View 269 August 3 - 9, 2003 (original) (raw)
Tuesday, August 5, 2003
Hard at work on the column. The Gods of the Copybook Headings yesterday reminded a reader that we have here The Old Issue, and it's still very relevant. Any good citizen of the Republic ought to read this every now and then for the health of the soul...
Working Class and Proletarians
In private mail I have been in a long and perhaps enlightening discussion on tariff and what's wrong with a system that reduces large parts of the population to proletarian status; and discovered that "proletarian" is now used in a strange sense, "working class," and apparently it's all right to have such a class.
Well, "working class" is fine: I'd be very happy to have a large working class, and in fact that's why I favor some kind of protection for manufacturing jobs. We have lost 5 million such in the past decade or so.
Manufacturing jobs are precisely what we need: not only is the output hard goods, things and not paper and the stuff dreams and bubbles are made of, but the work is something that those skilled with their hands but not intellectuals can do. Half the nation is below average in intelligence. Yes, I know, that is a truism, but it is true, and that fact has implications.
It has long been known that real wealth is not possession of things, but the ability to make them. We are busily developing that ability -- in China.
Our free trade system causes us to lose skilled labor jobs because of price, requiring our workers to go into intellectual activities: but then we have set it up so that they compete with the intellectually skilled unemployed overseas. The result is that Earthlink tech support is now conducted from Bombay, which reduces costs, but isn't precisely good news for the experienced tech support people they had in Pasadena.
First we lose the manufacturing jobs. Then we lose the intellectual jobs that were to replace them.
Some of this came home to me when I took the train home from San Diego Friday night: the train takes me to Union Station where the Red Line LA Subway connects to take me to Universal City. At the Universal City station I can get a Metro bus to Studio City: the whole trip from Union Station to my house including a three block walk takes less than an hour. I got to Universal City about 11:30 at night, and there saw an old friend I had not seen for a couple of years. I recalled missing him at Niven's parties.
He's been out of work for three years, and lives in a homeless shelter, and has been, I think, ashamed to come to the Club (and unable to pay dues, I'm sure). He was at one time a systems operator for a hospital computer system: the kind of job that's at the edge of professional, and which is vanishing. He worked hard, but he is not physically capable of manual labor. When budget cuts got him laid off he had work in tech support, but that too got exported. It was about then that he vanished, and I am ashamed to say that once he was out of sight he was out of mind.
Another old friend used to be a furniture maker. There's no work now. Note that being an independent in that business requires not only the skill to make goods, but also to market them; something an individual laid off in his fifties isn't likely to develop.
Both of these men have become proletarians: not working class, but proletarian in the old sense, people who own nothing, and have little or nothing to contribute to the state but their votes and their progeny. Now we have nothing to fear from these people; they worked most of their lives and they are even now looking for work. But now imagine a generation that has grown up without work, without the concept of work: to whom bread and circuses are the norm, a way of life. Who don't even think in terms of being useful, but rather of their entitlements. Add to that a rotten school system which strives to raise the self-esteem of those who have no achievements and little prospect of achievement or even employment: who don't grow up thinking that "a man should support his wife and children, it's the right and proper thing to do" and who aren't even a little ashamed of the notion that with a little bit of luck they, or someone, anyone else, will go out and work and start supporting you...
I think it's a formula for disaster. Telling people it's all right not to work, and it's not their fault that they're citizens but not taxpayers...
Tariff to protect working class jobs may not be the answer, but there darned well has to be some kind of answer. Forcing our citizens to compete with the brightest people in undeveloped countries may get us cheap goods, but it's hard lines on the citizens.
Now I have to work on the column. Go read The Old Issue again and think about this for me.
And here is an important story:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ wp-dyn/articles/A19083-2003Aug4.html
> Tan meanwhile argues that Lyme disease patients can't afford to wait for the science to inch its way forward. Her imagination still reels at the thought she was tested for both syphilis (after 29 years of marriage) and Lou Gehrig's disease before her doctors considered her for what the CDC terms "the leading cause of vector-borne infectious illness in the U.S."
>
> "I've never met a single person in my lifetime who had ALS, but they tested me for that before Lyme disease," Tan adds. "It's not the way the medical community should be dealing with these very real problems that people are having."
A reader points out that Lyme disease and ALS have similar rates of occurrence, and thus Ms. Tan is being unfair, and I have been unfair by using that cut quote.
I hadn't intended to be: it's still an important story, and thanks for the admonition.