Category: Politics (Page 4 of 4)

That headline got your attention. The Underpants Gnomes appeared in an episode of South Park. They would steal people’s underwear. The boys find out what it’s all about:

1. Steal underwear
2. ????
3. Profit

This seems to be how most companies work. I’m a big fan of capitalism. It works in practice much better than communism, but people are people. Any system can be corrupted. Capitalism is supposed to work under enlightened self-interest. Greed trumps enlightened self-interest. Greed trumps fairness. For day to day barter with your neighbors, capitalism works. What about between total strangers? It works for the most part. But what about addictive drugs?

I’m not talking about Heroin or Cocaine or even Tobacco. Well maybe I am. Don’t forget to include alcohol in the mix. I’m also going to throw prescription drugs into the mix. Most modern medications take years of studies and can be very expensive to develop. But some of them seem to be prescribed for other than it’s intended purpose. Some of it may work. But prescription drugs are like a hammer. Everything begins to look like a nail.

Anti-depressents and anti-pyschotics treat the symptoms. They don’t treat the source they don’t go after the problem. Therapy should be easier with the symptoms relieved. I get the impression that most people don’t get the therapy they need. They just pop a pill.

Profit. The drug company wants to maximize profit. So they look for other uses for their drugs. Hey if these anti-psychotic drugs are good for adults, they ought to be good for children. This may be true, but did they did do studies with the children. I don’t think you should mess with a child’s brain chemistry except under extreme circumstances. Not to sound like a Luddite, but children grew up just fine for the last 6,000 years of civilization without anti-pyschotics. Of course for most of human history, most children didn’t grow to adulthood. So let’s just choose the last century.

For the early part of the last century, children grew up just fine without anti-psychotics, anti-depressents, or anti-hyper (ADD) drugs. What about immunizations? They don’t mess with brain chemistry. Though one fraudster did attempt to cast aspersion on MMR innoculations that it caused autism. Autism is on the rise in this country. And I’ll try to address this issue.

Note – Why am I writing this essay/blog/post/entry? It’s to help me sort my thoughts out out on capitalism, marketing, drugs, autism. I suppose I could say that Greed has unintended side effects. Does Greed cause autism? I’ve written stories about the unintended consequences of new technologies. One of my childhood friends was hyperactive. One of my distant cousins is autistic. So I have some experience with these conditions.

I suppose what I’m getting at is the profit motive in the best interest of the consumer? How does he know he’s getting a fair deal. It’s all about fairness. It’s even been shown in some monkeys that the concept of fairness may be innate. They would reward some monkeys with food and others with a rock for the same task. The monkeys who got the rock were pissed and quit doing those tasks. And there is a difference between the concepts of fairness and entitlement.

Life isn’t fair, but that doesn’t mean we can’t strive to be fair. Some people have an entitlement mentality which is often confused with fairness. This is not the best example, but here goes. At a public venue like concert halls there are often long lines to the women’s toilets. They aren’t entitled to have more toilets, but it would be fair to have more toilets available to handle the traffic as quickly as the men’s toilets. OK, here’s a better example. We aren’t entitled to affordable housing, but we should have a fair housing market. We aren’t entitled to affordable prescription meds, but we should have fair pricing. Especially when some developed drugs are developed at public expense.
The consumer needs to be educated and there needs to be a level of trust between the seller and the buyer. Unfortunately, people can make a great deal of money by screwing different consumers. They have a large pool from which to draw. Profit is good. The market is pretty good at determing fair pricing, but certain commodity prices are not determined by market forces and that isn’t fair.

The most extreme example of market forces at work has to be the Irish potato famine. Other countries the Netherlands and Germany shut off food exports to stave off the worst of it. But in Ireland food was still being exported because people could pay more for it elsewhere and there were armed guards to protect the food shipments. Had Ireland done what the continental countries did the famine and exodus would have been much less severe. The next time someone tells you they want laissez-faire capitalism point to that and ask them if that’s what they mean.

Will this be yet another, bash Bush blog entry? It depends on how you look at it.

Today’s topic. Immigration. We are a nation of immigrants. Even the Indians who were here first. You might say they were colonizers. In that sense, that is true. Why is everyone up in arms over illegal immigration? The Europeans stole this country fair and square. They marginalized the original population in the most brutal manner. The Americans stole half of Mexico fair and square from the Mexicans who in turn stole it fair and square from Spain who in turn stole it from the natives.

Are we not a nation of illegal immigrants? I’ve traced a few of my ancestors. I have a French surname, but they were ethnic Germans who came to the US in the 1920’s from Romania. Before WWI it was part of Hungary. My great grandparents had five boys and five girls. The boys were all born in the same house, but in two different countries, Hungary and Romania. The girls were all born in the US of A. Maybe it was a change in the water?

The Merle’s orginally came from the Alsace-Lorraine at the end of the 18th century and were part of the Danube Schwabians who immigrated into Hungary while it was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The matrilineal line was already here. They were Cherokees and were immigrants into Oklahoma, forced out of their traditional homeland in the Carolinas. Other ancestors that I’m able to trace came from England, Ireland, Scotland, and Germany. I’m a little over 1/2 German and 1/8 Cherokee. The rest is mixed in the other 3/8.

Confused yet? What does this have to do with Bush? Well, seeing how he is President, he’s in the news alot. Lately, he’s been going on about illegal immigration, so have the Democrats, the Republicans, and the illegal immigrants. Reagan, the patron saint of the conservative movement, granted amnesty to illegal immigrants in 1986. If it was good enough for the conservatives then, why not now?

The problem is Americans are addiction to cheap labor. They are addicted to cheap oil and illegal drugs. Surprise, suprise. The solution to any problem is go to the source. Don’t go after the immigrants. Go after the people who hire them. If no one would hire them, they wouldn’t come.

Americans have always hired cheap labor. After abolishing slavery, the Irish and the Chinese were among some of the early groups to replace them. And cheap labor is what it’s all about. The biggest cost in any business is labor. Keep those costs down and you can keep your profits up.

In the dot-com era, we had the H1-B’s, high tech coolies from India, were effectively indentured servants. There was no shortage of skilled labor. There was a shortage of cheap skilled labor. When the H1-B visa cap was reduced, companies started outsource heavily.

I’ll have something to say on the economy and the belief that it is a zero-sum game, which it ain’t. I’ll also have something to say on minimum wage and health insurance too. Anyway, it’s a time honored tradition to hate immigrants. By making them illegal immigrants, we can hate the doubly so.

Here’s my two pesos on what to do. Grant amnesty, but make the clock for citizenship start today. At best a two for one for time already served with a minimum of three years. I’m not to keen on a guest worker program, because that effectively creates indentured servants. I suppose we could raise the minimum numbers allowed in, and any over that number would be given guest worker status.

Also, we need to heavily invest in Mexico’s future. If there is any country we should interfere with that would be Mexico. By working to increase the standard of living and reduce crime and corruption. Less people would desire to come to the US. But their are vested parties on both sides of the border that like the status quo. Companies want cheap labor and Mexico gets rid of their surplus population. And if the companies are going to outsource, lets outsource to Mexico. It’s a lot closer than China and India.

Unless the powers that be can create a vast permanent underclass as a pool of cheap, plentiful, and powerless labor, outsourcing and immigration will run the world out of cheap labor. Id like to see a large sustainable global middle class. We can’t do it with current American technology. It’s too wasteful, but it is possible. It’s not likely to happen, but it’s something that I can hope for.

I just watched the most appalling news story on Anderson Cooper the other night. It showed the Minutemen building a portion of fence along the Arizona border. They were sending a message to the President and Congress to help keep out illegal aliens. Remember the lesson of King Canute? If not, I’ll get back to it.

1. I remember growing up with the idea that America was a melting pot, but now a better metaphor might be more likened to a chunky stew. The Minutemen and a lot of other groups want to make it a bean and ham soup, made with white navy beans and surrounded by a thirty foot fence.

2. What is so amazingly wrongheaded about the fence is this. If people and companies wouldn’t hire the illegals they wouldn’t come. If amnesty was good enough for Reagan it should be good enough for the Minutemen. Let’s face it America is addicted to cheap labor and cheap oil and fatty foods and drugs.