February 2012 – Page 8 – Chaos Manor

Deserving and Undeserving Poor; How to have more unemployment; We want jobs.

By Jerry Pournelle | Feb 2, 2012 - 3:44 pm | Updated: February 2, 2012 - 3:53 pm | View

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View 711 Thursday, February 02, 2012

Ground Hog Day

I had a lunch appointment with Larry and Mike Niven today. We were going to talk about how to save the country, Of course this would be in a book, but we try to make our books realistic, Mike’s very smart, and I was looking forward to it, but when I woke up my cold was much worse and I had to call Mike and cancel it. My cold was bad yesterday, but it’s far worse today. Thursday nights I usually go to LASFS, tonight I’ll stay home and miserate.

Now that Romney’s at the top of the polls as predicted Republican nominee, everything he says is subject to deep scrutiny in the hopes of finding something that can be made to look stupid. Today they think they found one. Romney was trying to indicate that he’s mostly concerned about the American Middle Class, and in the course of saying that he said that he wasn’t worried about the Poor because we have a safety net, and the Very Rich can take care of themselves; what’s needed is government attention to the Middle Class. No sooner had he said it than the drum beats began about how callous and awful Romney is, and this just shows, and you can fill in the rest at leisure. Romney could have taken this opportunity to come out with a real discussion about the role of government in eliminating poverty and for that matter about what government ought to be doing regarding the Middle Class. Instead he went a bit squishy, and lost the opportunity.

What’s needed is a discussion of poverty: how to get more of it, how to get less of it, and what government ought to do about it. After that, we need a discussion about the role of government in boosting the Middle Class. In both cases there are conservative and liberal policies and attitudes, and they’re important.

We all know how to get more poverty. That’s elementary. If you want more of something subsidize it. If you want people to be poor, pay people to be poor. It’s simple, it’s effective, and it has been demonstrated year after year. Make poverty pleasant. Give the poor a right to other people’s money. It works every time, and the larger the subsidy – the transfer of money from those who have it to those who don’t – the more people you will have apply for the position of being poor for a living.

Of course that sounds callous. After all, surely there are people who are in poverty through no fault of their own. There are widows and orphans. There are people who have no skills and aren’t likely to learn any. These are the classical “deserving poor”. Nearly everyone agrees they ought to be taken care of. Nearly every religion requires those who can to help the poor, feed the hungry, clothe the naked, give drink to the thirsty, care for the sick, and so forth, and for much of the history of the US all these religious commands have been assumed to be obligations of the state. We have had poor laws since Elizabethan times (and before for that matter.) And in general all of the poor laws were directed toward aiding ‘the deserving poor.

The deserving poor might be given alms and tithe money as well as food and shelter. Every parish in England and Wales was required to have officials who raised money and distributed it. Of course England had an Established Church in those days, and much of this activity was done by the local churchwardens. It wasn’t generally pleasant, and might be both incompetent and corrupt – think of the Beadle in Oliver Twist – but not always. Some Rectors and Vicars took their duties seriously. But this was all for The Deserving Poor.

Then there was the Undeserving Poor. There were several subclasses of undeserving poor. At the top were those who were generally honest and law abiding but did not work although work might be available, which is to say, they considered the wages offered to be too low, or they just didn’t want to work at all. They might be lazy or they might be drunks. They were people who “ought” to be working, but were not working. This group of undeserving poor generally got fed in soup kitchens and almshouses, and perhaps found shelter. Much of the aid to them was also given by churches and charities, not necessarily the Established Church. There were also evangelical groups like the Salvation Army (see Shaw’s Major Barbara) which tried to convert undeserving poor to deserving poor.

Other Undeserving poor were aggressive beggars, petty thieves — but surely the point is made.

Both law and morality said that there was a class of people, the Deserving Poor, who ought to be taken care of through taxation including some pretty aggressive demands from churchwardens intended to shame those who had into giving something for those in need. The principle was established that the state could and should take from the productive and give it to the unproductive because they needed it. Lyndon Johnson spoke of taking from those who have so much and giving it to the have-nots who need it so much.

Over time the distinction between Deserving and Undeserving Poor was lost or at least faded into the background, and more and more attention was given to not being “judgmental”, and to making it less unpleasant to be poor and on the dole. Moreover, the distinction between insurance programs such as unemployment insurance and worker’s compensation vs. straight out giveaways such as Food Stamps and rent supplements tended to disappear. The Americans With Disabilities Act made alcoholism and drug addiction disabilities.

Food Stamps were converted to a debit cards in part to avoid embarrassment. I needn’t belabor the point. We’ve all seen the results.

And one result was increasing numbers of undeserving poor being treated as deserving poor.

We now have a system in which those who have are required to share it with those who have not, even if the have not is someone able to work but satisfied with what comes from not working.

If you want more of something, subsidize it. If you want more people to be in a certain condition, pay them to be in that condition and make it less unpleasant to be in that condition. If you want more poverty pay people to be paupers. If you want more unemployment, pay people to be unemployed.

There’s another way to increase unemployment. The simple formula is make it more expensive to employ someone. Raise the minimum wages. Make it harder and harder to fire people. Give people with some conditions various protections and rights. Make it expensive enough to hire someone and potential employers will do without.

While you are at it, heap calumny on certain jobs. Make it shameful to be a domestic servant and make it despicable to hire one. That way you will eliminate a class of jobs that once employed millions. Of course that may be a goal. Apparently we are more willing to send an armed tax collector to take money and give it to the unemployed than to suggest that the unemployed work as footmen, maids, cooks, and gardeners. That may be a very good thing; but surely it is worth discussion. Romney spoke of a safety net, and how if it is defective it ought to be repaired. Are those who consider domestic service or other jobs they consider unpleasant or demeaning deserving or undeserving poor? Or have we given up that distinction and now consider that anyone who is in poverty is deserving of money taken by the tax collector?

Raise the costs of hiring people. Make it less unpleasant to be unemployed and in poverty. You will in due season reap the fruits of what you have sowed.

The question is whether there is any obligation to have a safety net, and if so, is that an obligation of the states or the Federal government; and just where in the Constitution is the authorization to use tax money to transfer from the haves to the have-nots who need it so much. It may all be in there and this may be the way for the nation to go, but surely it ought to be discussed openly, not just done by degrees?

It might be interesting to have the candidates debate just what ought to be done about that safety net. There may be more of it than we need, and it may be provided by the wrong people. Perhaps this is one more item to be left to the states.

Today in Sacramento there was a rally of people, many college students, chanting “We want jobs”. They were demonstrating in favor of a “high speed rail” line to run between Los Angeles and San Francisco. Initially put forth as a bond issue for $9 Billion which passed, nothing has actually been built and the cost is now estimated at well over $100 Billion. A lot of money has been spent. Nothing has been built. No one is quite sure how the rail line would cope with the San Andreas Fault and the mountainous area between Los Angeles and San Francisco, and the steep slopes down into the San Joaquin known as The Grapevine are pretty formidable. No matter how fast the rail line, it will take a lot longer to get from LA to San Francisco by train as opposed to flying. There are nearly hourly flights from Burbank and LAX.

We Want Jobs. You pay for them.

I note that I haven’t said anything about what the government ought to do to help the Middle Class. Sorry.

The answer, of course, is not much. Mostly, get out of the way. Get out of the way of development of cheap energy. Stop making it expensive to hire people and complicated to impossible to fire them. Repeal a lot of regulations. It’s really not all that complicated.

A wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government, and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicities.
Thomas Jefferson

USAA, and I have a cold

By Jerry Pournelle | Feb 1, 2012 - 12:26 pm | Updated: February 1, 2012 - 12:26 pm | View

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View 711 Wednesday, February 01, 2012

Another day being devoured by locusts, We had a plumbing emergency that fortunately was controlled so no collateral damage, and that has been fixed without problems. It was small enough that it wasn’t anything we were going to the insurance company about, but – well, it’s a story worth relating.

Our insurance company for auto and house insurance is USAA. We have been with them from long ago, since Mr. Heinlein recommended them to us. I’d never heard of them, but Robert recommended them highly, and we found they were certainly cheaper than what we had been paying. USAA is essentially a veteran’s mutual insurance company although they have opened the rolls to others including sons of veterans. I can only say that in thirty years we have yet to be disappointed in their service, or to run into a bureaucrat who uses fine print to put the company’s interests ahead of ours. I don’t mean they are patsies, but they are competent and fair. This includes both automobile and home insurance, two major collisions (someone else hit our cars) and a major house structural problem.

One of the best features of USAA is their list of contractors who do the work, both home and auto; and in all our experiences with USAA recommended and approved companies we have again found it more than satisfactory. Today’s plumbing problem wasn’t covered by the home owners policy being below the deductible, but the repair was done by a company recommended by the contractors who had done our last major USAA paid repairs; and once again it was a satisfactory experience. It turns out our water pressure regulator had worn out, so that our internal house water pressure was 150, about twice what it ought to be. This caused a pipe to burst, but fortunately it was a pipe from a valve to a lavatory faucet and thus easy to control and cheap to replace; they also replaced the regulator and the whole mess was done quickly and efficiently. I love USAA.

In addition to the house matters eating my time, I managed to catch my granddaughter’s cold, and I have the miseries. Not fun.

I’ll comment on the Florida primary another time. It’s lunch time although I don’t much feel like eating. Arrgh.

Visiting Zeke in the Smithsonian; ADHD;Machiavelli’s Discourses; and other matters

By Jerry Pournelle | Feb 1, 2012 - 1:16 am | Updated: February 1, 2012 - 1:52 am | Mail

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Mail 711 Tuesday January 31, 2012

visiting Zeke

Jerry,

This morning I went to the Smithsonian to visit Zeke II. He was dozing comfortably when I arrived, in a cabinet on the fifth floor which a curator was on hand to open for me. (As you know, the Information Age exhibit is currently mothballed, to be replaced with something on "American Enterprise.") What a sturdy looking machine–they sure don’t make them like that anymore. Two shelves above him is the keyboard and some other components for the IBM Deep Blue computer, so I suspect he doesn’t lack for intelligent conversation where he is now. There’s also a Mac Classic: you’d know better than I whether Zeke would ever make a pass.

I looked through the documentation that was also included in the materials, much of it for the CP/M operating system. There were ten 8" diskettes. One was labelled "Safety: Storms." Would this have been Janissaries III: Storms of Victory?

I passed along your regards to Zeke. I can’t truthfully say that he blipped or blinked, but I think he liked getting some attention just the same. Couple of photos attached.

Best, Matt

—

Matthew Kirschenbaum

Associate Professor of English

Associate Director, Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) University of Maryland

Thank you. And yes, that was probably Storms of Victory. Those 8” floppies were the “mass storage” in those days…

TSA thuggery… looking for shovels in a suitcase because someone tweeted hat he was going to dig up Marilyn Monore. Come on.

http://technolog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/01/30/10272373-tourists-banned-from-us-over-twitter-jokes

I am no longer surprised by anything they do. The TSA needs defunding.

"Being forced to join and be subject to a home owners association is not a capitalist act, it is an undermining of property rights."

Except you aren’t "forced" to join. You join voluntarily, by moving into a community managed by a homeowner’s association. Private citizens voluntarily entering into associations is a Constitutional right.

If someone were to join a private club, break one of its rules, and then sue the club for enforcing those rules, would you say that law and morals were both on his side?

Yeah, this particular situation is awful, and what *should* have happened was that the HOA should have gone to him and worked out what the situation was. But a failure of an individual HOA’s management is not an example of how the notion of an HOA is a terrible concept that all right-thinking God-fearing Americans should abhor.

Maybe the moral of the story here is that if you’re gonna skip payments on a contracted obligation you should read the law *first*.

—

Mike T. Powers

Homeowner Associations

Dear Jerry,

I am puzzled by your contention that "Being forced to join and be subject to a home owners association is not a capitalist act, it is an undermining of property rights." As far as I know, homeowner associations are created only through the mechanism of real covenants, a form of contract that has been part of the common law for hundreds of years. If you do not like the covenants that "run with the land", you are not forced to buy it. If you have evidence of homeowner associations being forced on property owners after purchase, I would very much like to see it.

Home buyers may face more limited choices if all new developments in an area include homeowner associations, but let me suggest that it is a losing strategy for conservatives to claim that a person facing limited choices is thereby being "forced". It is a tragedy for an 81 year-old veteran to lose his home over a $340 debt, but, so far as I can tell, it is not a failure of capitalism. The failure here seems to be one of charitable organizations not providing the help that some senior citizens need in navigating legal requirements. Where is all the money raised in churches by social conservatives going? Perhaps, e.g., Santorum can take a moment to use his campaign rhetoric to redirect the considerable fervor of evangelicals in a more productive, less symbolic, direction?

Gordon Sollars

Point taken. I have never been the victim of a compulsory homeowners association whose membership is part of a restrictive covenant. In my limited experience restrictive covenants on real estates were things like not allowing the property to be sold to blacks. Of course the courts eventually held that enforcing such covenants is not in the public interest and covenants not in the public interest will not be enforced, and not long after the courts discovered this federal civil rights laws made the whole notion moot. But everyone I know who is part of a mandatory homeowners association hates them with passion. They seem to be great illustrations of the Iron Law in action: fussy old busybodies with far too much time on their hands end up as the officers. Perhaps I have friends in unusual situations.

There are matters of greater concern, I suppose. Fortunately I am not involved in any of this. I do pay my dues the local resident association but that’s purely voluntary. They can’t sell my house at auction if I decide to drop out.

ADHD Meds

A couple of comments about ADHD. The ability to multitask and to quickly shift focus when something grabs your attention is a survival trait for the person who is plowing the field and suddenly sees a tiger.

This ability is not helpful to the 3rd grade teacher who is trying to teach 25 students to read something that they think is boring.

When I was talking to my son’s doctor she noted two things.

1. ADHD is hereditary

2. Most adults self medicate with caffeine and sugar.

At which point I started laughing, and took another sip of my 4th starbucks of the morning.

Ritalin and coffee seem to work. They also are less needed once you get past about age 17.

College was wonderful because I could finally study only the subject that was interesting.

The ADHD ability is an asset for many professions which require quick task switching. Sales, and Customer service come to mind.

At a recent Amway Black Diamond sales meeting (highly successful full time Amway sales reps) a friend noted that almost all of them had kids taking Ritalin.

My brain can apparently switch gears quicker than normal. I view this as a good thing, not a handicap. The same is true of my children.

We suffer through the public school system and gravitate toward jobs where our ability is an asset. I have been doing technical service for various chemicals and plastics for 25 years. I love it when the phone rings. I love it when my lab tech interrupts me with a question. I hate it when I have to sit at the lab bench and run the same experiment 10 times in a row. My lab tech on the other hand loves routine and will gladly run the same experiment over and over with slightly different conditions.

We make a good team.

—

——————–

Jim Coffey

It may be that drugs like Ritalin do some good for some kids, but the studies seem a bit forced to me; and I know that we all got along without the stuff when I was growing up. Us nerds had our own problems, but being drugged was not one of them.

Ritalin

‘To date, no study has found any long-term benefit of attention-deficit medication on academic performance, peer relationships or behavior problems, the very things we would most want to improve.’

——————–

My guess is when teachers get a kid who acts up they want to do whatever it takes to make him settle down. If that means zoning the student out with drugs that is acceptable if it makes the teachers job easier. Maybe they do not have any mental disorder at all, but as you say, just youthful exuberance and lack of self discipline.

I don’t want to go into a long diatribe on this. I think you know what I mean when I say it is a mistake to substitute ‘metrics’ for good judgment. The result is the teachers end up scurrying to meet requirements and follow an array of rules with no time for anything else.

B

I can only repeat that we seem to have got along fine without them for centuries, and I am not convinced that 10 and more percent of the kids now need drugs.

I guess they’ve never heard of RF jamming, much less latency.

<http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16367042>

——

Roland Dobbins

‘The figures suggest that we could even be heading for a mini-ice age to rival the 70-year temperature drop that saw frost fairs held on the Thames in the 17th Century.’

<http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2093264/Forget-global-warming–Cycle-25-need-worry-NASA-scientists-right-Thames-freezing-again.html>

——

Roland Dobbins

More deniers self-identify

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/01/30/wsj_global_warming_letter/

Bert Rutan and a number of other formerly-respected persons consign themselves to the ash-heap of history as they insist on refusing to accept the obvious scientific truth.

—

Mike T. Powers

Fallen Angels was a lot of fun but we looked at serious subjects.The data are trumping the models. But then it has been that way for decades: the modelers were convinced of warming and the data collectors were not so sure. I can’t remember when it wasn’t that way.

Over a hundred thousand year trend the Earth is cooling. Over the last two hundred years it has been warming since the end of the Little Ice Age. It has warmed somewhat since the beginning of the last Interglacial Period, but we are still in an Ice Age. The modelers say that CO2 has rescued us from the return of the ice. The data are not so clear on that.

I don’t normally send viral video links, but this is Niftier Than Nemo! <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7aPzZsuBjo>

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7aPzZsuBjo

I don’t usually print the links either, but this is too good to miss.

Fighting the law and winning

Dear Dr. Pournelle,

I suspect you will find the following story interesting. Mr. Mocek was acquitted of all charges brought against him when the evidence in his video camera contradicted the sworn statements of serving officers. They had previously attempted to confiscate the camera and delete the footage, but evidently didn’t reckon on recovery technologies.

http://mocek.org/blog/2011/02/07/i-fought-the-law-and-the-law-lost-but/

My parents brought me up to believe the police were the good guys and only the guilty had something to hide. As you can well imagine, this is no longer a viewpoint I share.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

Charles Murray on the New American Divide – Jerry

A piece by Charles Murray in the Wall Street Journal, on The New American Divide:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204301404577170733817181646.html#printMode

“America is coming apart. For most of our nation’s history, whatever the inequality in wealth between the richest and poorest citizens, we maintained a cultural equality known nowhere else in the world—for whites, anyway. "The more opulent citizens take great care not to stand aloof from the people," wrote Alexis de Tocqueville, the great chronicler of American democracy, in the 1830s. "On the contrary, they constantly keep on easy terms with the lower classes: They listen to them, they speak to them every day."

“Americans love to see themselves this way. But there’s a problem: It’s not true anymore, and it has been progressively less true since the 1960s.” <snip>

“Single parenthood: Another aspect of marriage—the percentage of children born to unmarried women—showed just as great a divergence. Though politicians and media eminences are too frightened to say so, nonmarital births are problematic. On just about any measure of development you can think of, children who are born to unmarried women fare worse than the children of divorce and far worse than children raised in intact families. This unwelcome reality persists even after controlling for the income and education of the parents.

“In 1960, just 2% of all white births were nonmarital. When we first started recording the education level of mothers in 1970, 6% of births to white women with no more than a high-school education—women, that is, with a Fishtown education—were out of wedlock. By 2008, 44% were nonmarital. Among the college-educated women of Belmont, less than 6% of all births were out of wedlock as of 2008, up from 1% in 1970.

“Industriousness: The norms for work and women were revolutionized after 1960, but the norm for men putatively has remained the same: Healthy men are supposed to work. In practice, though, that norm has eroded everywhere. In Fishtown, the change has been drastic. (To avoid conflating this phenomenon with the latest recession, I use data collected in March 2008 as the end point for the trends.)

“The primary indicator of the erosion of industriousness in the working class is the increase of prime-age males with no more than a high school education who say they are not available for work—they are "out of the labor force." That percentage went from a low of 3% in 1968 to 12% in 2008. Twelve percent may not sound like much until you think about the men we’re talking about: in the prime of their working lives, their 30s and 40s, when, according to hallowed American tradition, every American man is working or looking for work. Almost one out of eight now aren’t. Meanwhile, not much has changed among males with college educations. Only 3% were out of the labor force in 2008.

“There’s also been a notable change in the rates of less-than-full-time work. Of the men in Fishtown who had jobs, 10% worked fewer than 40 hours a week in 1960, a figure that grew to 20% by 2008. In Belmont, the number rose from 9% in 1960 to 12% in 2008.”

On and on. More in that vein. It appears to be a condensation of his new book. Quite sobering, especially in juxtaposition with a series of lectures I am listening to on Machiavelli. In The Discourses he describes the kind of institutions an uncorrupted people can be trusted with, and the kinds of institutions that must serve when a people are “corrupted.” It brings to mind Ben Franklin’s answer when asked at the end of the Constitutional Convention what kind of government we had: “A republic, ma’am, if you can keep it.”

Ed

I am a big fan of Charles Murray. I have his new book but I have not yet had a chance to read it – it only came today. I will have much more to say on it I am sure. And I read Machiavelli’s Discourses before I was an undergraduate as it happens; I have always found them far more compelling than The Prince.

And we kept it for two hundred years…

Devoured by locusts.

By Jerry Pournelle | Feb 1, 2012 - 12:39 am | Updated: February 1, 2012 - 12:39 am | View

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View 711 Tuesday, January 31, 2012

It’s late and past bed time. The day was used up in household activities, and of course yesterday was devoted to family matters. Richard and his family are off to the East coast where they live. About half my stuff seems not to work well. Alex updated some things last night and nothing works properly now. My twenty year old hi-fi stereo has stopped working and I haven’t replaced it. I was using I to listen to the radio, but now KFI is directing me to something called I heart Radio rather than live streaming, and that keeps telling me oops something went wrong but we’re working on it. Real competence. I don’t want I heart Radio I want to listen but apparently they no longer offer that. Instead the link takes you to I heart radio which gives me the oops. As I say, real confidence inspiring competence.

The Florida election is over and Romney won big time including among those whose main concerns are economic matters and the budget. Of course Romney has saturated Florida with negative ads, and most voters are sick of them. As am I. I’ll think about the Florida primary later. It’s really bed time.

The Author’s Guild has a piece worth reading on Amazon and the publishing revolution. http://blog.authorsguild.org/2012/01/31/publishings-ecosystem-on-the-brink-the-backstory/ The Guild is increasingly more representative of the Guild and less of authors and writers, but then so are all the writers organizations now. Pournelle’s Iron Law seems to apply to the lot of them. As you would suppose.

I should have the first Chaos Manor Reviews column of the year done soon. I am sorry it didn’t get done in January but things have been a bit busy here, and for some reason the house and general household chores are demanding more attention than they used to. Or maybe things just take longer.