Category Archives: Labor

UPDATED: Big , Bad Business Generates The Jobs

The Economist: “It is true that small companies create jobs, especially when they are first born. And small companies destroy millions of jobs when they die—which is often. In fact, only a small fraction of smaller enterprises are capable of generating sustained growth of very many jobs. Yet lawmakers of both parties fall over themselves as the protectors of small business, creating programmes that often help big corporations (and wealthy hedge-fund managers) as much or more than favoured smaller enterprises.”

The Economist’s statement, being the Economist, is somewhat incoherent, at least in its tenor. The writer editorializing, being of the Left, wants the politicians to help small business, even though his facts tell him the returns on such assistance are minimal and that small business is not necessarily the engine of economic growth.

Of course, contra the SE Cupp cool model of “capitalism,” helping big business is as capitalistically crony as helping the smaller concerns.

UPDATE: To Robert G.: Yes, indeed, and WHAT IS AN OPEN ECONOMY?

“The voluntary free market is a sacred extension of life itself. The free market—it has not been unfettered for a very long time—is really a spontaneously synchronized order comprising trillions upon trillions of voluntary acts that individuals perform in order to make a living. Introduce government force and coercion into this rhythm and you get life-threatening arrhythmia. Under increasing state control, this marketplace – this magic, organic agora – starts to splutter, and people suffer.”—ILANA (April 23, 2010)

True too is that Big Biz was once small biz.

Goose-Stepping Stupid

Bush, Debt, Economy, Labor, Media

My favorite analogy in describing the random, rudderless veering of the political and economic “minds” that bedevil us on the idiot’s lantern is Brownian motion—microscopic particles (the minds in question) in motion, suspended in gas. Peter Schiff likens the flurry to a “flock of pigeons that stays in tight formation, flies feverishly, while refusing to stick to any particular direction for very long”:

“Today’s weak GDP numbers have finally caused the mass of economists to revise downward their formerly optimistic recovery forecasts, with many finally entertaining the possibility of a ‘double dip’ recession. It should be obvious by now that these economists only have the capacity to describe where the economy is moving in the short-term…they have no ability to explain the reasons behind the macro trends or make predictions that go beyond the next data release. But economics is not dart throwing. It can be understood and properly forecast.

The major mental block is that most economists believe that an economy grows as a result of spending. Any policy that encourages spending and discourages savings and investment is considered beneficial. Unfortunately, these policies, which only succeed in growing debt and government, act more as an economic sedative than a stimulant.”

[SNIP]

What do you know, the geese described above have news: it’s all good. TIME magazine wants you to know: Rising unemployment is good.

The Department of Labor reported August job numbers on Friday, and the numbers appeared to be another bad sign for the recovery. The economy lost 54,000 positions in the last full month of summer. Worse, the unemployment rate rose for the first time in four months to 9.6%, from a rate of 9.5% the month before.
So is this jobs report the latest sign that we are headed for a double dip? Probably not. Actually it’s the opposite. Despite what it looks like, today’s jobs numbers are good news for the economy. Mark Zandi, a closely watched economist, had this to say on CNBC when the job report was announced, “It solidifies the idea the economic recovery is going to remain intact.”

For a moment I was worried (actually, I began to worry—and warned of hyperinflation—in 2003, when “W” began the deficit spending in earnest).

The fig leaf of a “jobless recovery” is being used a bit less, but substitutes are coming fast and furious.

Desperately Seeking Ebonics Experts

Government, Labor, Law, Multiculturalism, Pop-Culture, Race, Racism

It sounds like OUR Myron Pauli, the relative of THAT Wolfgang Pauli (Nobel Prize for Physics, 1945) has had enough of his current position, and the type of federales that come with the job. I got wind (via another very smart man, R. J. Stove) about a job opening with the feds. This is Myron’s opportunity to push boundaries.

As far as Rob could make out, this is serious (i.e. not an ONION satire):

Justice Department Seeks Ebonics Experts.

“Move over Ali G.,” says Rob.

In all seriousness, an Eminem-type federal employee should push this envelope hard and insist that, as an adaptable honky who has mastered the future lingua franca, he ought to have access to this job with all its benefits and fun (talking in tongues? ‘Cmon). The feds can’t discriminate based on race. The job should be open to whites with flare and improvisational abilities (at least that should be the pitch on the resumé).

‘Diversity and the Myth of White Privilege’

Affirmative Action, Education, History, Labor, Race, Racism

JAMES WEBB is a good guy. So I’ve said for some time—ever since my correspondence with him during the dark days of the Iraq war, when I was THE ONLY antiwar writer on WND, and was cursed and threatened daily for it. Webb, of course, opposed the war. We exchanged friendly emails, which he initiated pursuant to one of many anti-war-on-Iraq columns I had written.

Citing Pat Buchanan, this courageous man has now come out against “government programs to help all ‘people of color'” as “unfair.” Writing in the Wall Street Journal today, Webb argues as follows:

“After a full generation of such debate, WASP elites have fallen by the wayside and a plethora of government-enforced diversity policies have marginalized many white workers. The time has come to cease the false arguments and allow every American the benefit of a fair chance at the future.

Unfortunately, present-day diversity programs work against that notion, having expanded so far beyond their original purpose that they now favor anyone who does not happen to be white.

In an odd historical twist that all Americans see but few can understand, many programs allow recently arrived immigrants to move ahead of similarly situated whites whose families have been in the country for generations. [A point upon which I expand in my new book.] These programs have damaged racial harmony. And the more they have grown, the less they have actually helped African-Americans, the intended beneficiaries of affirmative action as it was originally conceived. …

The injustices endured by black Americans at the hands of their own government have no parallel in our history, not only during the period of slavery but also in the Jim Crow era that followed. But the extrapolation of this logic to all “people of color”—especially since 1965, when new immigration laws dramatically altered the demographic makeup of the U.S.—moved affirmative action away from remediation and toward discrimination, this time against whites.”

The clearest example of today’s misguided policies comes from examining the history of the American South. …

At the height of slavery, in 1860, less than 5% of whites in the South owned slaves. The eminent black historian John Hope Franklin wrote that “fully three-fourths of the white people in the South had neither slaves nor an immediate economic interest in the maintenance of slavery.”

The Civil War devastated the South, in human and economic terms. And from post-Civil War Reconstruction to the beginning of World War II, the region was a ravaged place, affecting black and white alike.

In 1938, President Franklin Roosevelt created a national commission to study what he termed ‘the long and ironic history of the despoiling of this truly American section.’ At that time, most industries in the South were owned by companies outside the region. Of the South’s 1.8 million sharecroppers, 1.2 million were white (a mirror of the population, which was 71% white). The illiteracy rate was five times that of the North-Central states and more than twice that of New England and the Middle Atlantic (despite the waves of European immigrants then flowing to those regions). The total endowments of all the colleges and universities in the South were less than the endowments of Harvard and Yale alone. The average schoolchild in the South had $25 a year spent on his or her education, compared to $141 for children in New York.

Generations of such deficiencies do not disappear overnight, and they affect the momentum of a culture. In 1974, a National Opinion Research Center (NORC) study of white ethnic groups showed that white Baptists nationwide averaged only 10.7 years of education, a level almost identical to blacks’ average of 10.6 years”…

MORE.