05-02-2022, 09:40 PM
I can say this: the dumb young people with some moral compass are the sorts that one wants working cheaply due to their modest talents and their fear of an economic system that reminds them at all times that they are expendable. Such people know that they have little value to an employer because they can leave. The only costs that they have associated with their employment aside from pittances as wages is the cost of training to do minimally-skilled tasks. The more minimal the skill necessary to do the tasks, the better for the employer. Training is a real cost. Ideally the employer has others lined up in the event of a need to replace the person who must see the wares more precious than himself.
Yes, low-paying work is often dehumanizing. It practically ensures that one will be very close to the low end of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Maybe not as desperate as someone in a life-and-death situation... but having no economic certainty except to expect more of the same so long as one holds a job that barely keeps one fed and allows one to share a studio apartment with five or more people. Management is often awful, with an owner who sees anyone not a family member as livestock or a boss who himself is little better off but still believes that with dedicated, diligent work with few demands now he has a chance to get ahead in the organization.
The practical solution for just about anyone is to specialize. In general the more specialized and rare one's skills, the better one does in life. Paradoxically those who specialize last can do so most completely, which explains such people as physicians, attorneys, architects, accountants, engineers, research scientists, mathematicians, and college professors -- maybe some really, really good salespeople -- who are toward the high end of IQ. But getting to specialize late requires expensive education.
One day I got into a heated argument with a Trump cultist in which I told him that Trump made me wish that I were a German instead of a German-American even if I had spent the first thirty years of my life in the DDR. At the least, tax-supported education is available to anyone who has the talent to support it. (One rap on that is that the German educational system tracks kids early so that kids who aren't so promising at age ten get led into manufacturing... this said, there aren't that many late-bloomers. People who get delayed recognition? Sure! That's commonplace in creative activities). Medical costs are low for a German patient perhaps in part because German physicians don't make huge incomes; they also do not have huge student loans to pay off, and the system promotes family practice as prevention. Well -- prevention does more to extend lifespans than does heroic medicine. The tax system favors small business owners and small-scale farmers, which is reasonable when one considers that the tycoons and financiers bankrolled you-know-who. Religiosity is low, and although people can be devout, there's little room for fire-breathing fundamentalists and pushers of the Gospel of Greed. An educational system that pushes classical literature and great music (more than half the music in my classical collection spoke some German dialect) as an essential part of education makes one less amenable to pseudo-intellectual garbage. If I never hear another person tell me that if I believe in evolution I will burn in Hell I will be happy with that.
(Let's face it: faith is a vastly-overrated commodity. Something with strong experimental evidence and solid logic behind it needs little faith to support it. So it is with something that a great German, Albert Einstein, discovered. It takes little faith to recognize that a good society can thrive only if people generally do good and refrain from such evils as murder, assault, rape, child molestation, theft, abandonment of the vulnerable, boozing and whoring, and economic exploitation. As for the work ethic, it does not arise in a vacuum, and it can disappear quickly when the rewards that underpin it vanish. Know well: it is trashy ideas, like young-earth creationism, "scientific racism" and UFO cults, that require far more faith than does genuine science). OK, so if we had the German educational system about half the colleges would be closed as inadequate and parents would know by the time their kids are ten or so they might be trained to do auto body repair or institutional cooking. So!
It is not a disgrace to produce the food, fiber, or energy that keep people fed, clothed, or mobile and warm. It is not a disgrace to maintain things so that they not wear out or rust out before their time. It is not a disgrace to mine steel or iron ore or to fashion the product of stuff into girders and locomotives. It is not a disgrace to do hair, human or canine. It is a disgrace to make money off disgraceful activities that cheat and exploit people.
The disgrace is that people get paid badly because they do the real work. No legerdemain of tax cuts will solve that. Crony capitalism will only cheat workers on behalf of well-connected exploiters. (Heck, that is how Russia operates). The profit motive is not enough. Heck, the Mafia is highly profitable.
Yes, low-paying work is often dehumanizing. It practically ensures that one will be very close to the low end of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Maybe not as desperate as someone in a life-and-death situation... but having no economic certainty except to expect more of the same so long as one holds a job that barely keeps one fed and allows one to share a studio apartment with five or more people. Management is often awful, with an owner who sees anyone not a family member as livestock or a boss who himself is little better off but still believes that with dedicated, diligent work with few demands now he has a chance to get ahead in the organization.
The practical solution for just about anyone is to specialize. In general the more specialized and rare one's skills, the better one does in life. Paradoxically those who specialize last can do so most completely, which explains such people as physicians, attorneys, architects, accountants, engineers, research scientists, mathematicians, and college professors -- maybe some really, really good salespeople -- who are toward the high end of IQ. But getting to specialize late requires expensive education.
One day I got into a heated argument with a Trump cultist in which I told him that Trump made me wish that I were a German instead of a German-American even if I had spent the first thirty years of my life in the DDR. At the least, tax-supported education is available to anyone who has the talent to support it. (One rap on that is that the German educational system tracks kids early so that kids who aren't so promising at age ten get led into manufacturing... this said, there aren't that many late-bloomers. People who get delayed recognition? Sure! That's commonplace in creative activities). Medical costs are low for a German patient perhaps in part because German physicians don't make huge incomes; they also do not have huge student loans to pay off, and the system promotes family practice as prevention. Well -- prevention does more to extend lifespans than does heroic medicine. The tax system favors small business owners and small-scale farmers, which is reasonable when one considers that the tycoons and financiers bankrolled you-know-who. Religiosity is low, and although people can be devout, there's little room for fire-breathing fundamentalists and pushers of the Gospel of Greed. An educational system that pushes classical literature and great music (more than half the music in my classical collection spoke some German dialect) as an essential part of education makes one less amenable to pseudo-intellectual garbage. If I never hear another person tell me that if I believe in evolution I will burn in Hell I will be happy with that.
(Let's face it: faith is a vastly-overrated commodity. Something with strong experimental evidence and solid logic behind it needs little faith to support it. So it is with something that a great German, Albert Einstein, discovered. It takes little faith to recognize that a good society can thrive only if people generally do good and refrain from such evils as murder, assault, rape, child molestation, theft, abandonment of the vulnerable, boozing and whoring, and economic exploitation. As for the work ethic, it does not arise in a vacuum, and it can disappear quickly when the rewards that underpin it vanish. Know well: it is trashy ideas, like young-earth creationism, "scientific racism" and UFO cults, that require far more faith than does genuine science). OK, so if we had the German educational system about half the colleges would be closed as inadequate and parents would know by the time their kids are ten or so they might be trained to do auto body repair or institutional cooking. So!
It is not a disgrace to produce the food, fiber, or energy that keep people fed, clothed, or mobile and warm. It is not a disgrace to maintain things so that they not wear out or rust out before their time. It is not a disgrace to mine steel or iron ore or to fashion the product of stuff into girders and locomotives. It is not a disgrace to do hair, human or canine. It is a disgrace to make money off disgraceful activities that cheat and exploit people.
The disgrace is that people get paid badly because they do the real work. No legerdemain of tax cuts will solve that. Crony capitalism will only cheat workers on behalf of well-connected exploiters. (Heck, that is how Russia operates). The profit motive is not enough. Heck, the Mafia is highly profitable.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.