The Republican debate; Jim Bludso

View 709 Tuesday, January 17, 2012

As usual, Newt Gingrich came off well ahead in the Republican debate. When asked about unemployment compensation and how long it should be, he turned the topic to the proper channel: what ought the unemployed to be doing with unemployment compensation. He began that with an observation that ought to be central to every plan: “99 weeks is an Associate degree.”

My mother was always rather ashamed of not having a full four year college degree: she had an associate degree from a Florida Normal School. That was, in those days, sufficient for her to be a first grade teacher, and in those days first grade teachers in rural Florida schools were expected to teach all the children to read by the end of first grade. I once asked her if any children left first grade who hadn’t learned to read. She said there were a few, but “They didn’t learn anything else, either.” The notion that a child of normal or dull normal intelligence would leave first grade unable to read was simply not thinkable: everyone knew that didn’t have to be, and thus was intolerable.

And 99 weeks is an Associate degree. And we have no shortage of children unable to read. 99 weeks is an Associate degree. Look up the health care jobs one can qualify for with an associate degree. Look up the technical jobs one can qualify for. Sometimes problems solve each other.

(Regarding teaching reading, for those who are interested in reading, see Roberta Pournelle’s web page; anyone reading this can learn how to teach almost anyone how to read. Her program requires about 70 half-hour lessons, some of which may have to be repeated. That’s about 11 weeks to completion, or 9 teaching cycles in 99 weeks. Being able to read before getting to the public schools is a big head start. Alas, Head Start doesn’t think its pupils are “ready” to learn reading. Roberta’s research indicates otherwise. Being able to read is a terrific head start.)

Romney did a pretty good job of dealing with the “Bain Capital” nonsense. If we had a reasonably educated journalism profession that wouldn’t be needed. I was required to read Schumpeter’s Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy as an undergraduate. It should be required for anyone in America who claims an education. Capitalism is a means for allocating resources, and has proven to be the most efficient means of gathering returns on investing those resources. Doing so requires what Schumpeter called “creative destruction”, meaning the closing down of inefficient and wasteful firms. This is what the Soviet Union lacked, and over time more and more resources were misallocated and produced less and less return on investment. All of that was predicted and indeed was the underlying principle of the Cold War strategy of containment: communism and other central planning allocations of resources was doomed if it had to stew in its own juice. So it went.

Note that there are always exceptions. Unbridled capitalism produces what the market wants, and the unregulated market has no restraints on its desires. I usually summarize this by noting that the unrestrained and unregulated market will eventually offer human flesh for sale.

There are also reasons related to national defense to maintain some domestic industries because access to them might be cut off in time of need. Obviously many uncompetitive firms will claim their vital necessity and thus a need for subsidies or protective tariffs – actually, some quite efficient firms will make that claim and grasp for what they can get. These are matters for rational debate, but electoral politics is seldom decided by rational debate – as witness the “Bain Capital” advertisements.

All in all, the Republican candidates all came off well. I think Newt was the clear winner, but, except for a few painful skirmishes, it was a positive debate.

We used to memorize and discuss this in tenth grade. That was in Tennessee, but this poem and others like it were once part of the common heritage of growing up in America.

Jim Bludso of the Prairie Bell

John Hay

Well, no, I can’t tell you where he lives,
Because he don’t live, you see.
Leastways, he’s got out of the habit
Of living like you and me.
Oh, where have you been these last three years,
That you have not heard tell
How Jimmie Bludso cashed in his checks
The night of the Prairie Belle?

He weren’t no saint; them engineers
Are pretty much all alike:
One wife in Natchez under the Hill,
Another one here in Pike.
A careless man in his talk was Jim,
An awkward hand in a row,
But he never flunked and he never lied,
I reckon he never knowed how.

And this was all the religion he had:
To treat his engine well,
"Don’t ever be passed on the river
And mind the pilot’s bell."
And if ever the Prairie Belle took fire,
A hundred times he swore,
He’d hold her nozzle against the bank
Till the last soul got ashore.

All boats have their day on the Mississipp
And her day come at last.
The Movastar was the better boat,
But the Belle, she wouldn’t be passed.
And so she came tearing along that night,
The oldest craft on the line,
With a negro squattin on her safety valve
And her furnace crammed rosin and pine.

And the fire broke out as she cleared the bar
And burned a hole in the night.
Quick as a flash, she turned and made
For the willow bank on the right.
There was runnin and cussin, but Jim yelled out
Above the awful roar,
"I’ll hold her nozzle agin the bank
Till the last galoot’s ashore."

Through the hot, black breath of the burning boat
Jim Bludso’s voice was heard,
And they all had trust in his cussedness,
For they knowed he’d keep his word.
And, sure as you’re born, they all got off
Afore the smokestacks fell,
And Bludso’s ghost went up alone
In the smoke of the Prairie Belle.

He weren’t no saint, but at Judgment
I’d run my chance with Jim
‘Longside of some pious gentlemen
Who wouldn’t shake hands with him.
He seen his duty, a dead sure thing,
And he went for it, there and then,
And Christ ain’t gonna be too hard
On a man who died for men.