I
heard the Bill Gates interview on Morning Joe. I had always rather respected
the man for his philanthropy. He seemed to be a person who earned his money
honestly; yes, I know about some of the business dealings in cutting outers out
etc. but generally, I consider him to be a “straight shooter”. To his credit in
the interview he got into what he called the three misconceptions,
-- Poor countries are doomed to stay poor;
-- Foreign aid is a big waste;
-- Saving lives leads to overpopulation.
-- Foreign aid is a big waste;
-- Saving lives leads to overpopulation.
I agreed with that what he said about these
three things. However, he said that raising minimum wages does cause job destruction.
I tie this to a common fault rich people have about poor people, which is that they
are poor because the do not have the training they need to gain full employment;
that is seldom the reason. Perhaps, an assembly line worker in a factory, who
has been replaced by a robot, should go to school and learn how to do what a
robot does. Isn’t that the problem; isn’t it that the robot can do what the
person does because what they do does not take a great deal of skill or
training. The average IQ is around 100 with a range from 76 to 124, which includes
95% of people. There are people who need to eat and feed families who range
from the middle to the low end of that range—half the people in the world. These
people cannot and do not expect to earn $500,000 a year, the take one earnings of
a cardiologist. All people who work need a living hourly wage for a forty-hour workweek.
Equally, it is unfair to treat a young person who is entering the work force
while going to college to pay him or her at a rate that is less than a living
wage using their age as an excuse to do so.
Gates got into philanthropy as well but in my estimation, he
missed a major point; no amount of philanthropy
can forgive the way some people earn their money. For example, the
president of McDonalds, who preceded Jeff Stratton, the current president, took
home $2.15 million a year for a couple of years. This corporation pays its works minimum wage. Should we consider her
a great person for giving money to charity, if she does—I have no idea if she
does or does not give money. However, I look at history and see some of the
names listed as being the greatest among philanthropist and see Cornelius
Vanderbilt and John Rockefeller, for examples. Vanderbilt mercilessly destroyed
competition by underselling services until he “starved out” the competition and
then increased his rates for services above what they were before to pay for
what he considered his losses. Rockefeller destroyed many small oil producers in
western Pennsylvania with exorbitant freight rates he controlled. People may consider
these two philanthropists great people but I do not. Any executive of a corporation
that pays minimum wage is not a hero.
URL: firetreepub.blogspot.com Comments Invited and not moderated
I'm old enough to have written programs for the first PC operating system that was named CP/M (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CP/M). This pre-dated MS DOS. "Gary Kildall originally developed CP/M during 1973-74". Meanwhile a programmer Tim Paterson had developed a variant of CP/M-80 and according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOS, that variant was purchased by Microsoft to become IBM's PC operating system named MS-DOS. My experience with CP/M and MS-DOS was that they were pretty much identical. They both took the exact same register values in the exact same DOS calls. So often I hear that Bill Gates was some sort of self made man. My thinking is that, like other robber barons you mentioned, he simply extracted the value in other people's efforts to garner his personal wealth. That is the way of our capitalistic system. It just annoys me whenever I hear high praise for people I consider to be greedy distrustful exploiters.
ReplyDeleteBut about philanthropy by billionaires, I can't see this as anything other than their use of a common financial instrument to bolster the retained wealth from their gross incomes. If not for that greedy aspect, I expect there would not be any philanthrophy by those who hoard the vast majority of our nations wealth. People who hoard wealth are the same as people who hoard any object, compulsive, insecure, and generally in need of intervention. In talking about wealth distribution it is important to separate that from the general perception of personal wealth. This nation is blessed to be a very wealthy one, based on our nation's natural resources and talented labor. Despite this nation's great wealth, the plight for the majority of citizens is to see a decline "race to the bottom" while the most wealthy see an exponential increase in their share of the nation's wealth. Wealth distribution needs to be considered appallingly one sided... to the most rich. This is our national trend. The numbers are there to support that the moneyed people will continue to rack up the dollars and resentfully prevent the balance of the nation from having more than one serving of porridge. How kind of them to allow a crumb to fall from their golden plates. They should surely pay less on their taxes for that generosity.
Ranting? Well, just saying... after all you again got me started.
Your knowledge about programming and computers is so far beyond anything I know including Gate’s history. What I do know about wealth distribution is that it should be done in only two ways; one is by salaries and the other is through taxes. The power to tax is the power to destroy being carful not to destroy private agricultural legacies; have you ever heard of a 100% tax on both corporate and personal income levels above a certain amount?
DeleteSpeaking of McDonald's and robots, they are considering replacing many of their workers with automated, touch-screen ordering units. The technology is there, but they haven't done it. Why? Because labor is cheaper...for now. If you raise the minimum wage, the technology will eventually be cheaper than human beings - and a lot of those minimum wage people are going to find out that the real minimum wage is zero.
ReplyDeleteIt never ceases to amaze me that you on the Left have such a hard time grasping the fact that businesses are in business to make money. They are in no way philanthropic organizations.
Contrary to what you wrote, there are very, very few people working at McDonald's while putting themselves through college. If the number were 1%, I'd be surprised. It is a strawman argument. As is your contention that robots necessarily lower the number of jobs available.Somebody has to build those robots, somebody has to program those robots, somebody has to maintain those robots, and somebody has to fix those robots...and all of those jobs are better-paid than the people who were originally doing the job that the robots are now doing - provided that the people are educated.
And, therein, lies the problem: Our educational system isn't educating our populace. From elementary school to college, it is a Leftist propaganda machine, controlled by Leftist unions, Leftist administrators and Leftist teachers.
Our "Educators" are too busy "teaching" anti-bullying, global warming/climate change, tolerance and all of the rest of the left-wing agenda to teach our children the skills that they need to be productive citizens in our society. And, of course, our global ranking in education plummets, as it has for the past 30 years since the Department of Education was created and the Federal Government took over the education of our children.
But, of course, that is what always happens when Leftists/Socialists/Communists take over: the ideology becomes more important than the results. And the people (or "workers", if you will) live in squalor. China, Cuba, Cambodia, The Soviet Union...it ALWAYS results in poverty for the 99%, and exquisite luxury for the 1% (ironic, huh?). Not to mention the mass-murder that also ALWAYS accompanies any Leftist/Marxist revolution.
I have an honest question for you that has never been answered: how can you possibly watch EVERY government program fail miserably and, yet, advocate for more of them? Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, The New Deal, The Great Society and, now, Obamacare...not one of them works. They have all failed. They have bankrupted this country. My grandchildren's children will never be able to be able to pay off the hundred's-of-trillions of dollars of debt that your policies have thrown on their shoulders.
Actually, I know the answer. I guess that I'd like to know whether you admit it to yourself.
Gramsci.
Cloward-Piven.
Alinsky.
Marx said that you had to destroy the societal structure before you could institute Communism. The above-referenced people are doing just that.
I am just really curious as to whether you consciously understand what you're doing, or are just mindlessly following the collective mentality of the Leftist hive.
Read Hayek. Understand Hayek.
Although you comments are all interesting and well thought out, this was one of your best comments so far. Keep it up. We can have a fun time with our verbal exchanges.
DeleteSadly, your analysis is correct as far as it goes. A true minimum wages with no job is zero. I think all bleeding heart liberals like me grasp the idea that business is there to make money. What we question is how that task is accomplished and when is the profit to high; case in point, the two cited successful business cited in the post; Rockefeller and Vanderbilt.
I would like to see the data reference for the statement that very few people working at McDonalds are college students. Everyone knows including me from personal experience that almost every college student has a minimum wage job—if not McDonalds then somewhere.
By the way, the kinds of people who work at McDonalds are not the kinds of people who design, build, and program robots. By the way, what would be your answer as to why industry uses robots if they do not eliminate jobs?
Finally, we get to Glen Beck style of political argument, not Hayek or Rand but good old Glenn Beck, who is still fighting the Bolsheviks. The reason for the Department of Education is to take education out of the control of the hands of extreme school boards like those who won the Scope Trial in 1925, and teach that deny climate change is not real but rather based on economic impact on air polluting industries. Public schools teach children the skills they need to function in society such as reading, writing and how democracy is suppose to work. I think public schools are doing a good job in spite of the reluctance people to pay taxes to support them—which gets into the private education argument.
If people we can vote in or out of office don’t control education, who will? I like it the way it is. I belong to a Google discussion group, Education Revolution, where young enthusiastic teachers are talking about innovation in education such as on-line course structure and content. I detect no evidence of a “Leftists/Socialists/Communists” take over. By the way, the Republican governors have destroyed public service unions (teachers unions) so they can control nothing.
About costly government program, Social Security is self-sustaining, and Obamacare actually cuts the budget deficit. Pre Social Security the level of poverty among old people was 44% and dropped to near zero but is now climbing again due to Reagan top down economics—every one knows income disparity is not only abhorrent but getting worse and old people are becoming impoverished again. In addition, I see and end to bankruptcy due to catastrophic health events and an end to junk health insurance policies because of Obamacare. I think the Great Society was a booming success until the radical right wing Supreme Court started to tear it apart and allowed voter suppression.
I am curious; do you see anything between communism, which everyone knows was a failure, and vulture capitalism? Do you realize what is actually happening to our national budget? It is true that we have yet to pay back the money we borrowed for the Bush war machine.
I, as a socialist-capitalist, want more government programs that help the people—don’t you or do you want to live like a hermit, a Rand Paul, in a metropolitan area?
John H:
ReplyDeleteyou might enjoy listening to this lecture by Haidt.
http://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_haidt_on_the_moral_mind.html
It is something that makes Conservatives look good then read my comment.