When I was a teenager only teenagers worked at fast-food places. Adults weren't hired (the phrase used was "overqualified," which is something I don't hear anymore).
Now adults work at these places and it's considered acceptable. In fact, the economy is so bad the last time I heard the average age of someone making minimum wage is 35 years old.
Since you can't live on that kind of money we now have all kinds of transfer payments: Earned Income, Section 8 housing, HUD, food cards.
Nothing good is going to come of all this.
It's been known for a long time that if you want to see what is going to happen to whites, look at blacks. Welfare and the lack of jobs has destroyed their culture and families. And now they're rioting and attacking people.
People think whites don't really riot, but look at history. Look up Matewan sometimes.
And it was all about money then, just as the problems today are about money.
This doesn't mystify me. After all, thousands of years ago there was written a famous comment about the love of money being the root of all evil. That didn't make much sense as a teenager but it sure does now.
In the long run I expect the U.S. to break up into autonomous sections. It's happening already. Many of the inner cities are no go and the wilderness is returning to much of Detroit.
I used to live in Albuquerque and it's pretty much been ethnically cleansed of blacks by "Hispanics." I used to know a middle-aged black women there and she told me some Hispanic women told her to her face, "We are going to get rid of you." I, on the other hand, never had a problem.
Liberals are nuts with their beliefs in multiculturalism.
And those who can't see the long-term effects of a bad economy are nuts, too.
Interesting times are coming. It's not even hard to see. All the races and ethnic groups living apart, a very small majority with more money than they know what to do with, a great many people livng on transfer payments and low-paying jobs.
Artists tend to be antennae for coming problems. Neal Stephenson, for one, is very good at writing about the break up of the country. An impoverished country with advanced technology. It's exactly what I predicted (and others) while forgetting I had read Stephenson.
So it appears we are heading toward a broken-apart country, with advanced technology verging on magic, with a vanishingly small number of extremely wealthy people, and everyone else impoverished economically.
There will still be a lot of drinking and drugs and watching 500 TV channels, though. While the smart ones work their technological magick with programming, nanotechnology and genetic engineering - which ultimately are the same thing.
11 comments:
Employees can eventually work their way up to restaurant manager I suppose who can make good money. So it's not all that bad. Still, we should be creating more engineers, inventors and entrepreneurs in my opinion.
A good analysis. I'm a Gen X and I can't say I'm that much better off than 10 years ago.
Depreciating money value (we need to go back free market commodity money) and an oppressive tax confiscation schemes certainly don't help.
I stopped voting years ago unless it is something that will increase my liberty or reduce my tax bill by something.
I certainly won't be buying any new cars or $200k houses short of winning a lotto.
http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2015/06/04/ukrainians-dispossessed-americans-next-paul-craig-roberts/
"Apologists for exploitation claim that the rich are richer because they are smarter. But the stupidity of the rich is everywhere visible. The greedy fools have destroyed their domestic US market. Really, how stupid can you be? How do Americans buy when they are forced by offshoring out of well paid manufacturing and software engineering jobs into being waitresses, bartenders, retail clerks and part-time Walmart workers in order that corporate bottom lines improve? Who buys the stuff that sustains the profits? Not Americans who no longer have the incomes to do so."
"Employees can eventually work their way up to restaurant manager"
Half the people in this country have IQs of less than 100 or they are not going to retrain for higher-paying jobs or work their way up at all.
I see race wars. The blacks that are destroying Detroit, New Orleans, DC and other cities won't stay there when the free food and money runs out. They are going to go hunting. You will need to enslave them or forcefully exclude them from white societies.
I think whites, Jews, Hispanics and some Asians will be able to coexist but the blacks are a problem that will get worse before it gets better.
Hispanics and blacks hate each other. This I have seen.
"Half the people in this country have IQs of less than 100 or they are not going to retrain for higher-paying jobs or work their way up at all."
These low-IQ people definitely won't be trying to become engineers, scientists, entrepreneurs and inventors then.
Food service and low-skill menial work (e.g., like cashier, fork lift operator, janitor, maid) is just about the only option these people have. Robots are taking over factory work - if there are even any factories left in the U.S. that is. Where would these adults working in fast food be without these low-skill jobs? Unmotivated and low-IQ people have few job options in a modern, high-tech economy and pay a decent salary to live on and support a family.
The Bible repeats the phrase "Muzzle Not The OX that Treads the Corn" or "The workman is worth of his hire" as much as or more than "Thou shall not murder."
Wage arbitrage which is what all this is is not a new problem.
In the end though, at least those adults at McD's are working and contributing.
And yes paying them and the Wal Mart people food stamps and such is basically a subsidy but we aren't smart enough for the other option and to be honest avoiding the true price for things is in our nations DNA.
Heck the basic founding premises of the country included "hey free labor is too expensive even with indentured people, lets have chattel slavery."
Also re: flat taxes and the like. Its a core assumption that if you could get taxes lower than wages would go up. Not remotely true. A good rule of thumb , baring coercion or an induced labor shortage wages never go up. Ever.
The few times wages did rise in US history either coercion by the state or unions or a labor shortage was involved.
We can't get a labor shortage now though, even if we could expel all the invaders it won't help. Our society won't support the levels of trade control required, heck they have already sold America labor out with fast track authority
Some really violent revolutionary state could maybe make a new functional economy, maybe deal with the elite I suppose but dealing with outright the economic liberal Ayn Rand Jihadists that are out there without turning into Venezuela will be a royal pain.
Another option would be Social Credit of course, the State scoops up 50% of the GDP , distributes it each adult but that is incompatible with open borders, any immigration, a significant military , the existing pensions system and a host of other things.
Another option is to pay people to not have children but again, no in the ruling class wants that save for a few genocidal lefties. Its not much fun to rule over nobody. Frankly 1.2 forever is not a rallying cry people can get behind
In the end cutting the work week to maximum of 30 maybe lower (24 is about right) no salary exceptions , only emergency personnel closing the borders (with mass repatriation too ) and doing Social Credit and a crappy national health system is the best option since automation is going to make unemployment basically so high a capitalist system can't survive.
This again is not a new problem, Karl Marx noted it back in 1844. In short , there is too much product produced and too few buyers, globalists wage arbitrage means a declining standard of living for everyone and while yes, some of the very poor benefit, the lower low end where economies meet is where workers will be and this media means that way too many goods can't be sold.
In the end baring a revolt and economic controls the US will just be another 3rd world country, violent and well armed as it is, the elite will as the always loot the place before they go some bolthole.
"In the end though, at least those adults at McD's are working and contributing"
I agree. At least they are trying, and most make some tangible and positive contribution, especially people at 'low-level' jobs, like restaurant, hotels, store clerks etc. I've worked lots of cruddy jobs and so respect hard work, and I respect people who aren't just takers. Many Americans are very spoiled, and most would be quite surprised at the appreciation you'll get for even acknowledging the efforts of 'service' people, much less rewarding them, which is even better. For you both.
Those who take care of me, try to help me even in small ways, service gigs or whatever, I make it a point to look after.
The US is a clown country. We elected David Dinkins Jr. as president, and we're about to elect either the third member of one of our kleptocratic dynasties or else the wife of our former el presidente in the next election. We're like Argentina north now. Our elite caste is doing everything it can to debase or erase anything recognizable as the former country and turn it into an overpopulated third world hell hole/playground for the rich filled with an atomized, impoverished and subservient citizenry beneath them. The Bruce Jenner saga can maybe be thought of as the moment that American culture jumped the shark. We all know it's a joke, but anyone in a position to say anything is too afraid of being blacklisted. It's a display of power and dominance from the elites for the benefit of the regular citizens. The sooner the remains of the country bust apart the better because maybe something like the old America could reemerge, somewhere.
I loathe WSJ/chamber of commerce republicans and libertarians. They cheerlead endlessly for outsourcing and offshoring domestically and endless, pointless military adventures abroad. They answer every statistic about the devastation of American industries and the middle class with analogies about horses and buggy whip makers or Randian bullshit. What they don't realize is that 99% of the human race will eventually be about as economically useful as horses and every industry will eventually be in the same place as the buggy whip industry. There is almost no job or profession that can't potentially be automated to a large extent. It's happening to factory workers and lawyers alike right now.
Libertarians begin every argument with the assumption that human beings are racially and culturally fungible, and that technology and innovation will always save us in the end. If you corner them they'll speak in mealy mouthed platitudes about "winners and losers.. so whatever." By definition, half of the country has an IQ over 100, but only 25% have an IQ over 110. I've heard that number quoted a lot of times as an arbitrary baseline for entry into the professions. That's in the industrialized, first world nations that make up a minority of the human race. Third world fertility is meanwhile booming with Africa on course to double its population to 2.4 billion people by 2050, while of course the first world nations have stagnating or negative population growth.
I'm in an engineering program right now. I at least pass my classes, most of which have a dropout rate of 30-50%, but I'm not finding it particularly fun or easy. I strongly suspect that only 5% of the population are actually aspie enough to enjoy or take any real interest in calculus or physics. If an engineering, CS degree or something equivocally difficult is going to be the standard qualification for economic usefulness, we're in trouble. Bob is right, that the only difference between the white and black populations is time. If subjected to enough pressure, the white population will crack just like the blacks did.
The question I'd ask is what use does an economy that doesn't need people to the people in it. At some point the majority of the human race is going to have to be subsidized in make work programs, through welfare, or just exist in a state of anarcho-tyranny. Libertarians bitch endlessly about WPA programs, but at least they built some pretty cool stuff. What are our welfare disbursements getting us? Maybe another way, though, would be the self sufficient economies and societies of the Amish, Hasidic Jews or of Chesteron and Belloc's distributist schemes. I've read news stories that already report the Amish being inundated wannabe converts. At one point will the human race stop trying to catch up with an economy that's left all but .0001% of it behind? At one point does the economy and innovation stop benefiting people and effectively begin to rot their social structures and individual lives?
The Abolition of Work:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Abolition_of_Work
http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/bob-black-the-abolition-of-work
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DuoI4bQ07M
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