Fairness

If you have been reading these, thanks, but today I want to continue more or less where I left off yesterday.

Jobs that used to be available to "working class" Americans have been disappearing.  To a certain extent this is because they have moved overseas as economic reality forces the management to reduce production costs.  Those who want to bring those jobs back and restore America to what it once was could only achieve that by effectively taxing consumers with increased costs and giving that money to the working class, or hidden welfare.  This wouldn't be the only example of this, we subsidize farmers and prop up food prices and of course we already provide tax breaks to many industries to promote jobs.

Whether these policies are good or bad is probably a whole different discussion.  The topic today is fairness and the fact that capitalists have made the most from this movement of jobs is viewed as unfair by many who want them to bring the jobs back.  To do this they demand the Government intervene even while decrying big Government.  They argue this movement of jobs has been unfair to them, since they did what they were told they needed to do, finish high school, serve in the military, work hard, raise a family, and find themselves on the short end of the stick.  Of course they also defend rugged individualism while failing to be those rugged individuals themselves, failing to prepare themselves for this future.

I would also like to point out that the loss of jobs is also related to improved technology, not just movement.  Even had all the manufacturing stayed in this country there would be less jobs and those jobs would require a higher skill level.  It is fairly common that companies have trouble filling the jobs they do have because the available applicants lack the right skills.

Once again viewed as unfair by many.  There may actually be a point to be made there since the productivity gains primarily benefited the owners and managers and not the displaced workers. Its a bit ironic that the only organizations likely to argue for workers sharing in these gains are unions which have become less and less popular since they are viewed as causing job loses by driving up costs.  This leaves the working class more unrepresented and resentful because, well, it just isn't fair.

Capitalism by its nature is fair but cruel.  Similar to nature, the strong survive and the weak perish.  While it might be unfair to get a head start because your parents were successful, its in the long run simply a predictable outcome.  If we want to level the playing field we have to adopt policies that are social in nature, like free education, health care, unemployment insurance, etc. etc.  Everyone accepts the idea that we provide public education through high school which at one time was enough, but were not ready to do the same for college.  This of course requires Government intervention and we have a large group of people convinced that Government intervention is always a bad thing.  Of course the people who benefit from that happen to be the people who already have the money and don't want to share it.

You have to give them credit for the scam.  Big Government has made us move your jobs overseas by signing trade deals.  Therefore big Government is bad and look they give things to undeserving people and make deserving people pay taxes.  Reduce Government interference, let us run our businesses and everything will get better.  PT Barnum would be proud.