Here Among the Nuts

The trouble with being a nut is that you are a similar shape as other nuts and you all tend to roll into the same corners when things get shaken up. I find myself in the company of an odd assortment of lovely, rugged individualists -- opinionated the lot of them, well-read (I almost said "educated' but then given the unipolar structure of modern education these days "educated" can mean a lot of things). They are, however, for the most part, fair fighters. Oh, we've had some brouhahas, but without the typical animus you see in the press and on social media lately. We tend to argue until someone runs out of facts or energy or witty comebacks. We throw memes at each other, but most of us don't hate each other - at least not those who have rolled into the corners I frequent since the great shaking of 2016.

Mostly it's a vicious Marxist sort of snide cracks and jibes (Groucho Marxist that is). One finds out rather quickly who can't stand the heat. They abandon the kitchen and try to lock the door behind themselves. Only to find, of course, that the door only locks from the inside and most of us are in favor of leaving the door unlocked so that new material may drift back in once in a while to give us subjects for our weblogs and memes.

You know, like Trump pressers, Biden speeches, AOC tweets, or Pelosi tantrums. This past week has been an embarrassment of riches for conservatives as the boys at Right Angle called it.

I think what this is, may be the inevitable row couples get into sometimes when something has been wrong but nobody wants to talk about it. We're polite to each other while the problem festers until things blow up. Then, we either get a divorce or we apologize, have sex and make up. Nations don't actually have sex. Usually they have an all out war and then everyone's fine for a while. It can't be these little gropey brushfire shootouts either. It's make the danged declaration and then go unload your carriers on them, roll out the tanks, send over the B-2s.  I hope we don't have to have a bloody knock down, drag out with Russia or China or the whole Middle-East. It's unlikely I think. Russia has the sense to know it's badly outclassed and that we've got another one of those cowboy presidents. That scares them enough to give pause. China may be in the process of eliminating themselves with their own bio-weapons, and the Middle East couldn't get organized enough to pick someone to head up the committee to throw a falafel-themed potluck dinner.

I'm a pessimist about the fate of the world. For the first time in history, we have the technology to turn our nations into puddles of glass and we have the lunatics in positions of power who would push the necessary buttons. I figure we'll one of these days, argue ourselves into a giant nuclear orgasm at which time Jesus will come round collecting baskets full of nuts from those those stray corners they've rolled into, before they get over-roasted.

 © 2020 by Tom King (excerpt from my comment on "Random Thoughts by Mark Milliorn)

Socialism - Always a Surprise When You Open the Pretty Package!

Progressives will tell you how terrible it is that the minimum wage is not a "living" wage.

Well, duh! 

Low wage jobs available to unskilled laborers were never intended to be a living wage. Entry level wages are intended to be what they are - entry level pay for entry level jobs. These are jobs requiring little skill, training or experience. They get you in the door while you are in high school, college or just starting out so you can learn how to work, teach you how to manage money and give you some experience to put on your resume'.

The Progressive so-called "minimum living wage" proposes to force the economy to adjust itself to provide better money for people with no skills. The trouble is that with the higher bottom end wages, employers can offer no real incentive to entry level employees to do what they need to do to improve their circumstances.  Worse yet, it provides a disincentive to people who DID work hard to get that increase into living wage country, because employers find themselves unable to provide financial incentives to their ambitious employees without raising prices on the customers. And when they do inevitably raise prices for the consumers, the increased costs cause cascading inflation and prices go up enough to negate the raises the so-called "living" wage provided. Once again, thanks to inflation, the living wage becomes no longer a living wage and what was once a living wage becomes the equivalent to the former minimum wage and nobody is doing any better.

Ironically, the artificially inflated minimum wage winds up damaging the very people it purports to care about. It promotes inflation, raises prices on goods and services, closes small businesses, restaurants, small transportation and delivery companies, and such.. Centrally planned governments have to eliminate diversity, particularly business diversity in order to cope with their own bureaucratic paperwork. The more individual members of an economy, the more paperwork the bureaucracies generate for each other and the more bloated the government bureaucracy becomes.

Socialism favors, not mom & pop business, but massive corporations. Why? Because it's much easier to manage the integration of a a few massive corporations into the government planned economy than it is to manage millions of small entrepreneurial businesses into the government's economic schemes. Progressive socialism as it turns out, tends to kill local small business despite their pro-local rhetoric. Bureaucrats, always looking to ease their workload create economies that only work if all business is big business. Easier to manage that way.

It's like that whole, "You have to pass the bill before we can show you what's in it" business.

Socialism! Always a surprise when you open the pretty package!

© 2020 by Tom King