THOUGHT
FOR THE DAY
"Simplistic"
is the smart word to describe something you don't want to
do but cannot be bothered to think of any plausible
argument against - as in, "Putting bobbies back on
the beat is just too simplistic."
-- Ferdinand
Mount
Kevin
Michael Grace, 11.51 pm, 9 December 2005►
THOUGHT FOR THE DAY
Free Trade
is not universally a good thing. Protectionism is easily
overdone. High protective tariff shields can shield horrid
inefficiencies. But losing Detroit and Seattle and other
manufacturing centers is very dangerous in a world in
which history has not ended.
If
Fukuyama had been right and history had been over except
for consolidation of liberal democracy throughout the
world, unrestricted Free Trade would still have been bad
for America if possibly good for the world; but history is
not ended, and there will still be a need for an arsenal
of democracy.
My
suggestion is a 10% across-the-board tariff. It might make
sense to start with 15% to enable industries to start up
and retrain workers, then after a decade go to 10% and
leave it there. This would be enough to compensate for the
many higher costs of domestic manufacture: EPA, OSHA,
worker's compensation, unemployment insurance, minimum
wages and the other measures we have taken to price
ourselves out of the world market but not so high as to
encourage the horrible inefficiencies we had at one time.
The
alternative is continued automation. The cost of
automation is to sharpen the differences between the
educated classes and the skilled classes. This is not Lake
Woebegon. Half of our people are below average. Ruthless
world competition through unrestricted Free Trade pits our
below-average workers against the above-average workers of
China and Taiwan and Singapore and Indonesia. The result
is predictable: more automation and less employment of our
below average, possibly more employment of the higher end
of the Bell Curve here as constructors of the automated
regime but a definite increase in unemployment of the
below-average workers here.
Aristotle
defined democracy as rule of the middle class, and the
middle class was defined as "those who possess the
goods of fortune in moderation." That hasn't much
changed. America used to be a place where large numbers of
those on the left side of the Bell Curve could, by
learning skills (as opposed to intellectual symbol
manipulation capabilities) become part of the middle
class. That is increasingly less so. In part this is due
to the collapse of the school system, but unrestricted
Free Trade adds to this.
Our
education system is geared to "college
preparation," which in effect means ruthless
competition but little for the half -- half -- half -- of
the population intellectually below average. The left side
of the Bell Curve is not "stupid," nor are those
people useless or condemned to be "burger
flippers." They are more likely to profit from
learning skills than receiving a college prep education.
They can then compete: indeed it wasn't all that long ago
that skilled workers earned as much or more than
"intellectuals".
But we
need the kinds of jobs that favor skills; and that, I
think, means we need to keep more non-automated
manufacturing jobs; which means not making our left side
of the Bell Curve compete with the right side worldwide.
And that, I think, more than justifies a tariff.
Yes. I
understand that unions and legislation have driven the
costs of American labor up and up. But that is part of
what it means to have a democratic society. And I
thoroughly understand that ruthless competition with a
minimum of legislative restrictions and union
protectionism makes for the most efficient economic
system; but economic efficiency is not the only goal of a
good society. There is more to the world than things.
-- Jerry
Pournelle
Kevin
Michael Grace, 9.00 pm, 7 December 2005►
THOUGHT
FOR THE DAY
The free market is a necessary
part of any stable community, and the arguments for
maintaining it as the core of economic life were
unanswerably set out by Ludwig von Mises. Hayek developed
the arguments further, in order to offer a general defence
of "spontaneous order," as the means to produce
and maintain socially necessary knowledge. As Hayek points
out, there are many varieties of spontaneous order that
exemplify the epistemic virtues that he values: the common
law is one of them, so too is ordinary morality.
The problem for conservatism is
to reconcile the many and often conflicting demands that
these various forms of life impose on us. The free-market
ideologues take one instance of spontaneous order and
erect it into a prescription for all the others. They ask
us to believe that the free exchange of commodities is the
model for all social interaction. But many of our most
important forms of life involve withdrawing what we value
from the market: sexual morality is an obvious instance,
city planning another. (America has failed abysmally in
both those respects, of course.)
Looked at from the
anthropological point of view religion can be seen as an
elaborate (and spontaneous) way in which communities
remove what is most precious to them (ie, all that
concerns the creation and reproduction of community) from
the erosion of the market. A cultural conservative, such
as I am, supports that enterprise. I would put the point
in terms that echo Burke and Chesterton: the free market
provides the optimal solution to the competition among the
living for scarce resources; but when applied to the goods
in which the dead and the unborn have an interest (sex,
for instance) it wastes what must be saved.
-- Roger
Scruton
Kevin
Michael Grace, 10.11 am, 5 December 2005►
THOUGHT
FOR THE DAY (SPECIAL GUEST DEEP THOUGHTS EDITION)
Hi! I'm
Kevin’s cousin Deborah, and he can’t post a quote
today because he’s on vacation in Bimini, Rimini, Nizhny
Novgorod, Kathmandu and Ulaanbaatar.
The amount
of women in London who flirt with their own husbands is
perfectly scandalous. It looks so bad. It in simply
washing one's clean linen in public.
-- Oscar Wilde, The Importance Of Being Earnest,
seen in The (Tierra del Fuego) Times, in
Tierra del Fuego
Kevin
Michael Grace, 7.09 pm, 4 December 2005►
THOUGHT
FOR THE DAY
We now live in a predominantly
Christian country that is afraid to carry Christian images
on its Christmas cards, for fear of causing offence. Or
where someone who has traditional, honorably held, Roman
Catholic views -- pro-life, anti-gay, the importance of
the family -- is pilloried as unsuitable for public
office. That is not a tolerant, inclusive society,
celebrating diversity. It is merely replacing one kind of
intolerance with another. We have moved from the tyranny
of the majority to the tyranny of the minority.
-- "The
Vicar"
(Who
is The Vicar? This is the question asked by
most visitors to Punk's Corner at www.thevicar.com.
A few of the suggestions include Robert Fripp, Brian Eno,
Daniel Lanois, Peter Gabriel, David Sylvian, Debbie Harry,
a Hawkwind drummer, Monica Lewinsky and even Tony Blair.)
Kevin
Michael Grace, 10.44 pm, 2 December 2005►
THOUGHT
FOR THE DAY
Has an
airbag saved my life? Nah ... but I'll tell you something,
every time you have a near accident, instead of just
sighing and carrying on, you should pull over, get out of
the car and run down the street screaming, "I'm back!
I'm alive! My life has started again today!"
In fact, you should do that every time you get out of a
car. We're just riding on those things -- we're not really
in control of them.
-- Thom Yorke
Kevin
Michael Grace, 6.44 pm, 1 December 2005►
