Don’t worry…
Bernie only wants “the good kind of socialism.”
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Ford Labor
On January 5, 1914, the Ford Motor Company announced an eight-hour workday and a minimum wage of $5 for a day’s labor.
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John Taylor
A government of laws and not of men, is a definition of liberty; a government of men and not of laws, of despotism.
John Taylor of Caroline, as quoted in Walter E. Volkomer, ed., The Liberal Tradition in American Thought (G. P. Putnam Sons, 1969)
The savvier economists (and intellectuals like Steven Pinker) like to remind us that it is progress that must be explained; poverty is natural.
But when you see poverty settle in like an infestation of slime mold, staining a whole modern city or region, you begin to wonder. As Ron Bailey wonders in his excellent Reason report on West Virginia’s impoverished McDowell County . . .
WHY DON’T THESE PEOPLE JUST MOVE?
The feeling of being trapped in your community — in your hovel, in your own blighted life — does not come, these days, from mere poverty alone. I remember the Joads in The Grapes of Wrath; my family has a history. Once upon a time, folks in America, when industry ran out, left. Traveled. Migrated — to find work where industry boomed.
And sure, McDowell used to be much more populated. Bailey’s family left two generations ago.
But the stragglers?
Almost any community has its specific enticements.
But one thing becomes clear, as you read through Bailey’s sad survey (in part memoir, since he has family ties there): government is the worst culprit.
A lot of welfare goes into McDowell, and a huge percentage of the population is retired or on disability.
“If you get public assistance to supply your needs without any effort from you,” explains one young man who came back to his beleaguered hometown, “you’ve got no incentive to better yourself or your situation.”
Government subsidizes poverty. Sure, it prevents destitution. Utter misery. But it also traps people, robbing them of their wherewithal to get up and go and achieve something.
Modern government is in the stasis business. Our assistance programs don’t just assist.
A modern American nightmare.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
[mks_dropcap style=”letter” size=”62″ bg_color=”#ffffff” txt_color=”#000000″]C[/mks_dropcap]onsumer sovereignty is the idea that in markets consumers call the shots. In capitalism, most mass production is indeed for the masses, and the masses have a big say in what gets done. All profits and wages of successful businesses come from consumers.
But don’t take this too far.
Consumers don’t “create jobs,” for example.
Recently, Clinton-era Labor Secretary Robert Reich has been floating this bizarre notion. To his Facebook audience, last month, he wrote that it is a myth that “the ‘job creators’ are CEOs, corporations, and the rich, whose taxes must be low in order to induce them to create more jobs.
Rubbish. The real job creators are the vast middle class and the poor, whose spending induces businesses to create jobs. That is why raising the minimum wage, extending overtime protection, enlarging the Earned Income Tax Credit, and reducing middle-class taxes are all necessary.”
So, we have people in roles of “producers” and “consumers,” and it is the consumers who “create jobs”? And they do this by “inducing” businesses to, wait, uh, “create jobs”?
Face it: businesses create jobs — out of capital from somebody’s invested savings. Entrepreneurs brace themselves to take big risks, fronting workers’ wages as well as hiring and purchasing capital goods and material.
Before a penny is spent by consumers.
Only when entrepreneurs guess right does the flow of money come full circle.
Reich repeated his quasi-Keynesian rap yesterday: it’s spending consumers who “get businesses to expand and hire.”
Truth is, Reich doesn’t “get” basic economics. But he does understand political equations, which is why folks on the Democratic left think he’s a genius.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Anthony Lewis
Today, every president is the target of criticism and mockery. It is inconceivable that even the most caustic critic would be imprisoned for his or her words.
Anthony Lewis, Freedom for the Thought That We Hate; A Biography of the First Amendment (New York: Basic Books, 2007)
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King Charles
On Jan. 4, 1642, King Charles I of England sent soldiers to arrest members of Parliament, beginning England’s slide into civil war.
On Jan. 4, 1649, the English “Rump Parliament,” having purged those members willing to restore Charles I to the throne, voted to put Charles I on trial for high treason. Before the month was over, he was executed.
Consider the intersection of freedom and decontextualized fragments.
The specific “decontextualized fragments” in question appear in great and not-so-great works of literature, assigned in public schools for young adults to read: a graphic rape scene in Toni Morrison’s Beloved; racial slurs in Huckleberry Finn; sex, violence.
“Virginia regulators are drafting rules that would require school districts to red-flag objectionable teaching material and make it easier for parents to control what books their children see in the classroom,” reports the Washington Post.
Those regulations won’t be finalized for a year or more (because government bureaucracies are painfully slow). Yet an “earlier version of the language released on a state website drew hundreds of comments from the public,” the Post informs.
“Most parents were supportive of the change. . . .”
Teachers? Against.
Stafford County Public Schools literacy coordinator Sarah Crain worries about literature being wrongly labeled “sexually explicit.” To “reduce a book or a work down to something that is a mere decontextualized fragment of the work,” she argues, “actually impedes the ability for teachers and parents to have informed conversations.”
What about freedom?
Well, public schools aren’t primarily about freedom.
Teachers have a job to do; students follow instruction.
And it is pretty easy to see one reason for the opposition by “the professionals”: the new rules would entail more work.
Nonetheless, parents and their kids deserve as much choice as can be provided. And in every context.
Here, freedom means acknowledging the right of parents to decide. Not experts. Parents.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Caution: Do Not Over-Feed Government!
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Rep. Craig
On January 3, 1933, Minnie D. Craig became the first woman elected as Speaker of the North Dakota House of Representatives, the first female to hold a Speaker position anywhere in the United States.
On the same date in 1977, Apple Computer was incorporated.
January 3rd birthdays include that of Cicero (106 BC), Roman philosopher and theorist of republicanism, and J. R. R. Tolkien (1892 AD), English philologist and author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Both were deeply concerned about the problem of absolute power.