josephdunphy

I've only skimmed it, so I'll refrain from giving this one a thumbs up or a thumbs down at this point, but having skimmed it, I didn't find myself positively impressed. This is the sort of site that will talk about America's need for an industrial strategy - OK, fine - but when the time comes to say what that strategy might be, one finds a call to have the government build a lot of factories in which more of us can get to work on the assembly line, regardless of whether or not we prepared for any other line of work, and to make sure that the factory workers get payed megabucks, because while apparently one isn't supposed to question the proposition that the Market knows best when it comes to where professional jobs are to end up, it apparently doesn't know a thing when the time comes to decide what a factory worker's pay should be. Pure pic 'n mix, with the reader called on to overlook the inconsistencies.

I'll come back later to see if I missed something, but so far, this is reading like standard New Left ideology from the 60s, much rhetoric with little substance, with one important difference. The New Left of that era was open about the fact that it believed in "levelling" - dragging everybody down into a world in which everybody would work hard even though hard work wouldn't matter, because no matter how hard and how well one worked, one wouldn't be able to change one's station in life. Now, one must read between the lines a little, but that same bad idea is there, as if the failures of communism hadn't taught everybody a few lessons about the dangers of removing the idea of incentive from an economic system, lessons that now seem to be lost on liberals and conservatives alike, neither seeming to see anything odd in the belief that people will put decades of real sweat into training for and/or working at careers that might evaporate at a moment's notice with the slightest fluctuation in the currency exchange rates, and never ask themselves what good all of that "dues paying" will do them, should that happen. This is why so many of us tune out on politics - neither of these factions really listens to anybody, not even to themselves.