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Are the Republicans trying to make Obama a gift of the presidency?
Rick Perry has shown that he doesn't have what it takes. Sarah Palin surprised me (that Indianola speech certainly sounded like a bid for national leadership) by announcing that she won't run. Now Hermann Cain, who had briefly flashed across the sky, has committed electoral suicide and damaged the whole party into the bargain. The Republicans risk selecting Romney by default, and I have said what I think of him.
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In general, blame is a poor way of dealing with adverse circumstances: time spent blaming people is time lost from constructive labour. I find this a useful rule: If I must blame someone, let me begin by blaming myself, for my own behaviour is the thing I have the most power to change. If there is blame left over, then let me assign it to other people, and to institutions, and to structures of society, in that order. The structures would not exist unless supported by the institutions, and the institutions would not exist unless supported by the individuals who work in them: all comes down to individual efforts and decisions, or (too often, alas!) to individual sloth and the habit of deferring decision to others.
My own unemployment is a complex case; if there were an easy remedy for it, I should have found it by now. Partly I am unemployed because of various medical conditions that make me unable to do certain kinds of work; partly because I was prevented for many years from getting an education that would fit me for such work as I can do, through the officious stupidity of public-sector bureaucrats; partly because I have spent the last few years looking after my aged parents, a thing that only a cad would refuse to do, but that the cads who run bureaucracies (public or private) do not consider as ‘work’.
The only way in which I can find any capitalist institution to blame for my predicament is that too many businesses have accepted the myth of higher education as a necessary credential. People who pay a certain sum in tuition, and sit for four years in a classroom without causing a fuss, are rewarded with a piece of paper known as a bachelor’s degree; and because this degree is so easy to earn if you have the time and the money, it is (at least in my country) generally considered the absolute minimum qualification for any job requiring intellectual ability or clerical skills. A career counsellor whom I consulted a few years ago, after many tests and interviews, told me flatly that I should never find a job I was fit for without a degree. I therefore, after ludicrous effort, found a way to clear my name of the black mark that had made it impossible for me to get a higher education; and I got halfway through the required four years of sitting still, when my car was hit by a truck and I suffered injuries that made me unable to finish.
I have spent the last seven months (1) helping my parents sell their house, (2) dealing with the catastrophe caused by my stepbrother’s getting them confined in hospital and declared incompetent, with the intention of making off with their money; (3) putting their belongings into storage, and moving myself into an apartment; (4) fighting a court battle to prevent my stepbrother from removing my parents’ money from the country, and getting a more appropriate person appointed as trustee; (5) suffering a minor stroke due to the accumulated stress, and to my pre-existing hypertension; (6) recovering from the stroke; (7) moving my parents, after six months’ delay, out of the hospital and into an assisted-living facility. I don’t see how I could have either sought or sustained regular employment during that time.
Most of my troubles this year have been unnecessary, but they were all brought on either directly by the actions of my family, or indirectly by the Rube Goldberg apparatus of laws, regulations, and court procedures which my brother exploited in his effort to deprive my parents of their liberty and property. None of my troubles would have been any the less if capitalism had never existed.
About a red herring
The reason why Hermann Cain is an idiot is nothing to do with capitalism as such. It is that when there is no work there is no work, and no amount of positive thinking can make it otherwise. It is as bad, as sick, and as depraved, as to blame your lack of positive thinking for the fact that you are dying of cancer. My own business is going down the tubes at present, because less companies want stuff translated - especially to and from Italian - and also because some people are stupid enough to use computer translation instead of the real thing. I will have to apply for unemployment again, but if anyone tells me that it's my own fault - or the fault of any of the other translators who are similarly getting shafted - I promise I will react violently. Cain, as a member of the director class, has no right to say anything on the matter; his kind will never be unemployed and know nothing of it.
Re: About a red herring
This is true only if you assume that ‘work’ is something that must be bestowed upon the individual by an outside power. It is, in fact, the cargo cult theory of economics.
I will have to apply for unemployment again, but if anyone tells me that it's my own fault - or the fault of any of the other translators who are similarly getting shafted - I promise I will react violently.
Cain’s point, which you seem to have missed entirely, is that it is not Wall Street’s fault. There is not a conspiracy of Evil Capitalists™ to put translators out of work.
Cain, as a member of the director class, has no right to say anything on the matter; his kind will never be unemployed and know nothing of it.
What is this ‘director class’ of which you speak? Cain is the son of a chauffeur who grew up in the Jim Crow era in Georgia, and worked his way up from nothing. He has been unemployed in the past and knows as much of it as you or I. You appear to assume that because someone is now rich and in a position of economic power, he must always have been in that position. In fact you are parroting the bog-standard Socialist belief that great wealth is always and everywhere and intrinsically unearned, and that anyone who has wealth is ipso facto a member of a parasite class. I suggest you try to learn some of the most elementary facts about the man’s C.V. before you try to tar him with that brush.
Re: About a red herring
The term ‘capitalism’ was invented by nineteenth-century Socialists as a term of abuse, and they applied it as a contrapositive label to Socialism. (Proposition: ‘All Socialism is state control of the means of production.’ Contrapositive: ‘All conditions in which the state does not control the means of production is capitalism.’) In this original sense of the term, it most definitely does have to do with the free market, in the sense that it is a necessary but not sufficient condition. You cannot have a free market in a Socialist economy; and since the terms are defined as mutually exclusive and exhaustive opposites, by those definitions you cannot have a free market in anything but a capitalist economy.
Re: About a red herring
As for the director class, such a thing exists and is in power. It is no more important to it that Cain was the son of a sharecropper, than that Steve Jobs was adopted and a college dropout. I will even grant you that both of them have earned their places at the top - unlike most of the occupiers. What matters is that, bar for possible total self-destructiveness, none of those who are now in that position will ever know unemployment again, and that they will make sure that none of their children will. If you have any problem with that analysis, talk to Angelo Codevilla or to the many other conservative analysts who have pointed out the existence of a new aristocracy that occupies the commanding heights of society and makes sure that its own members never suffer from want.
Re: About a red herring
Re: About a red herring