Category Archives: View

View 812 Wednesday, February 26, 2014

“Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency.”

President Barack Obama, January 31, 2009

If a foreign government had imposed this system of education on the United States, we would rightfully consider it an act of war.

Glenn T. Seaborg, National Commission on Education, 1983

If you like your health plan, you can keep your health plan. Period.

Barrack Obama, famously.

In the morning before breakfast my sugar was 174, which is high but not the 301 of last night. This afternoon after lunch it was 191. My primary physician tells me to take an extra metformin (normally I take two a day) if it’s over 200. A few minutes ago after dinner it was 224, so I’ll have a glucophage with my night pills (having just had one with my after dinner pills). The steroids definitely raise blood sugar levels because I have been very good about eating, a half sandwich for lunch and a Greek salad for dinner, no desserts or sweets. And a pretty good walk. Alas no hearing improvements. In anything when I scrape the left side sound intake spot I hear that less well now than I did this morning. I took the six steroids with lunch. It’s all discouraging. It was great being able to hear for a few weeks, and I keep hoping something will get better. Better to hear with one ear than neither, of course. Count your blessings.

This in today’s Los Angeles Times

Patt Morrison Asks

Ron Unz, a mo’ money man on the minimum wage

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/commentary/la-oe-0226-morrison-unz-20140226,0,6284572.column#ixzz2uVAeSSGl

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/commentary/la-oe-0226-morrison-unz-20140226,0,6284572.column#axzz2uVAbF8g2

Ron Unz knows his way around the California ballot. He ran for governor against Pete Wilson in the GOP primary 20 years ago. He lost big, but four years later he won with his Proposition 227, which altered California schools by effectively ending bilingual education and mainstreaming Spanish-speaking students. The sometimes conservative, sometimes libertarian Republican entrepreneur-turned-activist is going back to the ballot, collecting signatures for an initiative to raise the state’s minimum wage to $12. It may seem counterintuitive but Unz contends it’s an idea that’s as conservative as they come.

Raising the minimum wage has been anathema to conservatives and Republicans. What changed your mind?

For years I’d assumed increasing the minimum wage was not a good policy, but once I did focus on it, I was surprised how strong the evidence was. My article [on the conservative Daily Caller website] strongly backing a higher minimum wage was probably what got the attention of Bill O’Reilly [and] prominent conservatives like Phyllis Schlafly. I think a lot of people may look at the issue in a new way.

There’s a lot more. Ron is brilliant. That doesn’t mean he is right, because if he is correct then some smart people like Milt Friedman have been wrong for a very long time, and, to be blunt, so have I. I have always assumed that minimum wages are a bad idea.

But of course there was a hidden assumption in that premise about minimum wages: it was that the difference between the minimum wage and “a living wage” would not be made up by a public payment of tax money, and that this payment could not be denied to anyone including minimum wage earners.

And Ron is certainly correct in pointing out that the great financial gains made since the crash and the Great Recession have not gone to the working class or the middle class. They have gone to stock holders and no one else, and they don’t contribute all that much to middle class tax relief.

I continue to be concerned about the effects on startup small businesses. I am also concerned about the Constitution: I know that the Courts have so interpreted “Interstate Commerce” to include transactions in which a local famer sells his garden produce in a local Farmer’s Market, and window washers in an Ann Arbor office building are engaged in interstate commerce because one of the offices whose windows they don’t even wash – contracts are with individual office renters – in that building is sort of engaged in financing commerce in another state. So after two different Child Labor Amendments to the Constitution failed of ratification, the Supreme Court reversed itself and said that the Federal Government had regulatory power after all. In my judgment, minimum wages are state matters. Alas, that point is moot: the courts have said that the Feds have a joint power with the states.

My concern with small businesses is not satisfied. I think that if we are to raise the minimum wages significantly that ought to apply only to businesses of 20 or more employees; the point being that we do not want to discourage small startups. We need them. And a high minimum wage raises the capital cost of starting that business, which is already burdened with plenty of Federal regulations to begin with. I think imposing minimum wages on small startups would send us further down the drain.

David McCord Wright predicted the end of the Soviet Union. One of his lines of reasoning was that Marx’s prediction of the total concentration of power into a very tiny group was not coming true: the American practice of trust busting – the Sherman Anti-trust Act – had seen to that. But lately we are seeing that come to an end. Already we have Five Big Banks Too Big To Fail instead of, say, Fifty Large Banks Any One of Whom Could Go Bust And We’d Still Survive. And it’s increasingly true of other organizations. We’re down to it on airplane companies: when I got into the aerospace business there were a lot of companies, Boeing, McDonnell, Douglas, Hughes, North American, Lockheed, and more; not so many now. And somehow there aren’t so many innovations, and each new airplane costs double and more what the last one cost, and==

We are concentrating on big business. We let companies “grow” by buying up their competitors. Does anyone here think any of us will benefit from Comcast acquisition of Time-Warner, just to pick a current example? Concentrating everything into a few companies ends competition and the consolidation of management saves money on the bottom line, but the savings tend to go to the stockholders, not the workers.

All those economic analyses warning of the perils of raising the minimum wage — are they wrong?

In 1996 when [California] raised the minimum wage, people said it would destroy the state economy. Instead, for the next four years, unemployment dropped by a third. Obviously there are broader economic issues, but when you see huge declines in unemployment after a minimum-wage hike, it undercuts the case that it would devastate the economy.

I was surprised at how insignificant price increases would have to be to cover the cost. People said Wal-Mart would have to double their prices. The actual figure is less than 1% — about $12.50 a year [per customer].

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/commentary/la-oe-0226-morrison-unz-20140226,0,6284572.column#ixzz2uVIZPwPj

What I don’t see here is an analysis of the effect on small startups. Wal-Mart is not your local hardware store, or the little ap designer shop operating out of mother’s basement. Or even Philippe Kahn starting Borland Software.

Understand, Ron Unz is no fool. He tends to be sure he is right, and prefers debate to discussion, but he’s good at it.

How would it affect illegal immigration?

It would remove the incentive businesses have to hire illegal immigrants. Right now the wages for certain businesses are so low that the only people who will take those jobs have just arrived from other countries, desperate for work. You see a lot of industries that used to have reasonable wages now have wages that are much lower. [That] drives down wages for everybody, including the immigrants themselves. The best way to protect against that is to have a high minimum wage; people can earn a reasonable living.

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/commentary/la-oe-0226-morrison-unz-20140226,0,6284572.column#ixzz2uVJiKYUV

Which is an interesting point.

In fact it is all interesting. Read the article and send me your comments. I am convinced that a universal minimum wage would be devastating – indeed I think that some of the devastation Victor Hansen sees in the California Central Valley comes from that big minimum wage hikes California periodically undertakes, but I can’t prove it. It seems to me that if you force me to pay someone more than the work he does will make for me, in general I won’t hire him; particularly I won’t hire a beginner in the hopes that he’ll one day be worth it, if in fact at first he ain’t worth nothing to me. But Ron is pretty smart and he’s written a lot about it.

The Conservative Case for a Higher Minimum Wage

February 3, 2014

Over the last couple of months the minimum wage has moved into the political headlines, but most of the arguments for raising it have come from liberals.  That’s fine, but since I’m not a liberal, I’d rather focus on the conservative reasons for supporting a much higher minimum wage, which are just as compelling.

Cutting Social Welfare Spending and Reducing Hidden Government Subsidies

Each year the American government spends over $250 billion on social welfare programs for the working-poor, individuals who have jobs but can’t survive on their wages.  This funding represents a hidden government subsidy to low-wage businesses, allowing them to shift the burden of their low-wage employees over to the taxpayer.

A much higher minimum wage would force these businesses to stand on their own two feet and cover the costs of their own workers.  Once those workers were no longer so poor, they would automatically lose eligibility for many anti-poverty programs, saving the government huge amounts of money.  For example, establishing a $12 per hour minimum wage in California would save American taxpayers billions of dollars each year.

http://www.ronunz.org/2014/02/03/the-conservative-case-for-a-higher-minimum-wage/

And I continue to wonder. The transfer payments from taxpayers to Citizens (and illegals) continue. The poor get richer, the middle class sort of holds its own or gets poorer, skilled workers lose jobs and get a lot poorer, and the rich certainly get richer. And more and more pay no taxes but get richer off those who do. If something can’t go on forever it will stop.

‘You want a higher minimum wage? Turn off the spigot of low-wage workers pouring in to the U.S. and it will rise on its own through the iron law of supply and demand.’

<http://www.anncoulter.com/columns/2014-02-26.html>

——–

Roland Dobbins

That certainly sounds like the first thing to do.  Improving the schools would be the second.

"This is essentially a case of a physicist, who may be very good in his sub-discipline, talking about a subject about which he is abysmally ignorant."

<http://www.usatoday.com/story/weather/2014/02/25/giant-walls-tornado-alley/5808887/>

—

Roland Dobbins

And then some!

And more food for thought:

‘By trading with China and helping it grow into an economic powerhouse, Taiwan has helped create a burgeoning Goliath with revisionist goals that include ending Taiwan’s independence and making it an integral part of China.’

<http://server1.nationalinterest.org/article/say-goodbye-taiwan-9931?page=show>

———–

Roland Dobbins

We were urged by George Washington not to become involved in the territorial disputes of Europe. We were warned by MacArthur and others not to engage in a land war in Asia. We are said to be the last hope of freedom and the world’s policeman but not to be interventionists or isolationists, and —

Walter Lippmann long ago wrote that Foreign Policy is like checks written against power, which ultimately comes from trade and the military as the assets the checks are written against. We have written large checks to Taiwan and Japan. Most are against Navy power, of course.  We also wrote large checks on Iraqi and Afghan democracy; those are definitely going to bounce, and many, including me, say they should not have been written in the first place.  Staying in Iraq after reducing its ruling mechanism to a shambles left us trying to plant democracy among people who don’t want it – since they are not a nation, and the Sunni, Shiite, and Kurdish factions do not think of themselves as a nation.  A vote is like the barnyard animals deciding who will be eaten. Christians and Jews, of course, but after that who’s next.  And in Afghanistan the writ of the Mayor of Kabul has never run very far; the one thing that unites Afghanistan is the sight of armed foreigners in Afghanistan.  We defeated the Taliban; we could have left Afghanistan to the Afghanis.  Instead we decided to implant Democracy in a nation that never had it, rule of law in a nation that never had it, and – but that is another story.  We don’t have a large enough bank account to honor that particular check.

The Cold War was close; Containment was the cheapest strategy, and yet it was very expensive. Reagan threw in enough chips to bleed the Soviet Union faster than we were bleeding. Viet Nam was costly to the Russians, costly in industrial goods shipped at great expense to Hanoi only to be destroyed. And the Afghanistan war bled Russia in the way that Viet Nam had bled the United States.  I suspect they see our struggles there as the cream of the jest.

Russia is not the USSR. The Cold War is over.  There is a new realism in the world.

And it’s now 2330 and my blood sugar is 318, so I will definitely take another Glucophage with my night pills.  Still no improvement in hearing. Incidentally, I have been taking LipoFlavenoid for months now, four tablets a day, and it has definitely ended tinnitus; but it didn’t do much for hearing.  That was done by the COSTCO hearing aids ($2,000 and worth it); but then came the Sudden Hearing Loss in my left ear.  See earlier logs this week on that.  The steroids are supposed to help. We’re hoping. Prayer may help too.

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.

View 812 Tuesday, February 25, 2014

If a foreign government had imposed this system of education on the United States, we would rightfully consider it an act of war.

Glenn T. Seaborg, National Commission on Education, 1983

In January I got new digital hearing aids from COSTCO, and shortly after my hearing was as near to normal as it has been in many decades. That continued until last Sunday. On Sunday I noticed that over the period from Noon to Dinner the hearing in my left ear became progressively worse, and by Sunday night I was as deaf as a post in my left ear. I thought at first this was some kind of hearing aid failure, but I found that if I put the left aid in my right ear I could hear in my right ear, and if I put the right aid in my left ear I could hear nothing. I did several other tests and the conclusion was obvious: I was deaf as a post in my left ear.

When I would sort of scratch on the sound input area of my right hearing aid I could clearly hear that. Sunday afternoon if I did that with the left aid, I’d sort of hear it, but not well, and over time that faded, until by Sunday night I could hear nothing at all from doing that. Similarly my hearing aids give signals, a ringing gong sound, in various patterns to convey messages: over Sunday afternoon they became fainter and fainter in my left ear, and again by Sunday night they were gone from the left but unchanged in the right.

Monday after our trip to the vet we went to Kaiser to my primary care physician, who looked at my ears, did things with a tuning fork, shone lights into my head, and other such physician activities, then excused himself and left the examining room for about ten minutes. He returned to say he had scheduled me with the audiology department for Tuesday morning – the next day, at 1030. So out I went, where I first got a fairly normal hearing exam, but not from a technician but an MD.  She didn’t show me the results of the test, but I already knew that my right ear was about the way it was before I got the hearing aids and the left was just about stony deaf. After the exam I went out to wait for a call to be examined by yet another MD.

He showed me the results. It was what I have feared. Damned near total loss in left ear. He also informed me that the diagnosis was Sudden Hearing Loss, and I pointed out that this wasn’t informative, a bit like “lumbago” for lower back pains. He agreed enthusiastically. It turns out SHL isn’t that uncommon for someone my age, but they don’t really have a good theory of causation although it’s likely that several different causes may produce the result, but they do have a treatment. It doesn’t always work, but it works better than anything else they have.

It’s steroids. A lot of steroids. Beginning with an initial application given by a needle through the eardrum; which sound extremely unpleasant, and in fact it was although less so than I had feared. I also take six steroid pills a day – the pharmacist says I can take them all at once, but with a meal – to be followed after a week or two by taking five a day, then four, then three, tapering down weekly; and also there will be three of these treatments by needle, one a week for three weeks, the first one to be in about five minutes. Or I could wait for more tests and such; he did want me to go down to the lab, which I was scheduled to do anyway. I told him to add his requirements to the already scheduled lab blood draw, and let’s get on with this. He agreed that was what he’d recommend.

It wasn’t all that hard a decision. My weeks of normal hearing with the COSTCO hearing aids were life changing. I didn’t say “Huh?” to my wife more than once, I think. I could hear just about everything going on around me. Birds. Kids laughing. The choir, and I could even understand most of the sermon although the acoustics in our church are awful (very modern with maybe 8 speakers on each side of this very great acoustically lousy hall, not really properly synchronized). Acoustics or not I could actually understand most of what was said. And at LASFS I could hear the other members of the club, and — Anyway, it turns out that it doesn’t take long to get used to being able to hear what’s going on around you, and I would put up with a lot more than an ear shot full of steroids to get it back again.

So I got the shots, and tonight at dinner I took the little pills – they’re very bitter – and watched TV for an hour, and LO! while I could not really hear in my left ear, by gollies when I scratch the input screen on the left hearing aid I can hear that, nowhere near as well as I hear when I do it to the right one, but better than late Sunday afternoon and as good as Sunday about noon. (And an hour after I wrote that I think it may be even better!) It’s nowhere good enough, but the fact that there’s a positive change is heartening. I have a faint hope that things will be restored to the point that the COSTCO technicians can retune the left aid to the point where that ear will be at least partly useful. Of course what I really hope for is that it can be made as good as it was.

Sudden Hearing Loss seems to be correlated with diabetic matters, and I’ve been somewhat diabetic for years. I haven’t always been as careful about sugar and dieting as I should be. That ends now. Today I have been quite careful about what and how much I have eaten.

I was also told that this steroid treatment can and probably will play hell with my blood sugar, and if I notice a sudden rise I should inform my primary physician who may prescribe an increase in the glocophages I take twice a day.

So, tonight, at 2200, four hours after a dinner of one half chicken sandwich, not a lot of chicken, quite a lot of lettuce, on pita bread, I took my blood sugar. I had half a sandwich for dinner because after my steroid shot in the ear but before I went to the lab I bought that sandwich at the Kaiser cafeteria, and ate half of it for lunch. I haven’t had anything else to eat all day. And I walked about a mile at Kaiser and took stairs rather than elevators for most of it.

My blood sugar reading at 2200 was 301, which is about as high a reading as I have ever had even after Niven’s New Year party. It’s usually between 130 and 145, which I think is high, but the EENT chap thought wasn’t bad. Anyway, I’ve sent email to my primary because this sounds like an increase as predicted, and since it follows the ear shot and the six steroid pills at dinner, I think it ranks as a sudden increase. Alas I haven’t taken a reading for a couple of days so I don’t know any more than that. But I’ll sure be more careful about what I eat, and now that we no longer have to worry about Sable I can take longer and more vigorous walks; which is what my cardiologist friend has been urging me to do for weeks.

And once again I can say: the problem wasn’t the COSTCO hearing aids, and indeed I have hopes that I will recover enough that they can be reprogrammed to overcome this setback; and having had nearly a month of relatively normal hearing, including going to Dvorak’s Risalka and hearing it properly and not saying “Huh?” to my long suffering wife a dozen times a day and never knowing really what was going on – even a month of that was pretty well worth the cost, and I still have hopes.

I kept reasonably good notes during the radiation treatment of my brain cancer five years ago – six years come March – and I will try to log going from a deaf old guy to nearly normal hearing to this remission and, we can hope, to restoration of at least some of my left ear. And maybe that will help someone find a better diagnosis than “Sudden Hearing Loss” which is a bit like telling a sleepless person that he has insomnia.

[Morning, 0900 before breakfast, 175, still high but not so frighteningly so. No change in left ear hearing: I still detect scratching the sound intake area, but I in my left ear cannot hear the gongs when the device signals me although they are fine on the right side. More steroids at noon. And I have heard from my primary physician not to worry about the 301 reading.]

Retire ‘Em

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/why-the-army-should-fire-some-generals-and-promote-some-captains/2014/02/21/7921a234-9802-11e3-afce-3e7c922ef31e_allComments.html?ctab=all_&

This really doesn’t go far enough. Many of the flag officer billets should be downgraded and staffed with Colonels/Captains and Lt. Colonels/Commanders. The inflation of stars – mostly for political and appearance purposes – has not benefited as a whole.

s/f

Couv

David Couvillon

Colonel, U.S. Marine Corps Reserve, Retired.; Former Governor of Wasit Province, Iraq; Righter of Wrongs; Wrong most of the time; Distinguished Expert, TV remote control; Chef de Hot Dog Excellance; Avoider of Yard Work

They are shrinking the Army and probably the Marine Corps, so there will certainly be less need for general officers; although the Navy and Marine Corps remain the usual instrument of American power projection when we are not at war. I am sure most readers are aware that I think the arrangement of a Department of the Navy and a Department of War made a lot of sense for a Republic. But that’s another discussion for another time. I should probably try to write a short piece on the Strategy of Technology in the modern age. Thanks.

The Iron Law affects military organizations, but having actually to fight wars weeds some of that out. And I rather like the notion of a service led by officers who have been in front of a bunch of armed Americans in combat.

On Global Temperatures

Thought this was a very carefully explained post.

http://judithcurry.com/2014/02/25/berkeley-earth-global/

mkr

I found this explanatory but it may be at the edge of my understanding. When I was in human factors testing astronauts and others tolerance of temperatures and ability to perform at various temperatures, I learned a lot about the state of the art of temperature measurement — admittedly for 1957 or so – and the difficulties of coming up with a reason for averaging numbers obtained in many different ways.

I know we have experts on this subject among the readers, and I invite comments on this.

Heinlein Society (@HeinleinSociety) tweeted at 5:58 PM on Mon, Feb 24, 2014:

Biggest Lunar Explosion Ever Seen: http://t.co/4UBaEsul5T

(https://twitter.com/HeinleinSociety/status/438100535430766592)

Get the official Twitter app at https://twitter.com/download

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.

View 812 Monday, February 24, 2014

We had to take Sable to the vet for the last time. She won’t be coming home. And I have some medical stuff at Kaiser.

Sable was our Red Siberian Husky, born on September 11. 2002, and brought home to Chaos Manor when she was five weeks old. She fit in immediately. She was the most beautiful dog we have ever had, and the smartest. She was like all Huskies, cooperative more than obedient. She was never vicious but she did have the pack dog attitude of testing her place in the pack from time to time.

A year ago last November she got cancer, and was given a few weeks to live, with the possibility of a couple of months if we let them cut her right foreleg off.  She would have been miserable, and we decided to keep her intact and give her as good a life as possible. We expected that to be a few weeks. Every day was a gift, and until last week she was mostly a happy dog, content to go on short walks, and to sit with us in the evenings. She was fun to be with and she was happy.  And that went on for more than a year, astonishing the vet; but eventually the cancer got to her, and she enjoyed life less and less, until she was no longer interested in eating, and couldn’t even be tempted with her favorite treats.  It was time for us to do our duty to her, and we have done it.

For those who remember her:

http://www.jerrypournelle.com/images/photos2002/sable1.html is the first segment of pictures. The pictures will enlarge if you click on them. The link to the next set of puppy pictures is at the end of the first one.

I will have more to say later. It was time for her to go, and she wanted to go to sleep.

My thanks to all of you who have written about Sable. It hasn’t been our best day, but we know we did the right thing.

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.

View 811 Saturday, February 22, 2014

“Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency.”

President Barack Obama, January 31, 2009

If a foreign government had imposed this system of education on the United States, we would rightfully consider it an act of war.

Glenn T. Seaborg, National Commission on Education, 1983

Another day recovering from my various ailments and ills, but I am reading and getting some things done, so recovering is the correct phrase.

For those who want to understand something of what it was like in the Apollo Race days,

http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/04/how-nasa-brought-the-monstrous-f-1-moon-rocket-back-to-life/

Is fascinating, and for those who have do plans for the future I’d make it required reading.

This was brought to my attention by the efforts of

Stephanie Osborn

Interstellar Woman of Mystery

See all my books at http://www.Stephanie-Osborn.com <http://www.stephanie-osborn.com/>

"Sometimes our hopes and dreams do not go the way we planned, but we must never let despair overcome us. We have to try and we have to care. We must never give up when we still have something to give. Nothing is really over until the moment we stop trying."

~Jeremy Brett

"Sometimes you gotta say what’s in your heart… And you have to stand for what you believe. No matter what."

Thanks Stephanie

And while I do not often publish my fan mail, once in a while I do in a fit of shameless self promotion:

2 Great books

Jerry,

I’ve just finished The Burning City and Burning Tower back to back on my iPad Mini – I felt compelled to congratulate you and Niven on a couple of cracking good stories! I really enjoyed them! Whandall, Sandry, Tower and Reggie are really great characters and I TRULY hope to run across them again on the pages of another addition to the series.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004BA5G9A/ref=as_li_tf_til?tag=digichok-20&camp=14573&creative=327641

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B000N2HBLG/ref=as_li_tf_til?tag=digichok-20&camp=14573&creative=327641

Thanks for the enjoyable experience…

Hope your wounds from the fall have healed!

Regards…Richard

Thanks for the kind words. I confess that I am quite fond of The Burning City, which came about because Niven was having trouble with a novelette and invited me in, and it just grew into two novels and possibly a third to come. Burning Tower is a full novel, romantic as well as heroic, and we have fun writing it, and driving through the desert to the various places where it takes place. Thanks for reminding me. And I am healing nicely, thanks.

Minimum Wage

I haven’t read The Road to Serfdom in a long time. (The Road To Serfdom, didn’t that star Bob Hope, Bing Crosby and Dorothy Lamour?) But I believe that quote was in fact a preface to an argument that a full-on European-style welfare state would inevitably lead to socialism. Of course, many of the enthusiasts for a minimum wage hike are the usual social democrats, socialists, Marxists, fellow travelers and useful idiots, so that’s a good thing.

If raising the minimum wage to $12/hour is good why not $25 or $100? Why not give every worker $1 million and eliminate all poverty? After all, $12/hour is only $24,000 a year. Who could live comfortably on that? It won’t even cover the payments on my Lexus, condo in Aspen and daily double tall skinny soy decaf latte at Starbucks.

Of course raising the minimum wage sounds like a good idea. And in a perfect world it really would be one. But the only arguments from the proponents amount to special pleading, completely ignoring the negative consequences. Both Charles Murray and Thomas Sowell have made a compelling empirical case that historically raising minimum wages really does increase unemployment. No fooling, kids, it really did. That’s not just a theoretical argument, subject to changing precepts, it’s real. And it most affects the most vulnerable elements in society, like black teenagers. Most minimum wage jobs are entry level, and lead to higher pay in any case. I know the proponents will always be able to trot out the one man in America raising a family of five on a minimum wage job he’s had for the last 57 years. In a nation of 350 million you can find at least one of anything.

There is another way out of this conundrum – inflation. Raise the minimum wage and then inflate the currency so that the new, improved living wage buys exactly the same amount of goods and services as before. That should keep everyone happy.

Labor obeys the same law of supply and demand as any other commodity. More supply lowers the incremental cost of a unit of labor. If you want a real, sustained increase in wages the supply of labor must be restricted. Start by discouraging illegal immigrants, deporting ones already here where possible and so on. Some sort of protectionist tariff on cheap foreign goods.

And then – Tax the Machines!

There really isn’t much demand for back-breaking, mindless grunt labor any more. Not like 150 years ago when 80 or 90 percent of the population lived on inefficient farms just to feed a small number of urban artisans.

The industrial revolution combined with Moore’s law has just about eliminated the need for conventional labor, and it’s not coming back unless we do something highly artificial.

What to do? WPA-style make-work projects is one possibility. It takes something like 20 laborers with picks and shovels to do the work of one bulldozer with a skilled operator.

A few road building projects, dams and state parks could absorb a lot of surplus labor if purposely done with manual labor like in the good old days.

Sure it’s horrible mindless, back breaking and so on, but *it’s a job*. Dignity, schmignity.

How are we going to handle the left half of the bell curve? There are just so many jobs for massage therapists, scented candle makers, butlers and so on. I know! Organic farming, let’s make all the surplus to requirements population Amish.

Seriously, outside of a few radical libertarians, we really don’t want starving poor people dying in the streets. If machines are going to force vast numbers of formerly employed workers out of a job and we want some sort of societal safety net for them, make the machines pay for it. They don’t care. (Or maybe they will. I’ve always wanted to write a story about the Robot Industrial Workers of the World (the Robblies) staging a general strike for more workers control, tastier lube and better conditions. Self-aware machines could lead to all sorts of complications. "But ma, I don’t want to be a horizontal end mill!!!") The owners face a similar situation to the one presented by the tariff. Best outcome is spreading the misery around so that no-one gets an over sized portion.

I’m out of ideas. What should we do?

There have been more (Moore?) changes in the last few generations than in the previous thousands of years. We either find ways to survive or we’re back to hunting and gathering in the ruins. Earth could wind up like Mote Prime a lot harder and faster than anyone expected.

Man Mountain Molehill

You raise many of the important questions.

My proclivity would be to teach, in the schools, the principles of self government, and let those who don’t have useful productive jobs be employed at governing themselves. A great deal of the work of self government requires mostly honesty and some dedication to getting things done; it’s not rocket science. Yet most local government is awful, and the few citizen jobs tend to be things like crossing guards. It doesn’t have to be that way.

I agree we don’t want street after street of beggars, nor do we need workhouses of the Dickens variety. Citizens ought to be, and feel, useful. For a man to love his country his country ought to be lovely. And there should always be a clear path into the productive community; but that doesn’t mean that if you aren’t an engineer, scientist, or financier you are useless: a great deal of self government can be done by almost anyone conscientious and honest. Obviously not all; but quite a lot.

Self government by Citizens who have a basic safety net of income and choose that path would be very useful were the schools to be oriented in that direction.

The DOW is high, but the number of jobs in the new efficient economy isn’t rising very fast. Unemployment falls more because people stop looking for work rather than by the creation of new jobs, and since the economy is awash in capital – see the DOW numbers again – the investments are likely to be in machines – robots – rather in jobs for graduates of schools that seem unwilling and unable to teach their students how to do anything that someone would pay them money to do.

A republic with a large number of people who are proletariat – in the original sense of the word of those who contribute nothing to the state but their progeny, and who have no other stake in the country – is in trouble. In the days when 70% and more of the population was required in agriculture this wasn’t such a problem: if you didn’t own a small plot of land (in some eras soldiers were pensioned with as much land as a man could plow in a day, or two days, or two such plots) you could still hire out as day labor. The old Southern share cropper system worked this way, sometimes smoothly, sometimes not; but there was always some work. In today’s economy the number of people with no skills at all who are needed to keep the economy running is not large. Domestic service used to provide jobs for many, but that is considered demeaning by many now.

So we have a growing number of people who have little to contribute, and who know they are useless – but they do have a vote. It is said that democracies endure until the proletariat realize they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. Historically it doesn’t get very far after that: the rich realize that hiring soldiers and bodyguards and security forces is cheaper than paying the taxes demanded by the people. And so it goes.

I seem to be rambling so I will leave it here. How does one distribute the wealth generated by machines, and how do you get anyone to invest in building those machines? They don’t run themselves, just as a complex financial system does not run itself; there is always a need for skilled labor and management. Those with skills tend to live apart from those who have none. The skilled are necessary. When many Citizens are not needed, what happens? I explored some of this in my CoDominium books.

More another time.

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.