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Politics : Mainstream Politics and Economics -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Brumar89 who wrote (478)	9/2/2011 12:27:26 PM
From: cnyndwllr	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 85487

Brumar, everything you said made sense. BUT you're leaving out a couple of important considerations. Would you agree that there is not enough demand in the economy now to create full employment? If that's the case then let's say we have a world with 1,000 workers and only 900 jobs. I know that's simplistic and that you could cherry pick it but in a real sense that's what we have...too few jobs for the number of people who need to work. Now the 100 people can hope that there's turnover and that they can get one of the jobs that open up. That doesn't, however, create less people that are out of work, it only changes the names of those not working. And who is it that has a chance for those jobs? That's where the genetic lottery comes in. If you are socially adept, attractive, have native intelligence, have learned manners, are confident, have a similar background to the persons doing the hiring, etc., then you have a shot at one of the few jobs out there. But what if you're socially awkward, physically unattractive, have low intelligence, have never learned to speak properly or conduct yourself well, lack confidence and come from a different background from those doing the hiring? In other words, what if the fact is that on every job interview you're going to be at the bottom of the list of preferred applicants and not even be seriously considered for a hire? You will not get a job. What can that person do about that? Try harder? Scrimp and save? Pray? ...Hope to hit the lottery might be your best shot. And it's not going to get better for the genetically challenged. Mechanisation is taking more and more strong back jobs away. Machines don't make mistakes, pay for themselves quickly, show up for work every day and don't need health insurance, payroll taxes or sick leave. Multinational corporation's management and boards of directors, in general, are much more concerned with squeezing every dollar of profit than they are with supporting American workers and they're outsourcing labor wherever they can. What that means is that there will be a demand for those of us with special intellect and talents but for the rest of us there will be less and less of the pie to share. It's not a problem that can be resolved with Obama's "educate the work force" initiative. Education will help but for those who are at the bottom quartile of the bell curve, you can't teach intellectual acumen. Let's face the fact that in our productive, machine aided society we no longer need the production of the least productive among us. We can feed, clothe, shelter, etc. everyone with the labor of probably half of the work force. But pure capitalism will not provide a living wage income for those whose labor has been displaced by machines or subsistence foreign labor living on a few dollars a day. So what do we do for those who can't make it in today's economy? All of the "If I was in their shoes I'd ...." won't help them because if they had your talents and intellect many of them would be in your shoes instead of theirs. The free market simply doesn't need them so that leaves either make work, government run programs, a new economy of some sort that once again requires substantial unskilled and semi-skilled labor, an expansion of the welfare state, or doing nothing which will create what Bread OTW refers to as an "ISM." Faced with no good choices, our society will, one day, have to choose among the best of the bad choices that reality offers. Ed