A Nod To The Gods

Never understood the minimum wage argument. If you don’t make enough money at a particular job, do something else. Easy squeezy.

Young people who begin by working at McDonald’s seldom spend their careers at McDonald’s. Just in the course of one year, McDonald’s has more than a 100 percent turnover rate. What those who leave take with them is not only such basic experience as showing up for work regularly and on time, cooperating with others, and knowing how to conduct themselves in a business environment, but also a track record that enables them to move on to other and very different occupations at progressively higher levels in the years ahead. The experience and the track record from McDonald’s are likely to be more valuable in the long run than the modest paychecks they earned serving hamburgers.

Put differently, whatever reduces opportunities for gainful employment for people with little or no experience has the effect of costing both them and the society far more than the lost jobs which have been dismissed as “menial” or as paying only “chump change.”—Thomas Sowell, Applied Economics: Thinking Beyond Stage One

 

 

 

Who would you rather have serving you?

I don’t agree with all of it but for entertainment purposes it’s worth the read. Below is a small exerpt, be prepared as in every epic rant he/she is not shy about profanity.
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What neither side seems to realize is that the system is not reformable. There are multiple classes of people, but it boils down to the connected, and the not connected. Just as in pre-Revolutionary France, there is a very strict class hierarchy, and the very idea that we are equal before the law is a laughable nonsequitr.

Jamal the $5 weed slinger, Shaneekwa the hair braider, and Loudmouth Bob in the 7-11 parking lot are at the bottom of the hierarchy. They can, literally, be killed with impunity … as long as the dash cam isn’t running. And, hell, half the time they can be killed even if the dash cam is running. This isn’t hyperbole, mother-fucker. This is literal. Question me and I’ll throw 400 cites and 20 youtube clips at you.

Next up from Shaneekwa and Loudmouth Bob are us regular peons. We can have our balls squeezed at the airport, our rectums explored at the roadside, our cars searched because the cops got permission from a dog (I owe some Reason intern a drink for that one), our telephones tapped (because terrorism!), our bank accounts investigated (because FinCEN! and no expectation of privacy!). We don’t own the house we live in, not if someone of a higher social class wants it. We don’t own our own financial lives, because the education accreditation / student loan industry / legal triumvirate have declared that we can never escape – even through bankruptcy – our $200,000 debt that a bunch of adults convinced a can’t-tell-his-ass-from-a-hole-in-the-ground 18 year old that (a) he was smart enough to make his own decisions, and (b) college is a time to explore your interests and broaden yourself). And if there’s a “national security emergency” (defined as two idiots with a pressure cooker), then the constitution is suspended, martial law is declared, and people are hauled out of their homes.

Next up from the regular peons are….

read it all here

I think educated, capable, experienced, honest, would be on my list well before the gender, race, or sexual preference.

……why don’t a majority of Americans?
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This is Canada ‘s Top Ten List of America ‘s Stupidity…

10. Only in America … Could politicians talk about the greed of the rich at a $35,000.00 a plate campaign fund-raising event.

9. Only in America … Could people claim that the government still discriminates against black Americans when they have a black President, a black Attorney General and roughly 20% of the federal workforce is black while only 14% of the population is black. 40+% of all federal entitlements goes to black Americans – 3X the rate that go
to whites, 5X the rate that go to Hispanics!

8. Only in America … Could they have had the two people most responsible for our tax code, Timothy Geithner (the head of the Treasury Department) and Charles Rangel (who once ran the Ways and
Means Committee), BOTH turn out to be tax cheats who are in favor of higher taxes.

7. Only in America … Can they have terrorists kill people in the name of Allah and have the media primarily react by fretting that Muslims might be harmed by the backlash.

6. Only in America … Would they make people who want to legally become American citizens wait for years in their home countries and pay tens of thousands of dollars for the privilege, while they discuss letting anyone who sneaks into the country illegally just ‘magically’ become American citizens.

5. Only in America … Could the people who believe in balancing the budget and sticking by the country’s Constitution be thought of as “extremists.”

4. Only in America … Could you need to present a driver’s license to cash a check or buy alcohol, but not to vote.

3. Only in America … Could people demand the government investigate whether oil companies are gouging the public because the price of gas
went up when the return on equity invested in a major U.S. Oil company (Marathon Oil) is less than half of a company making tennis shoes (Nike).

2. Only in America … Could the government collect more tax dollars from the people than any nation in recorded history, still spend a Trillion dollars more than it has per year – for total spending of
$7Million PER MINUTE, and complain that it doesn’t have nearly enough money.

1. Only in America … Could the rich people – who pay 86% of all income taxes – be accused of not paying their “fair share” by people who don’t pay any income tax at all.”

The cries for income equality by Obama and his peeps are making the rounds on all of the lame stream media networks. Obama is screeching about this issue because they need a shiny new object to distract from Obamacare and the upcoming 2014 elections and at the same time placing blame for the troubles of the poor/middle class/students.

Democrats have turned this into an art form, they very are good at it, and the uninformed suck it up like a sponge. They perceive this as another injustice done to them by the evil Republicans and bingo, the democrats get the votes, even though the uninformed voter is in reality, making his plight worse.

2004 essay by Paul Graham, it is long but worth the read.
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Like chess or painting or writing novels, making money is a very specialized skill. But for some reason we treat this skill differently. No one complains when a few people surpass all the rest at playing chess or writing novels, but when a few people make more money than the rest, we get editorials saying this is wrong.

Why? The pattern of variation seems no different than for any other skill. What causes people to react so strongly when the skill is making money?

I think there are three reasons we treat making money as different: the misleading model of wealth we learn as children; the disreputable way in which, till recently, most fortunes were accumulated; and the worry that great variations in income are somehow bad for society. As far as I can tell, the first is mistaken, the second outdated, and the third empirically false. Could it be that, in a modern democracy, variation in income is actually a sign of health?

Nature smiles at the union of freedom and equality in our utopias. For freedom and equality are sworn and everlasting enemies, and when one prevails the other dies. Leave men free, and their natural inequalities will multiply almost geometrically, as in England and America in the nineteenth century under laissez-faire. To check the growth of inequality, liberty must be sacrificed, as in Russia after 1917. Even when repressed, inequality grows; only the man who is below the average in economic ability desires equality; those who are conscious of superior ability desire freedom; and in the end superior ability has its way.

Read it all here

Amazing contrast from past to present to startling potential future. Go here now and read it in it’s entirety.
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I now live in Northern California, in the heart of the Bay Area, thousands of miles away from my homeland.
And yet the poison of Soviet propaganda seeps through college dorms just as it did in Soviet classrooms.

Living in the Soviet Union, being bombarded with similar nonsense, we had nothing to contradict it. When we walked outside the school, the everyday reality had no traces of the wealth afforded by capitalism. We lived in the grayness and that grayness was all there was.

Americans leave school to go home and they drop by a mall to buy something from an incredible selection of wealth and choice afforded by capitalism. They drop by a small corner store, which could probably feed a savvy Soviet village for a month (dog food is food, too, you know), and they pick up some “entertainment food” that did not exist in the USSR, in quantities that weren’t affordable for an average Soviet family.

Then they go home and write essays on their expensive iPads about how they don’t have the American Dream.

Now, most American news sources are no different than Pravda and Izvestia. Now, the government used the IRS to stifle political opposition. Now, ObamaCare is a wealth redistribution platform disguised as a common good. Now, Obama is being portrayed in academia and the media alike as a charismatic, messianic, “progressive” figure, fighting for the “underdog.” He would feel right at home as the General Secretary of the Communist Party. Now, Obama Youths are me, from decades ago. Leninist academia has had its way with them. Now, just like Soviet leaders, American leaders give lip-service to “social justice” while stocking up on personal wealth for their families.

There’s nothing new under the sun. I’m hardly the only ex-Soviet to point out the parallels. But some things matter enough to bear repeating.

Dear beautiful America, please, stop moving Forward.