I was born and raised in a liberal Democratic household. My grandparents were socialists and my parents leaned to the left side of the democratic party. Socialism is the default position for most people growing up, for the best of reasons, which is why young people overwhelmingly support political parties that lean left.
Historically and phylogenetically, socialism is the more congenial system because, above all else, it lends itself to the illusion that it is more fair. In capitalist systems, there is enhanced competition and the very nature of the system is to be unfair, as successful people get rewarded and the less successful garner much less material reward.
The last century showed, in rather unmistakable terms, that capitalism is the much superior system in terms of generating wealth, but under capitalism, unfairness is impossible to avoid.
Since we spend a great deal of time and energy trying to ensure that life is fair, a truly noble imperative, capitalism is counter-intuitive. It requires unlearning much of what we learn in our earliest years and gaining a much deeper and more nuanced view of the economy and fairness. In the end, those of us who evolve in our economic/political thinking recognize that capitalism is ultimately more moral and more fair to the greatest number of people. Unfortunately, far too many Americans are economically illiterate and well into adulthood operate as if the world should be designed the way a typical kindergarten works, where adult authorities make sure everyone plays nice and that all the toys are equally shared.
Being economically illiterate is apparently one of the prime qualifications for being a New York Tims columnist. Consider this story from Bob Herbert, who bemoans the state of the job market for young people today:
When the dismal unemployment numbers were released on Friday (at the same time that oil prices were surging to record highs), I thought about the young people at the bottom of the employment ladder.
Below the bottom, actually.
A shudder went through the markets when the Labor Department reported that the official jobless rate had jumped one-half a percentage point in May to 5.5 percent — the sharpest spike in 22 year.
The young people I’m talking about wouldn’t have noticed. These are the teenagers and young adults — roughly 16 to 24 years old — who are not in school and basically have no hope of finding work. The bureaucrats compiling the official unemployment rate don’t even bother counting these young people. They are no one’s constituency. They might as well not exist.
Thus begins an impassioned story bemoaoning the unfairness of the recent economic boom times, acsribing all sorts of social patholgy to economic deprivation, and desperately seeking ways to help these unfortunates. There are problems in almost every paragraph in Herbert's column but the most interesting is an omission that he probably doesn't even realize would color and invalidate almost his every word.
“These kids are being challenged in ways that my generation was not,” said David Jones, the president of the Community Service Society of New York, which tries to develop ways to connect these young men and women with employment opportunities, or get them back into school.
It is extremely difficult because, for the most part, the jobs are not there and the educational establishment is having a hard enough time teaching the kids who are still in school.
“Schools have not made much of an effort to bring this population back in,” said Mr. Jones. “Once you fall out of the system, you’re basically on no one’s programmatic radar screen.”
So these kids drift. Some are drawn to gangs. A disproportionate number become involved in crime. It is a tragic story, and very few people are paying attention.
Herbert's first omission concerns the centrality of culture. Poor children in generations past, who had the requisite cultural underpinnings, succeeded at school, learned how to work hard, and gained a foot hold on the American dream. Children who blame others for their difficulties in school too often graduate without basic skills in math, reading, science, not to mention such abilities as getting to work on time, everyday. Many businesses today complain that high school graduates do not have some of the most fundamental abilities needed to hold a job, let alone succeed. Blaming the schools is easy, but incomplete. Culture regularly trumps education.
And, oh, the unfairness:
The economic policies of the past few decades have favored the wealthy and the well-connected to a degree that has been breathtaking to behold. The Nation magazine has devoted its current issue to the Gilded Age-type inequality that has been the result.
Just a little bit of help to the millions of youngsters trying to get their first tentative foothold in that economy should not be too much to ask.
It’s not as if these kids don’t want to work. Many of them search and search until they finally become discouraged. The summer job market, which has long been an important first step in preparing teenagers for the world of work, is shaping up this year as the weakest in more than half a century, according to the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University in Boston.
Now, with the overall economy deteriorating, the situation for poorly educated young people will only grow worse. As Andrew Sum, director of the Center for Labor Market Studies, told The Times recently:
“When you get into a recession, kids always get hit the hardest. Kids always go to the back of the hiring queue. Now, they find themselves with a lot of other people in line ahead of them.”
As the ranks of these youngsters grow, so does their potential to become a destabilizing factor in the society.
More important, the U.S. needs the untapped talent (and the potential buying power) in this large pool of young people, just as it needs the talents of the many other Americans of all ages whose energy, intelligence and creativity are wasted in an economic system that is not geared toward providing jobs for everyone who wants to work.
America needs to dream bigger, and in this election year, job creation should be issue No. 1. If I were running for president, I would pull together the smartest minds I could find from government, the corporate world, the labor movement, academia, the nonprofits and ordinary working men and women to see what could be done to spark the creation of decent jobs on a scale that would bring the U.S. as close as possible to full employment.
We’ve maxed out the credit cards, floated mindlessly in stock market bubbles, refinanced mortgages to death — now’s the time to figure out how to put all Americans to work.
Now, lets see if we get this right. Herbert wants someone to figure out how to find jobs for people who didn't finish high school and have no real job skills. He does not place any of the onus on the youngsters who don't know how to dress, speak, get to work on time, or consistently show up. He wants someone to hire young people who lack basic skills and pay them to work. What is missing here?
Last year the Democratic Congress increased the minimum wage in the face of warnings from economists that doing so would lead to increased youth unemployment as small businesses, the single largest source of employment opportunities in America, were forced to make the calculation whether a young person worth $5.85 an hour might not be worth $6.55 an hour, moving up to $7.25 an hour next year. Only a liberal could be surprised that this has come to pass.
Presumably the next move will be for the Democrats to create a jobs program, administered for high fees by the usual community activists, to provide opportunities for these young people. The program will be funded by raising the taxes on the rich, including small business owners, who will have to spend hours filling out forms in order to hire these marginal people at a wage that makes sense, subsidized by the taxpayers, ie the rich, ie anyone making more than $75,000 a year.
Only a liberal could think this makes more sense than allowing the market to determine what wages make sense to businessmen and women. The new jobs program will become a typical bureaucratic boondoggle and will lose more money and create less jobs than promised. But, liberals will all feel warm and fuzzy knowing they did something to help young people and make the world a fairer place...even if it doesn't work.
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