I\u2019ve been editing newspapers long enough to have seen at least two waves of \u201cbubble\u201d job applicants.<\/p>\n
Back in the late 1980s, in Arizona, I advertised some relatively low-paying, modest-benefit newspaper jobs — stuff for which we would normally have expected to receive a dozen applications. Instead, we got 50. Many resumes had been jimmied around to stress work on the student newspaper in college, maybe a part-time radio job. Once you\u2019ve looked at a few hundred resumes you begin to easily spot gaps, omissions, euphemisms.<\/p>\n
\u201cOK,\u201d I\u2019d ask, \u201csince \u2018managing my family\u2019s real estate holdings\u2019 means mowing the lawn since I moved back into my parents\u2019 basement, what have you REALLY been doing for the past couple of years?\u201d Most would level quickly enough: they\u2019d been day-traders or otherwise involved in the stock brokerage business, which had just undergone one of its periodic crashes.<\/p>\n
Most had behaved as typical young folk, buying fancy cars and condos, figuring they\u2019d be raking in those (temporary) six-figure incomes forever because they were such gifted geniuses.<\/p>\n
It turned out Federal Reserve monetary policy and other misplaced government regulatory interventions had created false \u201cprice\u201d signals — and false investor confidence, since it couldn\u2019t be crooked if it was all \u201cgovernment regulated\u201d — indicating you \u201ccouldn\u2019t lose\u201d flipping stocks, buying into IPOs, etc. Though I don\u2019t remember the real culprits taking much of the blame, at the time. Instead, the fall guys were those usual suspects, the \u201cgreedy rich,\u201d who \u201cneeded more regulation\u201d by the very regulators who had been blithely assuring everybody everything was fine.<\/p>\n
Then 2008 hit, and we started to see the same phenomenon, although this time the young geniuses found themselves suddenly unemployed — after loading up on fancy cars and condos — after figuring you \u201ccouldn\u2019t lose\u201d flipping real estate.<\/p>\n
Once again, blame faulty price signals thanks to market and currency and regulatory manipulation — no more \u201cred-lining\u201d! — this time justified under the \u201cgood intentions\u201d of wanting to make home ownership possible for minorities, the poor, everybody, without forcing them to go through that old-fashioned nonsense of sticking with a boring steady job, saving up a hefty down payment, etc.<\/p>\n
In both cases, had all these suddenly-down-on-their luck high flyers been benefitting from \u201cwealth they didn\u2019t deserve\u201d? Maybe — though the real world seems to have self-corrected fairly quickly, except where government interventions continue to block a real correction. (Try renting office space in a vacant building now controlled by the \u201cFDIC.\u201d)<\/p>\n
The one thing we know for sure is that a system under which some government bureaucrat figures out what everyone \u201cdeserves\u201d to be paid is bound to be more pernicious, more enervating and stultifying and poverty-generating than the free market. The Soviet Union proved that.<\/p>\n
Talented doctors who are told they only \u201cdeserve\u201d to be paid the same as drywall installers will quickly flee to economies where they can earn whatever patients are willing to pay. (That\u2019s why communist states build fences to keep their people IN.) What do you think that does to the quality of your medical care? Perhaps you don\u2019t care, so long as it\u2019s \u201cfair,\u201d it promotes \u201ceconomic justice,\u201d and no doctor enjoys \u201cundeserved wealth.\u201d Frankly, I\u2019d rather have the best guy or gal possible wielding that scalpel.<\/p>\n
These days, they seem to have pried open the sarcophagi of a lot of the old Marxists, pumped them full of Herbert West\u2019s rejuvenation serum, and set them loose to recycle their old harangues. A recent favorite is \u201cLate last year the Washington politicians passed out big tax cuts to all their rich country club Republican buddies, and now they\u2019re trying to pay for it all on the backs of the working man by destroying collective bargaining.\u201d<\/p>\n
By the numbers: 1) The Democrat-controlled Congress and the Democratic White House last December combined to pass a tax bill leaving tax rates precisely where they were, except that the death tax went up from a temporary zero rate to 30 percent, which is a tax HIKE. They SHOULD have slashed taxes if they wanted an economic recovery, but they didn\u2019t.<\/p>\n
2) In Wisconsin, Tea-Party-supported Gov. Scott Walker now seeks to get his out-of-control state budget in hand by eliminating the foolish recent innovation of allowing state employees to collectively bargain for pensions and benefits. (Arbitrators award hikes based simply on whether \u201cgovernment can get the money.\u201d Sure they can, since tax rates know no limit.) Gov. Walker would still allow collective bargaining for wages — which is dumb.<\/p>\n
3) The \u201cworking men and women on whose backs\u201d the states now attempt to balance their budgets are $60,000, $80,000 and $100,000 state and municipal bureaucrats who work in air-conditioned offices, enjoying health benefits, pensions and paid vacation that long-suffering taxpayers would swoon in ecstasy to receive. They now whine that \u201cWe don\u2019t want more, we just want to keep what we\u2019ve got\u201d … after decades of double-digit pay and benefit hikes, enacted by their wholly owned legislative puppets in the face of warnings that all this stuff would prove unsustainable.<\/p>\n
But debating whether they should receive better pay and benefits than the taxpayers who support them misses the larger issue, which is whether most such jobs should exist at all.<\/p>\n
Randolph Scott, not the movie actor but the zoning commissioner of the city of Savannah, Georgia, recently decided the tradition of allowing Girl Scouts to sell cookies on the sidewalk in from of the historic Savannah home of Juliette Low, the woman who founded the Girl Scouts almost a century ago, violated the city zoning code.<\/p>\n
The Girl Scouts were kicked off the sidewalk.<\/p>\n
To which Jan McKinney, who heads product sales for the Girl Scouts of Historic Georgia, responded by telling the press that getting kicked off the sidewalk taught the girls an important lesson: \u201cWe try to teach them that in business you have to adjust to things that happen, adapt to the market and follow the law,\u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s a real-world experience.\u201d<\/p>\n
Teaching them what — that if you want to succeed as young entrepreneurs today you have to either have to stay out of sight of the G-men, entering the gray, Internet economy, or else export your jobs to Taiwan, Vietnam or Guatemala?<\/p>\n
Last week, the Savannah Board of Aldermen voted an exemption from the zoning code to allow the Girl Scout\u2019s sidewalk cookie sales to resume.<\/p>\n
That was the wrong thing to do. More useful would have been to say, \u201cAmerica surged to become the economic powerhouse of the world from about 1810 to 1960, give or take a few decades, during most of which time we had NO zoning code enforcement officers going around imposing costs on our businessmen, and thus (eventually — it takes awhile) driving them out of business. If this is the result of having a zoning code and a whole scorpion\u2019s nest full of \u2018enforcement officers,\u2019 let\u2019s see how much we can prune down our municipal budget by repealing the whole shebang, laying off every one of these suckers.\u201d<\/p>\n
Next week: Till \u201cEverybody has just what they need.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I\u2019ve been editing newspapers long enough to have seen at least two waves of \u201cbubble\u201d job applicants. Back in the late 1980s, in Arizona, I advertised some relatively low-paying, modest-benefit newspaper jobs — stuff for which we would normally have expected to receive a dozen applications. Instead, we got 50. Many resumes had been jimmied […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[43,25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-712","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-government-unions","category-history"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pWqFl-bu","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/712","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=712"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/712\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":714,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/712\/revisions\/714"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=712"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=712"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=712"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}