Yeah, Timex likes to be annoyingly blunt, but he’s kind of on the mark here.
There will always be areas of the country that are suffering, even in a roaring economy and even with very low unemployment numbers. It’s not hard to find towns or counties that have been hit hard by a closure, a fading fad, a played-out resource, or simple bad luck. The suffering in those places is very real, but it has to be balanced by looking at the job opportunities in the next town over.
It’s fine to feel bad for the people affected and even better to offer them some assistance in moving, retraining, retooling etc.
But compassion and understanding will only go so far. If you’re living in a town that depended on a mine and that mine is played-out, you’ve got to accept the fact and adapt or move. If you made lots of money farming tobacco, but that crop is worth less nowadays, you need to switch crops or find a new business.
These people are lamenting the closing of the horse carriage plant. They need to be looking for a job at the car plant or maybe in the tire factory instead of waiting for horses to come back in vogue, because the world moves on and we’re not going back just to make them comfortable.
Or, in this case, the coal mines increased production over 2.5 times in the last 50 years, but only needed about 40% of the people to do it.
We would need to more than double coal production (and given the Idaho basin productivity its more like 3-4x) per year just to get employment to where it was in 1960.
Not at all… They should be offered assistance to move on. We did this.
But if they are offered assistance and refuse it, then yeah, they are screwed.
Lying to them and saying that we are going to magically turn back the clock and make it how it used to be isn’t helpful. It might make them feel better, temporarily, but it won’t actually help them.
Fairly interesting interview with Charlie Sykes on Vox. I am not a fan of Sykes / Krystal / etc. and yet the interview IMO shows a potentially sane path forward for at least a splinter of the current US right. On the other hand, the interview doesn’t really offer anything that I would call a true solution to our current woes, just a lessening of the plunge off the cliff.
Sykes is pretty up front about one thing: it’s not clear that there’s any market for this type of Never Trump media or that his new website can succeed at all. I’ve been pretty skeptical about the viability of Never Trumpism so I guess this new website (which I will not link) is a good test case.
Why do people assume Adam Smith would have been a pro-rich capitalist? He described things like specialization of labor and market forces. I do not ever recalling him writing about the mega-wealthy and such.
Writing about supply and demand as market forces doesn’t mean he was a libertarian.
I’ve got a paperback copy of Wealth of Nations on my bookshelf. It’s over 1200 pages long, not counting the Index and Appendix. 1200 pages of economics: who has actually read it?
Well the same group likes to claim they’ve read the Bible too. I imagine they’ve skimmed that one as well, like over all the parts where it tells them not to do what they’re doing.
Quick summary - Munger is saying that government will be used as a way to maximize profits and power by those who can do so. The idea of “crony capitalism” is one expression of this: the government actors get power, the private actors get profits. The current rise of progressive politics (i.e. Green New Deal) is in part a backlash against this. There follows a long discussion about the breakdown of moral fiber in society - Roberts argues that society as a whole used to hold accountable those who acted this way, and that would be a better response than socialist policies.
I’m not sure I buy the “moral breakdown” part of this, and I certainly don’t see how we can rely on society at large to hold bad actors accountable. (If we could, it would be happening already.) But the discussion is excellent, and I recommend giving it a listen if you have the time.
