Death by a Thousand Cuts Is Still a Death
Wow, I just threw up my last post on French rioters and began to partake of bloggy richness elsewhere only to find Barbara Ehrenreich defending the French rioters. I will destroy her argument later on, but I just had to laugh at the last sentence of the opening paragraph:
"Throughout the month of March and beyond, they were demonstrating, rioting, and burning up cars to preserve a right Americans can only dream of: the right not to be fired at an employer’s whim."
Ah yes, those cruelly whimsical American employers, of which there seem to be, as of today, enough of to employ 95.3% of us. First I think that Ehrenreich completely whiffs on sizing up the dreams and desires of Americans. I think most Americans want a better job - be it better paying, more challenging, offering more flexibility, less physically demanding, whatever - rather than a guarantee to their current one. That is a characteristically American trait, not least of all simply because it's achievable (see here), but also because Americans inherently know that there are no guarantees in life and thus pursuing them is a pointless endeavor. Americans understand risk and reward, that less of former means less of the later.
The truth is that while close to 25% of French youth can't find a job, American employers can't find enough qualified workers (see here). Putatively evil corporations are throwing money, perqs and policy/environment changes at employees like mad in desperate attempts to keep people from leaving. That is the natural state of things if the economy is allowed to grow unhindered by the shackles of restrictive and punative policy. Ehrenreich and her ilk are not simply risk averse, presenting to Americans merely a different spot on the risk/reward continuum. They are irredeemably collectivist. They are the heirs of Karl Marx and Upton Sinclair and we know where their ideas lead. They lead to declining life expectancies. It is just a matter of degree and rate. We aren't at risk for a Mugabe-style descent into human despair, but a thousand little Ehrenreichian policy proscriptions over time would not be too far afield in its effect upon the direction of our social welfare. Whereas it is inexorably climbing, it would stop and then begin declining.
"Throughout the month of March and beyond, they were demonstrating, rioting, and burning up cars to preserve a right Americans can only dream of: the right not to be fired at an employer’s whim."
Ah yes, those cruelly whimsical American employers, of which there seem to be, as of today, enough of to employ 95.3% of us. First I think that Ehrenreich completely whiffs on sizing up the dreams and desires of Americans. I think most Americans want a better job - be it better paying, more challenging, offering more flexibility, less physically demanding, whatever - rather than a guarantee to their current one. That is a characteristically American trait, not least of all simply because it's achievable (see here), but also because Americans inherently know that there are no guarantees in life and thus pursuing them is a pointless endeavor. Americans understand risk and reward, that less of former means less of the later.
The truth is that while close to 25% of French youth can't find a job, American employers can't find enough qualified workers (see here). Putatively evil corporations are throwing money, perqs and policy/environment changes at employees like mad in desperate attempts to keep people from leaving. That is the natural state of things if the economy is allowed to grow unhindered by the shackles of restrictive and punative policy. Ehrenreich and her ilk are not simply risk averse, presenting to Americans merely a different spot on the risk/reward continuum. They are irredeemably collectivist. They are the heirs of Karl Marx and Upton Sinclair and we know where their ideas lead. They lead to declining life expectancies. It is just a matter of degree and rate. We aren't at risk for a Mugabe-style descent into human despair, but a thousand little Ehrenreichian policy proscriptions over time would not be too far afield in its effect upon the direction of our social welfare. Whereas it is inexorably climbing, it would stop and then begin declining.
posted by Donny Baseball at 10:11 AM
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