Tom wants reparations, from whom, I'm not quite sure: > Economists talk about this all the time - "easing the pain" > for people displaced by macroeconomic currents - but IT NEVER > ACTUALLY HAPPENS. We never, as a society, seriously think > about compensating the victims of necessary economic change. > We don't help them, we don't make arrangements, we don't > think or talk about it. Basically, we live in a "you're on > your own" society that believes everyone succeeds or fails, > rises or falls, completely on their own. Until it happens to us.
Most people don't like to think about bad things that might happen or mitigating risks, especially when they're young. But it's your own fault if you don't buy car insurance because you like to think you won't crash your car or you don't buy life insurance to support your family because you don't think you'll keel over dead at 35. And it's your fault if you think your training and your job have you set for life and you don't have to think about what happens if innovation makes you obsolete. Many people think they have a god-given right to keep doing whatever job they'd like to keep doing in the way they'd like to keep doing it, and as long as they obey the rules and don't goof off, they deserve to be taken care of. I have sympathy for people displaced from jobs they've grown comfortable in. Hell, I'm facing the possibility of becoming one of them, and recently scrambled to switch jobs because I saw my current job waving bye bye on the ship to India). My whole specialty may be obsolete in 5 years and I'll have to re-educate myself, accept lower pay, start over. What I don't have sympathy for is people who are in complete denial this could happen until they get the layoff notice, and then they expect me to pay to retrain them or to subsidize them while they sit on their lazy butts for months till unemployment runs out, and then move in with their moms. Hardly anybody thinks that businesses that go under should be compensated and cuddled by the government for having their livelihood disappear. If a business can't cut it in the marketplace, tough. Worse than that, when a business is going under, and the owner must liquidate inventory at a loss, all the people who most want a safety net are the first piranhas in line for their 80% off. Losing your job sucks, but it doesn't usually leave you deeply in debt on top of everything else. Getting fired is not essentially different from going bust. As an employee, you're not naturally entitled to be shielded from market realities. The trouble is most people who are employees know damn well at an unadmitted level that they don't really have what it takes to cut it in the marketplace without an employer to champion them and protect them. So they hate to think of themselves as vulnerable to the market. Instead, they subconsciously make a bargain of taking less money and taking orders in return for security. That's fine, to make that bargain, if you know you're doing it, and you know the limits of it. But most employees get in this mode of not ever thinking that the company they work for could go under, like a child finds it unthinkable that daddy could die. Well, we're not children anymore, so it's time to face the world rationally, and that includes facing the fact, years before your job disappears, that it could go away, and being prepared for it, and noticing threats that make the prospect more imminent. And if you don't, well, then I'll be over to your yard sale buying your stuff at 80% off. Mike Lee Islamic Moderate _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
