View 712 Sunday, February 05, 2012

I continue to try to recover from my cold. It’s awful. My head isn’t working very well.

Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta is warning that the Israelis may strike Iran to destroy their nuclear capability. Meanwhile we know that Israel recently has conducted a brigade sized airborne practice session; they have not had a brigade sized practice jump in decades. The US routinely practices brigade airborne operations.

Many seem to think that taking out Iran’s nuclear would only require air strikes. That’s really unlikely. Iran’s deception and denial capabilities are pretty good. Moshe Dayan famously said when asked why his Israelis could defeat such overwhelming numbers, “It helps if you’re fighting Arabs.” That’s not universally true – Jordan’s Arab Legion was pretty effective against the Jewish forces in the 1948 Formation Wars, taking what is now known as “the West Bank” – but it’s also irrelevant: Iranians are not Arabs. They aren’t stupid, and their nuclear facilities are their crown jewels.

The Israelis know this. They knew it years ago: they sent commandoes in when they wanted to take out nuclear facilities. The units don’t get much publicity and everyone was encouraged to think everything was done by air operations only, but Israeli forces were able to identify the ethnicity of some of the construction engineers: North Korean. That didn’t happen from air observations.

An anti-nuclear raid on Iran will require everything Israel has, every paratrooper, and even that might not be enough. And it’s going to take some US cooperation, at least in operations support. US troops may not have to go in, but US aircraft may be needed for extraction, once it’s done. US strike planners understand the realities as well as the IDF does.

It may be an interesting election year. The current Administration understands that yet another war will not be popular with the American people. Meanwhile the Iranians are getting closer and closer to having what they need to make several nukes. Washington is pretty sure that a nuclear armed Iran is undesirable but tolerable. Jerusalem is not at all convinced of that.

We do live in interesting times.

I am reading Charles Murray’s new book Coming Apart. I don’t want to comment on it until I have finished it, but here is something to think about:

Subj: Charles Murray answers questions about _Coming Apart_

http://blogs.wsj.com/ideas-market/2012/02/04/charles-murray-answers-questions-on-americas-growing-class-divide/

Things Murray said, during the chat, that particularly caught my attention:

>>We’re talking about IQ more than culture. It helps to be living in a neighborhood where smart actions about money are common, but the main breakdown is IQ. Lots of smart people in Fishtown do the right thing, but (politically incorrect warning) there are more smart people in Belmont than in Fishtown.<<

>>I wish I had spent more time on the “no jobs” argument. I have a few pages, but I should have spelled it out at greater length. Amazing how people think men used to make a “family wage” that they now can’t make. In constant dollars, it just doesn’t square with the data. … The ["no jobs" argument is the] idea that jobs for low-skilled people either have disappeared or pay a lot worse than they used to. It’s true for some jobs (plasterers in 2010 made $6,600 less than in 1960) but not for others (waiters/waitresses made $8000 more). On average, working class jobs pay about the same now as they did in 1960.<<

>>Get out of the way. Stop subsidizing behavior — any behavior. Conservative attempts to subsidize good behavior backfire as badly as liberal ones, by the way. Thank heavens the Bush administration’s attempts to foster faith-based programs didn’t get very far, or we would have ruined religion.<<

>>Apprenticeships would be great. But the electricians, contractors, plumbers, etc. I talk to (I live in a blue-collar area) keep telling me that they can’t find kids who want to learn their trade, even while getting good wages. These stories are more than anecdotal. They pop up wherever people are willing to ask the question.<<

>>As a parent, I too have to hope for the best. No guarantees. And I’ve tried to think of something to add to that without much luck. Getting used to hard work at a young age is perhaps the best single thing you can do. Can’t say I did all that well with my children on that score, however, and they’re turning out okay. Although my daughter did used to say that her dad’s idea of the perfect summer job was to work at MacDonald’s by day and clean toilets by night.<<

>>About half of all social capital is religious in origin, according to Putnam’s data. Greater secularization, falling social capital. And married males are great contributors to social capital, whether it’s coaching Little League or lobbying for stop signs. Unmarried males aren’t. Unmarried mothers don’t have time to become engaged in their communities. Marriage collapses, so does social capital.<<

Rod Montgomery==monty@starfief.com

For those who don’t know who Murray is, his The Bell Curve was one of the most important books of the last century. There is very little ‘science’ in ‘social science’ (see my Voodoo Sciences essay), but The Bell Curve has a number of testable hypotheses, and all of them were tested. The conclusions look pretty solid. They form much of the basis of Murray’s new book, which promises to be as important as The Bell Curve.

The Bell Curve was denounced by many ‘social scientists’. I was personally present as a special session of the American Association for the Advancement of Science which was supposed to ‘discuss’ The Bell Curve. This was at a AAAS annual meeting. The special session opened with the chairman, who was chairman of a social science department at a major university, announcing that he had not read the book and did not intend to. He then proceeded to condemn it in very strong language, and called up other ‘discussants’, some of whom also announced that they didn’t intend to read the book. It was an astonishing display, but not surprising if you know much about the Social Sciences.

I make no doubt that Coming Apart will receive much the same treatment.

I wish Newt would lay off commenting on Romney’s “poor” remarks. Everyone knows what he meant. We’re broke, and poverty in the US is a lot more pleasant than what 80% of the human race experienced for most of human history. Even paupers have or have access to TV, travel, food stamps, a change of clothes. It’s not pleasant being poor, but it could be a lot more unpleasant; and we’re broke. It’s time to be concerned about jobs and the economy, and finding ways for the poor to participate in the economy; not on tailoring yet more entitlements. We all know this.  For Heaven’s sake, talk about what we need to do, not about who is the most compassionate. Compassion is good intention. Good intention butters no parsnips. We know what’s paved with good intentions.

That’s probably my miserable cold talking.

View 711 Saturday, February 04, 2012

Roberta has now got my cold, and I am not recovered from it so I can’t do much to take care of her. We’ll manage, but it’s not going to be fun around here for a few days. I used my nose pump this morning to clean out my head and that helped, but I am still nowhere near In good shape, which I fear will affect what I write. I don’t feel very sharp.

I have a number of responses to my notes on Deserving and Undeserving Poor. Some have gone into the letter bag and I’ll get to them when I‘m up to that. One was a reference to an on-line essay the correspondent wrote. It wasn’t well organized and I had trouble following the argument, if there was one; most of it was a well written tale of success followed by unemployment due to the incompetence of his employers. So far as I could see the point was that we ought to have an economic system that let him have his job back. He had done everything right, got his college education, and it wasn’t his fault that his employer had ruined the company, nor was it his fault that no one he could find needed his particular skills. He had been unemployed for a while now, and he had been on unemployment, and he preferred employment. He hadn’t signed up to be unemployed.

It’s easy to have great sympathy for someone with that story, as it is easy to have sympathy for the mill worker who has been in the same job for 20 years and established himself in the middle class, with suburban house, children in college, and the whole American dream – and now it’s all gone. The mill is closed, the town is fading out, half the fast food places have closed and the rest of them have far more fry cooks than they need, and there’s not even yard work to be had. This is the very definition of “Deserving Poor”, and if anyone deserves government help this is him. This is what Roosevelt meant by folks who need a hand up not a handout. I grew up during the Great Depression. My father used to give something to anyone who asked.

They used to tell me I was building a dream, and so I followed the mob,

When there was earth to plow, or guns to bear, I was always there right on the job.

They used to tell me I was building a dream, with peace and glory ahead,

Why should I be standing in line, just waiting for bread?

Once I built a railroad, I made it run, made it race against time.

Once I built a railroad; now it’s done. Brother, can you spare a dime?

Once I built a tower, up to the sun, brick, and rivet, and lime;

Once I built a tower, now it’s done. Brother, can you spare a dime?

“Give to him that asketh thee, and from him that would borrow of thee turn not thou away.”

But that is from Matthew, not the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution of the United States. Matthew may not distinguish between the Deserving and the Undeserving Poor, but all the Poor Laws from Medieval times to present certainly do. It’s not entirely clear how one acquires a legal obligation to help someone out because he needs help, and the state acquires a right to send an armed man to collect alms from you and if need be sell your house at public auction to acquire the money to give to a formerly employed college graduate who can’t find a decent job.

My correspondent quotes me and then comments; I dislike that form of dialogue, in part because it doesn’t require that the critic demonstrate he has understood what I said, but I’ll reproduce it here to save time:

There’s the following: “We all know how to get more poverty. That’s elementary. If you want more of something subsidize it.  If you want people to be poor, pay people to be poor.  It’s simple, it’s effective, and it has been demonstrated year after year. Make poverty pleasant. Give the poor a right to other people’s money. It works every time, and the larger the subsidy – the transfer of money from those who have it to those who don’t – the more people you will have apply for the position of being poor for a living.” – Jerry Pournelle

Of course, there is another quite simple way, as well, and we are all witnesses to its effectiveness.  Put economic policies in place that ultimately lead to the complete elimination of several million jobs in a period of a few months, and we get lots and lots of poor people (and many homeless, as well) without any subsidies (if one doesn’t count tax breaks for the rich as a subsidy).  I’m not sure how many of those newly poor actually applied for the position of being poor for a living.

And: “There’s another way to increase unemployment. The simple formula is make it more expensive to employ someone. Raise the minimum wages. Make it harder and harder to fire people. Give people with some conditions various protections and rights. Make it expensive enough to hire someone and potential employers will do without.” – Jerry Pournelle

I know of only two real ways to increase unemployment that will always work.  One is to significantly increase efficiency.  The other is to have one’s sales reduced sufficiently by a large enough decrease in consumers.  A retailer has no reason to maintain a large sales force if he has very few sales.  A manufacturer has no real reason to keep building things he can’t sell to wholesalers and retailers; the owner of a services company has no real need to keep people on the payroll if there are no calls for his services.  Of course, idiotic higher management decisions can also lead to unemployment (we all have probably seen examples of this).

There is more here, and then follows the biographical details of the writers’ unemployment. It may be my cold, but I find it hard to understand the point. I presume he is saying that making unemployment comfortable will not bring about an increase in unemployment, which is demonstrably untrue. The fact that most people prefer to keep their old jobs to being unemployed – actually applied for the position of being poor for a living – is either irrelevant or a distortion of what I said; and of course there are plenty of people who apply for the position of being poor. It’s easy enough to do. Don’t develop work habits, have babies while very young, live profligately when you get any money at all – there are plenty of ways to apply for being a pauper without filling out a form, and none of them require significant increases in efficiency.

Of course increases in productivity – increases in efficiency – certainly can cause unemployment. Increased in agricultural efficiency was certainly a factor in bringing about the Industrial Revolution. At one time far more than a majority of the population were needed as farm labor just to feed everyone. Great increases in efficiency caused them to be unemployed, and the flocked to the grim life of the soulless factories, and the world of the early industries so well described by Dickens. Out of that of course came the booms that changed everyone’s lives and made a society in which more than 10% of the population had more than enough to eat, more than one change of clothes to wear, choices in their place of residence, transportation – made all that possible. I grew up while those changes were happening. Believe me, the United States is a far different place from what it was in 1940.

Efficiencies make some jobs obsolete, and drastically reduce the need for workers in that profession. This has been the theme of a great deal of literature for a very long time. Robert Jungk portrayed the future as a possible horror story rather than a highway to progress in The Future Is Already Here, and he was neither the first nor the most eloquent. I had to read The Deserted Village in 7^th grade. Or perhaps it was 8^th.

Now if the point here is that allowing employers to use new technology to increase productivity and thus require fewer workers also gives that employer an obligation to take care of the workers who lose their jobs, then we are on familiar ground. That argument has been made by the Socialists for well over a hundred years. H. G. Wells and G. B. Shaw wrote eloquently on the subject. The problem is that if you put that onus on those who would hire people, you change the whole nature of the marketplace. I suggest reading Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy by Schumpeter before resuming the conversation. Of course efficiency creates unemployment.

But this is to open the whole notion of a centralized command economy which will be humane and kind and gentle and also efficient and not corrupt – something which experience shows isn’t likely. Mussolini hoped to create that kind of economy, and, for a while, may have done so. Huey Long had much the same notion for Louisiana. And for that matter, that was the goal of FDR and Lyndon Johnson. Managed efficiency in investment with government protection of the workers. Regulations to protect everyone including the disabled. And here we are.

If you want unemployment and poverty, pay people to be unemployed and poor. There are other ways to bring it about, but those will work. Governments have wrestled with this problem for a long time – why do you think there were workhouses and treadmills in Dickensian times? The notion was to make life in the almshouse nearly unbearable so that no one wanted to be there, and thus ready to take any alternative. That was considered cruel, and the churches and the Salvation Army and the various missions look for ways to give alternatives. There’s a enormous literature on this.

But one thing is certain. If unemployment is caused by higher productivity and efficiency – and it often will be – then the only remedy it investment in new technologies that creates new jobs. And the best way we have found to get that is freedom. Government can cause economic growth, but the best was we have found is for it to get out of the way. See Hong Kong and the German Economic Miracle as examples.

But laissez faire capitalism is cruel and uncaring. And indeed it is. It needs mitigating. It how it shall be mitigated and regulated that we’re debating. A lot of people have thought about this. It’s a huge subject. I suggest starting with Wilhelm Roepke, A Human Economy. Google Roepke and follow your nose. You’ll learn a lot.

And it’s lunch time.

I note that you can watch all the Superbowl ads today but you have to have a Facebook account to do that. Everyone I know now seems to do Facebook, so I suppose I’ll have to before I become the last person in the world not on Facebook. We’ll see.

View 711 Friday, February 03, 2012

I continue to wallow in misery, which is to say I am recovering from my cold. It’s no fun at all, but I have to say I am better today than yesterday. I’m also falling further and further behind. Alas.

In today’s Wall Street Journal:

“Back to the Moon—For a Fraction of the Old Price

Gingrich is right that America needs to retain its lead in space.” By Charles Miller. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204652904577193501932074504.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

Since the op ed article says what I have been saying since 1980, it should be no surprise that I approve. Miller says the right things for the right reasons, and agrees with Newt Gingrich that the path to space is through prizes. His article reads like a condensation of the 1988 Citizen’s Advisory Council on National Space Policy titles America A Spacefaring Nation Again. I chaired the Council. It met first in 1980 after the election of Ronald Reagan to write the Transition Team papers on Space Policy for the incoming Reagan Administration, and continued to meet until 1988. Its last act was to convince then Vice President Quayle to fund the SSX X Project as a step toward restoring America as a Spacefaring Nation. The only funding Quayle could find was in the Strategic Defense Initiative appropriations, and there wasn’t enough for the 600,000 pound (Gross Liftoff Weight) SSC, so a scale model, the DC/X, was built. The original SSX was intended to lead to a fully reusable spacecraft. I did a somewhat technical report on it which is available here. There is also a belated public Council Report on reusable spacecraft.  And of course there is my report on How to Get To Space.

SSX advocates Single Stage To Orbit (SSTO) as a path to reusable spacecraft. SSTO is one approach. Another is a multiple stage to orbit concept with each stage being reusable. These are technical matters, and which is best is not going to be decided by argument: we need more technical data. The major argument for SSTO is operations simplicity, and, we believed at the time, savability. The original goals of SSX were Savable, Reusable, Reliable, and then higher and faster. As Max Hunter put it, SSX at 600,000 pounds GLOW might not make orbit but it would sure scare it to death – and we’d learn from it enough to build a Savable, Reusable, Reliable spaceship that would routinely make orbit.

Multiple Stage to Orbit supporters advocate a recoverable first stage, generally a special purpose piloted airplane which takes the orbiter to very high altitudes and releases it at fairly low velocities. The advantage here is that rocket engines function better in vacuum than at sea level. To get the most out of your rocket you want a large bell, but the bell has significant drag in atmosphere. Therefore, if you take the rocket to vacuum or near vacuum you can design the rocket for much more fuel efficiency. The cost of this is the operational complexity and cost of the first stage, and the reliability cost of ignition and stage separation. These are highly technical issues, and not easily settled by argument.

The important point is that savable, reusable, and reliable space craft are needed for a true spacefaring economy. If you have to throw away the rocket each time you launch, it’s pretty hard to make a profit.

The problem here is that the initial investment in spacecraft development is fairly high. The technical risks are not all that great. Investors understand technical risk, But when that is explained the next question is always “An what’s the market?” I think I was first asked that in 1970 when I argued strongly for reusable spaceships as opposed to building more expendables. The only real answer is “Have faith. If your build it, they will come.” Now I think there are better answers than that, but I can’t prove it. I can’t prove that you can build reliable solar power satellites and bring that power to Earth for commercial use. There are other speculations about commercial advantages in space. I am quite certain that eventually space will make us all rich, and I’ve been saying it for a long time. See A Step Farther Out. I first met Newt Gingrich when he read that book, was impressed by it, and called my publisher (Ace Books) and bullied my phone number out of my editor (Jim Baen). The first time I ever heard from or of Newt Gingrich was when my phone rang, and he wanted to discuss the book.

A Step Farther Out was written long ago, but most of its arguments, particularly those on Survival With Style and the speculations about a spacefaring economy are still relevant. We have much better understanding of space technology now. Our engines are more efficient, material science has made structures stronger and lighter and thus improves mass fraction, and our control systems are orders of magnitude better than they were when I wrote that book. We can build reusable spacecraft, and with proper use of prizes we can provide incentives by rewarding successful research and development, thus reducing the market risk – you get a substantial sum for making the technology work – while putting the costs of technical risk outside government bureaucracy: you don’t get the money if you can’t build the ship.

Dr. Miller’s Wall Street Journal article makes many valid points. He also names some of the giants of American aviation development – Bill Boeing, Glen Martin, Donald Douglas, Jack Northrup – and some of the space pioneers. He includes Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Robert Bigelow, Burt Rutan, Paul Allen, Jeff Greason. One could add to both lists, but that’s not the point: aviation was developed by entrepreneurs. Space travel can also go that right.

There are also military reasons for America to be a spacefaring nation. One of the first lessons taught in tactics classes is “Take the high ground boy, or they’ll kick hell out of you in the valleys.” Space is the high ground, and for a high tech military such as ours, the ability to make repaid sorties into space to replace assets destroyed by an enemy is critical. If Iran gets a nuke – just one – and launches it out over the Indian Ocean to “test” it at high altitude – we won’t say how high – the results on GPS and some of our other space assets are, well, officially unpredictable. One can look up what happened after Argus to get an idea of possible effect.

Whatever else one may say about the Republican candidates, Mr. Romney seems to think Newt’s space proposals are absurd. I do not agree. Whomever we elect will have to learn about the importance of space exploration. Newt already knows.

I have a number of other notes today. I’m still in robe and pajamas and it’s lunch time. I’ll see what I can get to after lunch.

I have one observation: Romney, in his backtracking over what the media said was a faux pas in his remarks about the poor (see yesterday’s View) said that he’s in favor of automatic rises in minimum wage. This is hardly the usual conservative response. I’m sure it can be explained to him that minimum wages either have no effect at all (if they are low enough) or produce unemployment (if they require payment of wages higher than the job is worth), but you’d have thought he’d already know that. One presumes that he has never had to worry about minimum wages because he always pays people more than that, which is to his credit; but he does need to know that minimum wages destroy jobs. We can hope someone will teach him that.

Now to lunch.

From Peggy Noonan’s column entitled “A Battle the President Can’t Win”  in tomorrow’s Wall Street Journal

The president signed off on a Health and Human Services ruling that says that under ObamaCare, Catholic institutions—including charities, hospitals and schools—will be required by law, for the first time ever, to provide and pay for insurance coverage that includes contraceptives, abortion-inducing drugs and sterilization procedures. If they do not, they will face ruinous fines in the millions of dollars. Or they can always go out of business.

In other words, the Catholic Church was told this week that its institutions can’t be Catholic anymore.

Some years ago the California legislature contemplated a law that would require any hospital that had a maternity ward to perform abortions on demand.

The elderly Mother Superior  who ran St. Joseph’s hospital went to the legislature and said as follows:

I am as abbess of the order that own this hospital a corporation sole, and I own this hospital. If you pass this law I will send all the patients to other hospitals, discharge the staff, cancel all the insurance policies, and order the demolition of all the buildings. Thank you.

Now she was very much of the Old School, and no one doubted she meant every word of it. The law never got to the floor of the assembly. I have no idea what President Obama thinks he is doing here, but I cannot see how this will help him be reelected.

Noonan concludes

There was no reason to pick this fight. It reflects political incompetence on a scale so great as to make Mitt Romney’s gaffes a little bitty thing.

There was nothing for the president to gain, except, perhaps, the pleasure of making a great church bow to him.

Enjoy it while you can. You have awakened a sleeping giant.

View 711 Thursday, February 02, 2012

Ground Hog Day

I had a lunch appointment with Larry and Mike Niven today. We were going to talk about how to save the country, Of course this would be in a book, but we try to make our books realistic, Mike’s very smart, and I was looking forward to it, but when I woke up my cold was much worse and I had to call Mike and cancel it. My cold was bad yesterday, but it’s far worse today. Thursday nights I usually go to LASFS, tonight I’ll stay home and miserate.

Now that Romney’s at the top of the polls as predicted Republican nominee, everything he says is subject to deep scrutiny in the hopes of finding something that can be made to look stupid. Today they think they found one. Romney was trying to indicate that he’s mostly concerned about the American Middle Class, and in the course of saying that he said that he wasn’t worried about the Poor because we have a safety net, and the Very Rich can take care of themselves; what’s needed is government attention to the Middle Class. No sooner had he said it than the drum beats began about how callous and awful Romney is, and this just shows, and you can fill in the rest at leisure. Romney could have taken this opportunity to come out with a real discussion about the role of government in eliminating poverty and for that matter about what government ought to be doing regarding the Middle Class. Instead he went a bit squishy, and lost the opportunity.

What’s needed is a discussion of poverty: how to get more of it, how to get less of it, and what government ought to do about it. After that, we need a discussion about the role of government in boosting the Middle Class. In both cases there are conservative and liberal policies and attitudes, and they’re important.

We all know how to get more poverty. That’s elementary. If you want more of something subsidize it. If you want people to be poor, pay people to be poor. It’s simple, it’s effective, and it has been demonstrated year after year. Make poverty pleasant. Give the poor a right to other people’s money. It works every time, and the larger the subsidy – the transfer of money from those who have it to those who don’t – the more people you will have apply for the position of being poor for a living.

Of course that sounds callous. After all, surely there are people who are in poverty through no fault of their own. There are widows and orphans. There are people who have no skills and aren’t likely to learn any. These are the classical “deserving poor”. Nearly everyone agrees they ought to be taken care of. Nearly every religion requires those who can to help the poor, feed the hungry, clothe the naked, give drink to the thirsty, care for the sick, and so forth, and for much of the history of the US all these religious commands have been assumed to be obligations of the state. We have had poor laws since Elizabethan times (and before for that matter.) And in general all of the poor laws were directed toward aiding ‘the deserving poor.

The deserving poor might be given alms and tithe money as well as food and shelter. Every parish in England and Wales was required to have officials who raised money and distributed it. Of course England had an Established Church in those days, and much of this activity was done by the local churchwardens. It wasn’t generally pleasant, and might be both incompetent and corrupt – think of the Beadle in Oliver Twist – but not always. Some Rectors and Vicars took their duties seriously. But this was all for The Deserving Poor.

Then there was the Undeserving Poor. There were several subclasses of undeserving poor. At the top were those who were generally honest and law abiding but did not work although work might be available, which is to say, they considered the wages offered to be too low, or they just didn’t want to work at all. They might be lazy or they might be drunks. They were people who “ought” to be working, but were not working. This group of undeserving poor generally got fed in soup kitchens and almshouses, and perhaps found shelter. Much of the aid to them was also given by churches and charities, not necessarily the Established Church. There were also evangelical groups like the Salvation Army (see Shaw’s Major Barbara) which tried to convert undeserving poor to deserving poor.

Other Undeserving poor were aggressive beggars, petty thieves — but surely the point is made.

Both law and morality said that there was a class of people, the Deserving Poor, who ought to be taken care of through taxation including some pretty aggressive demands from churchwardens intended to shame those who had into giving something for those in need. The principle was established that the state could and should take from the productive and give it to the unproductive because they needed it. Lyndon Johnson spoke of taking from those who have so much and giving it to the have-nots who need it so much.

Over time the distinction between Deserving and Undeserving Poor was lost or at least faded into the background, and more and more attention was given to not being “judgmental”, and to making it less unpleasant to be poor and on the dole. Moreover, the distinction between insurance programs such as unemployment insurance and worker’s compensation vs. straight out giveaways such as Food Stamps and rent supplements tended to disappear. The Americans With Disabilities Act made alcoholism and drug addiction disabilities.

Food Stamps were converted to a debit cards in part to avoid embarrassment. I needn’t belabor the point. We’ve all seen the results.

And one result was increasing numbers of undeserving poor being treated as deserving poor.

We now have a system in which those who have are required to share it with those who have not, even if the have not is someone able to work but satisfied with what comes from not working.

If you want more of something, subsidize it. If you want more people to be in a certain condition, pay them to be in that condition and make it less unpleasant to be in that condition. If you want more poverty pay people to be paupers. If you want more unemployment, pay people to be unemployed.

There’s another way to increase unemployment. The simple formula is make it more expensive to employ someone. Raise the minimum wages. Make it harder and harder to fire people. Give people with some conditions various protections and rights. Make it expensive enough to hire someone and potential employers will do without.

While you are at it, heap calumny on certain jobs. Make it shameful to be a domestic servant and make it despicable to hire one. That way you will eliminate a class of jobs that once employed millions. Of course that may be a goal. Apparently we are more willing to send an armed tax collector to take money and give it to the unemployed than to suggest that the unemployed work as footmen, maids, cooks, and gardeners. That may be a very good thing; but surely it is worth discussion. Romney spoke of a safety net, and how if it is defective it ought to be repaired. Are those who consider domestic service or other jobs they consider unpleasant or demeaning deserving or undeserving poor? Or have we given up that distinction and now consider that anyone who is in poverty is deserving of money taken by the tax collector?

Raise the costs of hiring people. Make it less unpleasant to be unemployed and in poverty. You will in due season reap the fruits of what you have sowed.

The question is whether there is any obligation to have a safety net, and if so, is that an obligation of the states or the Federal government; and just where in the Constitution is the authorization to use tax money to transfer from the haves to the have-nots who need it so much. It may all be in there and this may be the way for the nation to go, but surely it ought to be discussed openly, not just done by degrees?

It might be interesting to have the candidates debate just what ought to be done about that safety net. There may be more of it than we need, and it may be provided by the wrong people. Perhaps this is one more item to be left to the states.

Today in Sacramento there was a rally of people, many college students, chanting “We want jobs”. They were demonstrating in favor of a “high speed rail” line to run between Los Angeles and San Francisco. Initially put forth as a bond issue for $9 Billion which passed, nothing has actually been built and the cost is now estimated at well over $100 Billion. A lot of money has been spent. Nothing has been built. No one is quite sure how the rail line would cope with the San Andreas Fault and the mountainous area between Los Angeles and San Francisco, and the steep slopes down into the San Joaquin known as The Grapevine are pretty formidable. No matter how fast the rail line, it will take a lot longer to get from LA to San Francisco by train as opposed to flying. There are nearly hourly flights from Burbank and LAX.

We Want Jobs. You pay for them.

I note that I haven’t said anything about what the government ought to do to help the Middle Class. Sorry.

The answer, of course, is not much. Mostly, get out of the way. Get out of the way of development of cheap energy. Stop making it expensive to hire people and complicated to impossible to fire them. Repeal a lot of regulations. It’s really not all that complicated.

A wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government, and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicities.
Thomas Jefferson