A Moment Passes By In Utter Inconsequentiality

Sometimes a tiny detail of daily life, work, or what lies in between will claw its way back from the obscurity of lost memory to intrude once again as the focus of attention.

We read the news on some blog, or in the newspaper, or listen to the radio. Someone wrote that blog post, the wire story, or radio copy. How much work was it? Will they remember it tomorrow?

We drive along the highway, or ride in the bus or train. Who poured the concrete or rolled the asphalt, who laid the rails? Who planned the construction and guided the project along, these many years ago? They may have forgotten doing it by now, or it may be the pride of their life's work, an achievement they tell about to this day.

The sand, gravel, lime, and crushed rock used to make the concrete all came from somewhere. Would anyone remember the day those components were ordered, delivered, or put together?

We dispose of some problem or issue, only to have it return from the grave. The matter is settled, we think, and it leaves our short-term memory, erased from our agenda for all time. But something in the solution to the problem was incorrect, insufficient, or ill-advised. Invisibly, it has clung to existence, waiting for just the wrong moment to spring itself on its erstwhile vanquisher.

A penny lies quietly on the sidewalk. How did it get there? If the penny could write a blog post, would it tell of its glory days as part of the change back from a Happy Meal? Or would it lament that, with the minimum wage what it is, it now would be unprofitable to hire someone to pick up pennies even if the ground were strewn with them?

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Of Envy and Admiration

Sometimes people are successful at what they do. Others are not. Sometimes people succeed, sometimes they fail. Having failed, we learn (or not) and try again.

When we see other people who are more successful, we have really only two options, though a third lingers: we can resent them, or we can emulate them. The lingering third is what most people end up doing, which is observing from afar and doing nothing. On some level we pass judgment, either in favor of or against the more successful. From the corrupt.org link above:

Some people assume that if any person they don't like is more successful than someone they like it is primarily or solely due to moral inferiority - a greater willingness to lie, cheat and steal. This mindset is common in underground subcultures, though some mainstream progressives also think this way. A more advanced version of this mentality adds the assumption that anyone who is successful in the "wrong" areas - for example dating or country music - must be a despicable and morally inferior individual.

There is a danger in giving up, in deciding that your sweat and diligence are no match for the world. But there is no higher virtue than working, being paid for it, and saving for a better future in which you no longer work for money, but money works for you. That, and not mere home ownership, is the American Dream.

When people decide that the only way they can get ahead is to lie, cheat, and steal their way to the top, they have one of two options: do it themselves, or vote for it. We call the first group criminals, and the second group liberals.

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Unions Throw People Out of Work and Keep Them There

The UAW has succeeded in limiting how many people the automotive industry has been able to hire, by forcing it to pay too much to those it does.

And now, the threat is that because of its outrageous labor costs, GM may go out of business. If it does, all of those union jobs will go away.

So, the title.

The minimum wage works the same way. The more money a business has to pay per worker, the fewer workers it can hire. Those it can't hire will just have to keep looking. If the business can't cut wages in response to tough times, its employees will have those nice minimum wage jobs right up until the moment they don't.

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Health Care Is Not A Right

If health care is a right, then anyone who knows you lack perfect health is obligated, on some level, to provide you with care.

Bad personal hygiene, grooming, and sexual repression are all negative health factors.

So if you need a haircut, manicure, or sex, any person who is skilled in the work of caring for you in that area is obligated to provide you with service.

"But", you say, "it's our right to health care, not that stuff you mentioned."

OK, so you know a doctor, and he knows you are sick. If health care is a right, he is obligated to provide it, for free. He is your health care slave.

"But no", you say, "he deserves to be paid".

How much? Minimum wage?

"Well, clearly, at least minimum wage."

Suppose he wants more, say, to care for your annoying case of tuberculosis than for my pleasant tinnitis.

"Why should he get more?", you ask.

Well, I suppose if health care is a right, he should be required to charge all patients the same.

So if he wants more than minimum wage, what are his options?

"He can petition the government for more money."

And if he finds he can make more delivering pizzas, should he do that?

"Well, I suppose he could do that."

But health care is your right, which he would be violating.

"Yes, he must be a doctor, and not a pizza man."

Suppose he wishes to sleep. You said he should get minimum wage, so should he also not have an 8-hour day, or 40-hour week?

"Yes, clearly."

What if a patient becomes ill and our doctor has worked his 8 hours. Should he treat the patient?

"Of course. The patient has rights."

What if he's worked 80 hours in a week already. Should he go home to bed?

"Not if there are patients to serve."

In that case, I think we must repeal the 13th Amendment.

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TANSTAAFL

There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch.

Liberals (and that means you who run about calling yourselves "Progressives", as if a name changed a thing) are fond of promising a free lunch. They never call it a Free Lunch, but use terms like "compassion" and "fairness", for who is against compassion and fairness? But a Free Lunch is always promised, and a Free Lunch never is.

• Tax the rich their "fair share" while "real people" need not pay taxes, and half the country doesn't. There is no pain directly associated with a tax increase, so government grows in its taxing power.
• Punish Big Oil companies who will pass on their costs to consumers, or who will not have incentive to invest in new sources and new technology, reward their investors, or grow in other ways.
  
• Free health care will cost more to deliver than private care does, and will be of inferior quality. While those using free health care will suffer the consequences first, eventually everyone will suffer. By competing with the private sector (or outlawing it), the government health care will decrease the quality and increase the cost of care.
  
• Free health insurance, also known as insurance company welfare. Health insurance is the biggest scam ever, except maybe for Global Warming Carbon Offsets. Why do you need insurance? Because health care is expensive. But do the insurance companies make a profit? Yes, a huge profit. If they make a profit, then it stands to reason that the money you pay for insurance does not all pay for health care. For the government to pay insurance premiums, or even to become an insurance provider itself, is merely to suck money away from health care and toward the bureaucracy.
  
• Free housing should be subsistence-level, at most: a way to keep out the elements and lock the door, but not much more. Instead, public housing competes with private landlords, forcing them off the bottom two rungs of the ladder.
  
• The Minimum Wage is an exercise in tail-chasing, which also outlaws certain kinds of work. Jobs which a person could perform that would be helpful, but are not profitable enough, can not be done, or must be done by volunteers. If a volunteer cannot be found, the task must be handled by employees who would otherwise be doing more profitable work, thereby decreasing their productivity, their value, and their wages.
  
• Broadband Internet is not a right, contrary to what you may have heard. If you want the government to ruin the Internet experience, have them regulate it. Once they start, there will be no limit on their control, either in the technology to be used or the content to be found.
  

Now comes Hillary Clinton with he free plan for mortgage bailouts. Rather than allow people to face the consequences of their decisions and fail, learning a lesson for next time, she wants to allow people to live inconsequential lives.

All of these promised free things come at a cost. The cost is hidden, and the person promising it may see that cost as a benefit, but that doesn't mean that it is actually a benefit, at least not to the one on the consuming end of the supposed free lunch.

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Wal-Mart Caused Global Warming

J. Oliphant at The Minority Report Blog and Redstate notes that even though China has surpassed the US as the world's largest CO2 emitter, that's still the fault of the West, for buying Chinese-made goods.

Leaving aside the ludicrous nature of that idea, with which Jolly melts faster than an ice cube in June, it occurs to me that it isn't all of America who forces China to produce CO2. After all, I personally boycott Chinese goods on the basis of their utter crappiness.

To wit, who distributes and retails all of these crappy Chinese-made goods at a cost that unionized, minimum-wage owing, overregulated, lawyered-up American companies can't beat at wholesale?

Wal-Mart.

The dreaded, evil Wal-Mart.

So, not only is Wal-Mart responsible for first inciting and then delaying John Edwards' purchase of a Playstation by making his staffer wait in line like a common customer, but they have pushed China into becoming the biggest CO2 producer.

It's a wonder they're still in business.

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The Ungreen Party

If I had my own party, it would not be like the two major American political parties. It would also be unlike the Green Party, the Libertarian Party, or any other. Well, maybe a little like them.

To have one's own party is an exercise in intentional projection. Let us pretend, therefore, that there are more than, say, two people who would join a party that reflected my point of view. It hardly seems likely, but this is my blog.

I am green. I really don't consider myself an environmentalist, but I love the woods, hate litter, and I have a compost pile. However to me the Earth is not a Mother but a tool, at once a very large resource and a smallish planet circling a smallish star at the edge of a smallish galaxy, all of which are safely nestled in a caring hand. The Owner of that hand I believe holds us responsible for our use of the resource, but is also more concerned with other things.

I think most people are squarely in that same dichotomy of cognitive dissonance: there is a Creator to whom we are accountable, but our place in the universe is pretty insignificant. In the end, it seems right to leave the world and universe in at least as good a shape as we found it. It also seems right not to fret too much that we cannot.

My party would recognize the right of people to hold property, whether that be a paperclip or a continent, and to direct the use of that property as they see fit.

Humans and their ideals matter more to me than money or pollution. My party would be in favor of war to defend the freedom of other nations to direct their own affairs, but would otherwise leave them alone to do so. My party would not favor war to defend the environment, nor to correct or uphold unequal distribution of wealth.

My party would work to end the War on Drugs, as the War has proved to be more harmful than the Drugs.

My party would defend the right to keep and bear arms, not in terms of hunting, target practice, or even self defense, but simply as a right.

My party would defend the right to life, from the moment of conception to the last sweet breath.

My party would reject multiculturalism, farm subsidies, protectionism, hate crime laws, Jihad, the minimum wage, affirmative action, and smoking bans.

My party would build a wall and deport all illegal immigrants. We would then allow anyone who wanted in to come in, as long as they will speak English, renounce their foreign citizenship and loyalties, and meet certain reasonable background checks.

My party would know that nations are not people, and cannot be held to the same standards of conduct. A nation cannot be expected to respond as a person would. Yet each nation has certain rights among the others.

But the biggest reason my party would be so small is that we would assert that the only legitimate functions of government are to defend the rights of its citizens from internal or external violators, and to settle such disputes that may arise. In the end, my party would have as its highest goal the reduction of the overall size, scope, power, and importance of government at all levels, until such a time as it was able to fulfill its legitimate functions rather than wasting our resources trying to do things it should not be doing in the first place.

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Give a Man a Fish

Socialism comes in two flavors, the kind practiced in democracies in which the people have discovered how to vote themselves free bread, and the kind practiced in dictatorships in which the dictator or oligarchs have discovered how to starve the people on it.

There is an old liberal saying:

Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day;
Teach him to fish, and he will never be hungry.

The arrogance implied in that statement is astounding. Which came first, the starving poor or the liberal? Come to think of it, it's a harder question than I thought.

Socialism gives the people bread, fish, or whatever the government decides they "need". Since the people do not have the ability under socialism to feed themselves, tomorrow the government must continue to give the people bread, while enduring their whining compaints. The bread is baked from flour ground by those who will never bake or till. The grain is grown by those who will never grind or bake. And eventually everyone pays for it in blood, since the system falls apart without someone holding a gun.

Capitalism teaches the people to fish, or bake their own bread, or figure out their own health care. It requires no one to force the people to till, or grind, or bake, because the people will do these things with the hope of wealth but with the knowledge that they will be rewarded for the cleverness and diligence with which they do so.

Socialism is the enemy of capitalism not just because the two economic systems are incompatible in their methods and goals, but because socialism demands more and more control over its subjects, while capitalism does not want to control. Socialism requires stifling dissent, for if people remember that they don't need the government, they will rebel.

Socialism, and its sister communism, require thinking of the world as a zero-sum proposition, in which a person can become wealthy only by impoverishing someone else, and the world is composed of competing groups out to enslave one another. In fact, wealth is most often created by the mutual benefit of two or more parties, and the less they try to enslave one another, the more mutual benefit they can accrue. When one of those parties is a health care provider, one of them gains health, which is more valuable to him than the mere money gained by the other.

Capitalism, by contrast with socialism, works best when people are free to decide all aspects of their own affairs, whether they till, grind, bake, join the Marines, or become a doctor. When decisions are made for people, their initiative dries up, and the initiative of the people is the life blood of capitalism. Capitalism is freedom.

Socialism has no life, only the blood of its dissenters.

Will people try to steal from one another without some kind of government to resolve disputes between them? Universally. But socialism requires them to steal from one another.

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The Liberal Error

I've noticed a tendency, a pattern of sorts, among modern American liberals. They seem most often to conflate side effects and cause.

Self Esteem

Liberals love to talk about self esteem, as though low self esteem were its own cause and not simply the mental health equivalent of scurvy. Without achievement, we lack the self esteem to stay away from suicide, drug abuse, and undesirable sexual activity. But just a little self esteem is enough to ward off these potholes of life. Too much self esteem leads to arrogance and sociopathy.

Low self esteem is undesirable, but high self esteem is just as bad. Furthermore, you can't supply the self esteem innoculation with unmerited praise, and the reward of doing a good job is often enough without any praise at all. As Dr. Sanity says,

Our cultural focus on enhancing "self-esteem" has resulted in the near-worship of emotions and feelings at the expense of reason and thought; on emphasizing "root causes" and victimhood, instead of demanding that behavior be civilized and that individuals exert self-discipline and self-control--no matter what they are "feeling".

Healthy, well-adjusted people have moderate self-esteem, but that cannot be given -- it must be earned.

Diversity

Diversity is not a source of strength in human societies, it is a symptom of it. Unity gives strength, .and people are different enough without foolishly trying to make them more different. A people who are unified is a stronger people. But to be strong, a people must have freedom;. A free people develop diversity. Mere enforced superficial (e.g., racial) diversity does not enhance strength in any way. This topic deserves more treatment, and will be the topic of a future post.

Guns and Violence

Just days before the Virginia Tech massacre, my son's high school English class viewed two videos about the Columbine school schooting. One delved into the actual motivations of the kids who committed the acts of murderous rage, and the other was Michael Moore's Waiting for Columbine. My son identified with the first documentary, saying (and I'm of course translating here from the original teenagerese) that he understood the pain of peer rejection. We agreed that was hardly an excuse to go killing people, but he pointed out that if someone were intent on killing, there's not much that can be done about it. Anyone with a library card can learn how to destroy.

Michael Moore's shlockumentary, on the other hand, he found ludicrous. He took Moore's point to be that if K-Mart had not sold the bullets the Columbine killers had used, they would not have been able to kill. Getting the bullets taken off the shelves would solve the whole problem, he thought Moore to be saying. Knowing as he did the amount of time and thought the Columbine killers put into their rampage, not having those bullets would not have held them back. Guns were their plan B. Plan A was homemade explosives, which failed. Without the bullets, even assuming they couldn't find any anywhere beside K-Mart, they would have come up with some other plan B.

The Columbine rampage didn't happen because bullets were available. It happened because humans ostracize those who are different, and we live in the time of leverage from which there is no return. The bullets were available because we live in a dangerous world, not the other way around.

Now gun control advocates are playing this VaTech massacre for all it's worth, saying that it was caused by the availability of guns. No, it was caused by a lack of guns in the hands of the victims.

Massacres are a result of gun control, not a reason for more of it.

I could go on listing examples in which liberals conflate cause and side effect, such as Global Warming (is the world getting warmer because of the CO2 in the air, or is there more CO2 in the air because the world is getting warmer?), or social justice (to a liberal, life is only fair if the outcome is fair; the conditions are judged by the outcome). However, I'm not really happy with this post, and though I am fairly happy with all of the points made, am not sure I've made my overall case.

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The Maximum Wage

We in this Enlightened nation formerly marched together in a more familiar cadence. We believed that a free man needed for happiness only his God, his family, and the chance to profit by his own skill at the task to which he turned his hand. The chance to succeed and distinguish oneself, and not to protection from failure, was the thing. But in our distress that anyone should crawl, we now behave as if none should soar. In the ratcheting upward of the Minimum Wage, we see the machinery of rewarded un-achievement, and an artificial limit placed on the ability to succeed. For a certain group of people whose wages it affects, the Minimum is actually a Maximum.

Not everyone in that younger nation accepted the notion of Liberality, of course, but it came to so dominate our thinking that our government performed acts of magnanimity, such as in giving away vast tracts of land to those who would but keep a mule employed thereon. Liberality resulted in Emancipation. Liberality clearly underlies traditional American beliefs in capitalism, that a poor man can earn great wealth, or at least can provide that opportunity to his children, if only given the chance. Liberality springs from the underlying assumption of mobility: if a man can improve his own lot, then our not allowing him to improve shames us. Doing it for him shames him.

All of this, along with urbanization and modernization between 1830 and 1930, formed the backdrop of the Great Depression. Agricultural inefficiency, a stock market bubble, the stirrings of globalization were its start; protectionist economics several years of hot, dry weather kept it going. Times were hard.

Franklin D. Roosevelt came into power in 1932, and to spur the economy took Hoover's use of government programs to a new level. But in responding to poor working conditions, and the populist economics of the time, Roosevelt and his Northern trade unions wanted a national minimum wage, as a way to levy a tariff on goods from the South:

During the 1920s and 30s, the American textile industry had begun to shift from New England to the South, where the cost of living was lower and where Southern workers produced a high quality product for lower wages. Politicians in Massachusetts, led by Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. and House leader Joseph Martin, battled in Congress for a law that would force Southern textile mills to raise wages and thereby lose their competitive edge.

Sometime between the passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 and LBJ's Great Society, the idea of Liberality morphed into something else entirely, losing the prospect of shame, both for the denial of necessary assistance and acceptance of unneeded aid. Caused perhaps by an internally contradictory picture of human nature, or with the cancerous assistance of Marx and Engels, Liberality came not to mean trusting men to do right when treated rightly, but forcing men to give out of assumption of their wicked illiberality.

Modern "liberal" rhetoric is that fulfilment requires economic equality, which is to say equality of outcome rather than of opportunity. Noting quite rightly that it is easier to become wealthy when one is economically well off, they reason that opportunity is not equal unless means are equal. They then use that corruption to assert that equality must start with taking the "excess" from one to supply the "needs" of the other, with both excess and need redefined as circumstances dictate. If, or rather since, the process of enforced equalization fails to make men equal, rather than question the assumption that it can or even should work, they discover new ways in which men's means differ and demand that they must not.

It's right there in the Constitution, isn't it? Life, Liberty, and Equal Property. Wait, that's not quite it. "Pursuit of Property". Same thing, right?

No. Humans are satisfied only with what they somehow have earned. To paraphrase Pascal, a man will spend an afternoon in the woods chasing something that he would not accept as a gift. An athlete will train for years in pursuit of a medal he would not purchase. The overcoming of life's obstacles, like the pursuit of a clever prey, is the thing; the earning of the prize, and not the prize itself, is the victory.

It is difficult to see, then, how earning a living is less important than earning a prize. There is a striking difference in outlook between someone who just barely makes a living at work, and someone else who subsists through government largess. That difference is the key to understanding why the Pursuit of Property, and not the Property itself nor some other Pursuit, was given precious ink in our Constitution.

So while the government deeded to homesteaders vast areas of land so recently purchased from the indigenous inhabitants with the blood of soldiers, the land itself was not the prize. It was worth very little without improvement, but with risk, time, and work it could be improved, if only with a shack in which to live, and a bale to feed that mule.

Now comes the government to say that employers are not paying their workers enough. The minimum wage will be set higher than the employers were otherwise willing to pay. But they still will need workers, so with a combination of layoffs, price increases, taking less profit, and cost-cutting, employers will adjust. But one thing they will probably not do is to pay any more than the minimum. Until inflation eases the pain of the current minimum (and incidentally erases the gain for the workers in this tail-chasing game), the Minimum Wage will be the Maximum Wage many can expect to get.

The process reinforces the notion that low-skilled workers can only achieve a higher wage by government fiat. Not only will employers not be able to afford to give raises, but politicians will be taking credit for giving raises without regard to merit. Everyone gets a raise, whether they can keep a mule employed or not; since everyone is chasing the hare, we must give them all a rabbit. Giving people what they have not earned has not worked yet, so we must do it some more.

And the burnt fool's bandaged fingers go wobbling back to the fire.

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