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Frank Lee's avatar

I have a background as a corporate IT executive. I remember driving home from work one day depressed after a meeting with a division head that wanted a new multi-million dollar computer system that would be funded by the savings it would derive in a reduction in workforce. I was literally working in a discipline to reduce the number of jobs in corporate America.

Currently I own and run a couple of small businesses. One of them is a non-profit that provides financing to small business with a mission to grow jobs in the communities we serve (a tonic to my previous professional job-destruction role). Both of my businesses have seen personnel costs and other costs rise, primarily because of the constant increase in regulatory compliance, fee and taxes and dumb policy moves... with the fees and taxes going to government... government that keeps expanding and with government employees that are all paid significantly more than their private sector peers in total compensation.

In the other business, which is a food product manufacturing operation, we needed a piece of equipment to support a task that was significantly difficult manual labor. The equipment was only made in China and Canada... even though the design of the equipment was originally made in the US and produced in the US. The Canadian version of the equipment was not a good fit for our application (they were targeting larger operations). So I had to purchase a Chinese version. The installed equipment freed up my employees to do more valuable labor.

I would have paid 2x or 3x the cost of the Chinese equipment to purchase USA-made equipment.

However, it is not made here. It is not made here for several reasons.

1. It requires welders, and welders are in short supply in the US.

2. The business to make the equipment is industrial and the US regulations for starting an industrial business are complex, costly and restrictive.

3. The energy costs for an industrial equipment manufacturer are extreme in many parts of the US.

4. US parents have sent their kids to expensive liberal arts schools and the kids don't want to work at any physical labor.

5. The parts of the country where these jobs would be welcome are a mess with drug problems and crime. And the education system sucks so bad that there the number of people that can be trained to do the jobs required to manufacture the equipment are too few.

Today there are millions of unfilled jobs, and plenty of opportunity to start and grow small businesses that would provide more jobs. However, the Marxists know that they are better served to push these narratives of automation causing the need to approve Universal Basic Income.

One last point. Collectivism does not work. It sucks in any form. You cannot pay people to not work and expect human needs will be met. We are better off subsidizing work as needed to get more humans doing productive things. We are entering an anti-work cultural shift that is terrible and will be the end of us if it continues.

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Jay's avatar

I think you're making two fundamental errors here. One, you're not distinguishing productivity and distribution. Two, you're not distinguishing what productivity gains are technological and what are non-technological. These are important distinctions!

Start with one. You characterize Denmark, Sweden and so on as "more socialist" -- but their difference from what you would call "less socialist" countries, like the United States, is overwhelmingly in their distribution of wealth, not in their production of it. Both groups have golden gooses. They distribute the eggs quite differently. But their gooses are not very different at all. You can't use the success of messing with distribution as evidence that it would be good to mess with production. They aren't the same things. To say otherwise would be to say that, oh, ok, since messing with who gets the eggs works fine, it would also be ok to mess with the goose. That's obviously not true, and it's how you end up with a dead goose.

Second. Not all of the gains in productivity are technological. We've all had or heard of bad bosses. Not jerks or criminals, but ones who organize things badly, who make bad decisions. Bosses who are not engineers but harass the engineering team with useless suggestions and directives. Bosses who are lawyers that insist that the support staff use a word document for a task that is obviously more suited to a spreadsheet, because the lawyer is more comfortable with word documents. Bosses who insist on unanimity as a decision-making process only to discover that the only way to get that unanimity is to kick out the dissenters, which they do. It's easy to believe that these things are symptoms of capitalism, but there's another possibility which is that this sort of behavior is basically human, and capitalism's pressures to deliver the goods (especially in more competitive industries) significantly reduces such behavior. I certainly believe that, and if those of you that have worked with or seen a lot of badly-managed movements in the non-capitalist space consider how much bad management they have vs. how much bad management is in business, you may find that you believe it too. Good management is hard, and transitioning social systems can 100% throw it down the drain. I know you don't like to use the example of Chinese communist experiences because they are old, but I really think that the fact that farms in China became outrageously more productive once Deng Xiaoping allowed them to operate privately is a pretty clear indicator that it isn't all about technology. Those farms didn't suddenly get a bunch of technological breakthroughs. The technology was the same before and after. What they got was better management. It's not all about the tech.

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