc. . .
I really hate Politics these days because the extremeists get the publicity, bringing it all down.
The politicains forget about the “Silent Majority”
22 Comments
Don’t mean to cause a debate, but if his ideas about common sense are directly related to his moderate conservatism then I take issue.
As far as I’m concerned my very liberal politics make sense. Hitler probably thought he made sense too, at least for a while. All I’m saying is the only way to distinguish whatever an individual feels is sensible from “common sense” is to somehow apply the “common” in a literal way (which in the colloquial sense of the phrase it isn’t). In which case common sense would go from meaning “universally sensible” to meaning “generally sensible to the majority of residents in a community,” which obviously could quickly get out of hand as “common sense” is enforced and a community becomes more and more partisan and dogmatic, which from what I can tell is basically what happens, and is why people resort to party politics in order to forcibly decide what common sense will be for the next term of office or bill in question.
tl;dr: “Common sense” is a misnomer and people’s differing perception of what is normal only more clearly defines their differences in opinion, resulting in even more partisanship.
See? This is what’s wrong with politics now. Thomas has said virtually nothing about what he actually believes, but got back a pretty long comment that mentions Adolf Fucking Hitler in the 3RD SENTANCE.
That’s zero to Hitler in under 40 words.
Amen, brother.
I said I didn’t mean to cause any ruckus. I could’ve as easily mentioned Mao, Putin, Stalin, President Carter, or even President Kennedy. Hitler is just the easiest historical figure for people to put into context.
Also not I didn’t talk about his politics at all, I merely object to the use of the phrase “common sense.” I could hold nearly any political belief and have the same opinion on the phase.
I don’t mind a ruckus, not that this is one ayway, but the point I was trying to make is that people hold their political beliefs so dear that the rhetoric is instantly hyperbolic, rather than working up to it over time.
At the end of the day, you’re still taking up an issue against a fictional character… Mao, Putin, Stalin, Presidents Carter and Kennedy, etc. all real historical figures. J. Thomas Blackwell, as real as he may seem, is not.
Godwin’s Law strikes again, with a vengeance!
Personally, I belong to the “Throw The Bums Out Party”. Don’t for the incumbent. For that matter, the challenger isn’t likely to be much better. So I usually vote for the sacrificial goat party candidates rather than the Demublican or Reprocrat.
I am very much a “right wing” conservative, and this is my viewpoint on modern liberalism.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=ODXgGS50AVY#!
Evan Sayet has been a top Hollywood writer and producer for more than 20 years. His credits range from The Arsenio Hall Show to Politically Incorrect. After the Sept. 11 attacks, Sayet decided to step from behind the camera and speak out in his own voice, that of one of the nations top political satirists. At Heritage, his entertaining yet quite serious lecture will examine the modern liberal mindset and how it can lead to siding with evil over good and behaviors that produce failure rather than success.
Alas, “common sense” is anything but common these days.
Politically, or otherwise.
Judean People’s Front or People’s Front of Judea? Can’t I pick another?
I want to talk about economics a little.
Keynsian economics is close 70 years out of date.
PreKeynsian (Austrian) economics is more like 150 years out of date.
Nothing else has a following.
This is a great big problem.
I will describe the problem with overstated examples.
Say I own a town with 50,000 people in it. Everybody rents their homes from me. Everybody buys their food in my stores. Etc. But I have only 3000 jobs for those people. I will pay some of them to dig me an olympic-size swimming pool in my backyard. I will pay some of them as security guards. Etc. What should happen to the extra people that I don’t need? They should go someplace they can get jobs. I have no responsibility for them.
And if I own the whole country and I have 30 million jobs for 300 million people? Same thing. If I don’t need you then you can go someplace where you can make a living. I don’t owe you anything.
But people want to survive. They want handouts, or at least jobs. One approach is the government can take stuff from me. They pay people to make stuff the government wants,and then the people who got paid can buy stuff from me so I get the money back. Then the government takes it away from me again and pays people to do more stuff…. How is this good for me? They cut down my forests to provide paper for the government and homes for government workers etc. I prefer forests. Paying jobs for lots of people doing things I think are better not done at all. I am deadset against the government taxing me to give people jobs.
OK, how about the government borrows the money from me. They promise to pay interest on the loan. That’s better. When they can’t pay off the loan (unless they collect it as taxes from me and then pay me back) then the government will owe me. I’ll get a great big say in all their decisions.
A third way — I put my money in a bank. I don’t want to invest it, I want it to sit there quietly. But the bank lends the money to businessmen who think they can make a profit. My own money is getting used to create companies that compete with me. But sooner or later the banks find they have lent more money than their debtors can pay off, and the whole thing collapses. They create lots of jobs for awhile and then they lose big.
As long as I own the country and I get to decide how many jobs there will be doing what I want done, everybody else has a big problem.
If we had a decent system, it would not be built around crony capitalists deciding what to sell us and then 15% of the price goes to the marketing that persuades us to buy.
But then, the only alternative that’s been tried much was to set up communism, where they threw out the owners, and then a small group that was in a position to control things became the new bosses, no different from the old bosses.
So here we are. Obama is trying to be a Keynesian. He wants to increase aggregate demand, failing to notice that these days the government mostly *is* aggregate demand. Take GDP. Subtract what the government spends. Subtract what government workers spend and what government contractors spend. Subtract what people spend who got their money from government workers and government contractors and their employees. How much is left?
Meawhile Romney talks like a pre-Keynesian. Make sure the rich people keep their spending power, and they will hire as many people as they think they ought to. They will hire everybody if the government stops spending.
We’re ripe for a new idea, if it isn’t already too late.
Wow. You’ve summed up the current economic climates espoused by the two major parties in a very eloquent fashion. Well done.
I’m sure my response will look like a train wreck by comparison, but please bear with me.
The most basic problem with the worldwide economic climate is that there are far more people populating the planet than there are jobs. At the current rate of expansion, we’ll be out of some very important resources before too long, though I think that’s only tangential to the current discussion.
Barring drastic and inhumane practices, overpopulation is one significant reason that most nations have a huge force of largely unskilled labor. Comparatively few skilled positions are required by contrast. So, in the short-term, economic prosperity is brought about through large-scale ventures such as construction, public works, and mass-manufacturing. When you have so much labor available and so few jobs, pay rates and basic amenities on the job take a nosedive.
But that’s only looking at the industry in a single nation. When you look at commerce and industry on an international scale, what you find resembles a series of living cells. Each nation has factors which contribute to the flow of money in and out. These include federal laws regarding job safety and employee treatment, the minimum wage, and that country’s ambient living expenses. We in America have seen the phenomenon where our factories and much of our customer service jobs have been outsourced to China and India. They can work for significantly less in China and India than Americans can and still make enough money to survive. This makes the parent companies more competitive because of lower overhead, allowing them to post higher quarterly profits and inflate their stock prices, much to the delight of shareholders. Jobs moving from one country to the next is very much like osmosis to my mind. And, like osmosis, there comes a point where so many jobs have left a country that its inhabitants can no longer afford the products that are being manufactured elsewhere and sold at home. Too many jobs in China, too much American money there, not enough of either in the US, results in a severe imbalance.
How that imbalance works is something to be speculated upon. Rioting in the streets. Warfare declared by a bankrupt US. Mass migration elsewhere. Or just people starving in the streets. I have no idea how it’ll happen. But it’s happened to other countries before. And, just as the US was once the world’s economic rising star, that title will be passed to those countries with all the jobs and money. Right until they become more profit minded and start outsourcing jobs and manufacturing gigs to other nations in order to establish a lower overhead. Then the cycle will begin anew.
The only way to avoid this osmotic imbalance is for the nations of the world to establish a single currency, a single minimum wage, and a singular code of employee’s rights. I know. It’s incredibly high-minded. The logistical implications are mindblowing, even if we were to allow ourselves to believe that the nations of the world could agree on anything for one laughable instant.
Short-term, attempting to maintain the rights to American intellectual property is just not feasible. And though intellectual property represents a substantial portion of America’s income, it’s about as stable as trying to build your house on quicksand. My thoughts on the matter involve re-establishing heavy industry in the US and trying to balance out our imports and exports. We import everything because it’s cheaper, but what can we theoretically produce in house that’s cheaper than anyone else?
Paper goods and clothes, believe it or not. I’m not a pot-smoker, but legalizing marijuana in the US for recreational use would have profound effects on business. It would drastically increase the amount of incoming international tourism the US receives.
Also: Low THC content hemp is legal to use for making paper and clothes in several countries. It’s legal to import hemp paper and clothing products, regardless of THC content, in every first world nation on the planet. But producing hemp with a low THC content is costly, making it an ineffective business venture. The benefits are that it grows much, much faster than pine for paper and flax or cotton for cloth. It also uses fewer nutrients. If we start cranking out paper and clothing made from regular THC hemp, we can not only look to ourselves for clothing once again, but we can undercut the market elsewhere to such a degree as to bring all those textile manufacturing jobs back to the US. In theory, it would balance America’s imports/exports for at least a few years until other nations follow suit.
In conjunction, public works. I’m sure many people are familiar with the drought that’s parched almost 70% of the US’s corn crop. That represents a huge loss in bio fuel and animal feed. With the loss of the animal feed, cattle ranchers and other livestock owners can’t afford to feed their animals, and are faced with selling them off en-masse to keep them from starving to death. Obama’s plan to fix this, last time I checked, is to buy all the livestock on the taxpayers’s dime, butcher it all, then give the meat to various charitable organizations. Since the meat isn’t going to end up at your local supermarket, meat prices will still skyrocket. That’s a huge expense, and it doesn’t change the fact that since cattle herds have been decimated there won’t be enough left for next year’s breeding stock. It’s an insanely stupid plan which doesn’t address the cause of all this: drought.
Public works programs like this would keep people busy while re-investing into the nation’s infrastructure. Off the top of my head, using the money Obama was going to waste on beef to pay for the construction of an inter-state irrigation network would ensure food shortages in this manner would never happen again.
Thoughts?
There is no necessary relationship between the number of jobs and the number of people. It’s arbitrary. The better we automate things, the less work it takes to provide for people’s needs. Then there are jobs if the people who control the resources want there to be jobs. If they decide to build pyramids then there will be as many jobs as they want to provide, building pyramids.
Traditional economics would say to reduce the supply of people until it matches the demand for jobs. This is madness. But if we let individual people decide how many children they want, it will be kind of random. In general poor people have more children (because having a lot of children will make you poor if nothing else) while rich people tend to be infertile. (Because one way to get rich is to inherit the money your ancestors didn’t spend on more descendents.)
There is no possible way to get a democratic solution to the problem when the public is so thoroughly in disagreement. We have a lot of people who believe that if you re poor it’s a moral failing on your part and you deserve to be punished for it. If any solution has to satisfy them, what kind of solution is possible? Nondemocratic approachs are unlikely to work either — if you take over and do things while ignoring their complaints, they are going to try to take over themselves and we blow things up and kill people during the fighting.
So I want to propose a collection of minor improvements that might help some. I like your idea of legalizing marijuana. It would make the unemployment problem worse because all the people who are currently in jail on those charges would otherwise be out looking for jobs along with their prison guards etc. But that’s not so bad.
1. I want a federal stock exchange. The stock exchange would be run fairly, with limited opportunity to manipulate prices. Give people a tax incentive to bet on that market instead of private markets. Sell at a profit after 1 year and you pay no tax. Sell at a profit within 3 months and you lose the entire profit. You can make bids or asks and your offers will be publicly known to anybody who wants to look at them on the internet.
People could invest for retirement etc and not be subject to much manipulation by people who make their living off market manipulation.
2. Put a maximum size on corporations. A maximum number of employees. A maximum capitalization. A maximum income. When a company goes over the maximum they pay fines and have a limited time to get back under. One way to stay under the maximum size is to spin off companies.
Each year make the maximum size for corporations smaller, until we get down to whatever we decide is the right size. To start with we would require only WalMart to split up into smaller competing corporations. Then the WalMarts would be split again. Then WalMart would split a third time along with McDonalds and IBM. Then Target, Hewlett Packard, Krogers and UPS.
A corporation that does something right can gain market share. But once it has a great big market share it can make everybody else adapt to it, and then it gets a competitive advantage *because* it’s big. So split it into two competing companies that both have the chance to do something right and gain market share and split again.
3. Start using acceptance voting or something similar for political party primaries, and eventually for general elections. As it is, you vote for the better of the two candidates you think can win. The better of the two might be pretty bad. If you aren’t one of the top two then you’ll only get votes from people who consider those both too bad to vote for.
With acceptance voting you vote for all the candidates you would accept. All your votes count. Of all the candidates that get a majority, the one with the largest majority wins.
This way third candidates get to see just how much support they have. Each time, the winner will be somebody who positions himself somewhere close to the center, and that’s how it should be. We don’t want radically-opposed candidates who slug it out and then one wins with a minority of the vote. That’s how we got the Civil War. If you want something radical, persuade people until it’s mainstream and until a majority want it. If you get the government to push things on people that they don’t want, it will likely backfire.
Well, that’s three.
Not sure whether or not you’re being sarcastic about the drug legalization issue, but I’ll continue on as if you’re being direct. The American penal code is already more extensive than any other on the planet, which doesn’t inhibit crime so much as increase the number of inmates we have mooching off the system. The cost of housing someone in a prison, if you include utilities, guards, food, and medical expenses for when they get shanked, is significantly greater than just handing someone an unemployment check now and then. If you legalize, tax, and regulate drugs like the ATF does with their responsibilities through over-the-counter dispensaries, you have less federal and state money tied up in the entire criminal justice system. With the money earned in luxury taxes, we might actually make a dent in the budget. As for the argument that it will turn citizens into junkies, my counterargument is that we already have junkies since people who want to abuse drugs will abuse drugs regardless. It’s a free country supposedly. The freedom to self-destruct in this respect should be available too.
Moving on, the number of jobs available is related to the population, but only when there are more jobs than people able to perform them. Otherwise, you end up with an employer’s market and an overall reduction in the quality of the jobs because of the general population’s desperate want to remain employed. If we want to control the population, offering a 5-10 year tax credit for anyone who volunteers to be sterilized would take care of that problem pretty darned quick.
That being said, I like your proposed changes, and I believe they will never be enacted if it comes down to a vote. Nobody in office would willingly limit their power or dare anger a wealthy constituency. And that’s the inherent problem with any form of government: any leader is looking out for himself first at all times. Establishing a democratic ruling system simply slows down government by engendering infighting amongst its members while they look out for themselves.
“Not sure whether or not you’re being sarcastic about the drug legalization issue, but I’ll continue on as if you’re being direct.”
There’s so much hypocrisy about this stuff that if you say things straight it sounds sarcastic. I agree with you about drug legalization right down the line. However, one of the “advantages” of the current system is that people who are imprisoned don’t count as unemployed. So it brings the official unemployment rate down and makes the government look good. Also it provides jobs. Construction workers get to build prisons. Prison guards etc get to work in prisons. That also brings the official unemployment rate down.
People who have been in prison cannot expect to get good jobs. They will settle for low pay and hard work until they are sent back to prison. Employers like to have people available who will work hard for low pay. Employers like to have lots of alert people looking for work, as opposed to druggees who are likely to make stupid mistakes on the job. If you figure the laws are designed to help employers then it makes a lot more sense.
Speaking for myself, I don’t want to try to control the population to fit the number of jobs the economy has available. Adjusting the birthrate for that would mean we must predict the job market 20 years ahead. I can’t begin to figure a solution for this which could become socially acceptable within my lifetime.
You say we can’t get the changes I propose. These are the weak watered-down changes that don’t handle our fundamental problems. I think we might eventually get something like acceptance voting for party primaries. The way it works now, sometimes a dedicated minority in a political party (often with some deeply held minority opinion) manages to drive through and win the nomination. And then they see that the rest of the party doesn’t campaign much for them. They beat everybody else and got the nomination, and the people they beat don’t really care whether they win the general election. Dole. Mondale. McGovern. Goldwater. There’s a long list of almost-forgotten candidates who lost elections partly because they won the nomination but they didn’t win hearts doing it.
Acceptance voting or IRV would make it much more likely that whoever wins the nomination will at least have most of their own party behind them. It will tend to win elections. Political parties that want to win elections might start using it. Eventually.
I doubt anybody much would much object to WalMart splitting into competing corporations. If we started something like that it would take a long time before it affected a whole lot of other corporations. Of course solutions that take a long time to act won’t solve much in the short run, but it might be possible to at least get it started.
Ew, really? It’s hard to believe that his sexually liberated girlfriend shares his views.
What do you think he meant when he said that? They seem to be doing fine.
My political stance is Progressive liberal. Im not above politics and I dont believe anyone is above politics or below it. Politics is a social thing, and sometimes it doesnt fit well with some peoples ideas.
Main reason Im political is my favorite band:Rage against the machines: is highly political.They value intelligence and justice and both are key themes in their music.So naturally I thought Id discover those values myself. Now I am an atheist, Pro-Gay marriage, Pro-choice, and economically I want to shift Defense to education and Scientific research.
The most important issue to me is equality for marriage and sexuality. I wanna live in a world where the only sexual conversion camp is for pedophiles. Which need the help and quite clearly are getting ignored and treated as evil.
And Religion can’t influence who I can marry, or where. as a bi-sexual and transgender person I want to be able to be who I am and date comfortably.So obviously Not having social politics snag my life is a must.
Beyond that I value truth, even if its negative. I understand the importance of not pretending to think greater or worse then the country actually is. We are after all A society and society is not perfect, we do evil things sometimes, and we need to aknowledge and teach them so the next gen doesn’t make those mistakes.
Social conservative and Catholic here. Thought it would be cool to let the author know people of a wide range enjoy “Between Failures”
While I do believe in objective truth, I also accept that our understanding of it is flawed, so we can disagree with respect and humility.
Religion can influence. That’s a given, but Christian religion is not a legal device. It in and of itself does not create laws that compel or set itself up as a device of government. Its core is free will and the choice to do good or evil. Much simpler than politics.
When actions are characterized as good or evil, then you have disagreement, but Christianity simply declares; governments rule by force either direct (jail) or coercive (taxation).
It’s amazing how much vitriol there is for Christianity, which you can disagree with with temporal impunity, as opposed to governments (I’m looking at you, Putin) who use force to solve problems, more often than not with disastrous consequences.
In God I trust. Politics, not so much.
I tend to stick with pretty standard totalitarianism. I should have all the power, and everyone else should fear my robot army. Now to get to work on them robots…
I agree with thomas and have a similar viewpoint. I’m Scocially Liberal and Fiscally Conservative. I believe in Small Government, Pro-choice, Seperation of Church and State, Pro Gay Marrige, Against inceased welfare, etc. . .
I really hate Politics these days because the extremeists get the publicity, bringing it all down.
The politicains forget about the “Silent Majority”