Archive for November 12th, 2010

Half Wits

I like to say I always wanted to be a real wit and I’m halfway there already.

The country is run by two sets of half-wits. Both sides say “Follow the money” but each follows half the money. Liberals are always talking about Big Business and Military expenditures but they never wonder about the titanic industries that taught them their own ideology.

Conservatives believe they are wiser about “the money.” They talk about land, labor, capital and management, but they never think of the biggest economic factor of all.

The minute you cross into Mexico you are in a place where the per capita income is, and always has been, a fraction of that of the United States. Is this land or labor or capital or management?

None of the above. It is the one thing a conservative cannot say and be respectable. I put it in a book in 1982.

Mexico is poor because its population is made up of MEXICANS.

If I were to give you a choice of places to invest, and I said “The only factor you have to go on is the color of the skin of most of the population,” where would you put your money?

And for all their exceptions and loud protestations that everybody is alike except for the Book they get their economic philosophy from, it will be an icy day in Hell before Forbes or any other conservative puts his money where his mouth is.

One of the basics that makes our society so irrational is that both sides are frustrated that they cannot get the other half to see the half that is obvious to them.

I was on the Education and Labor Committee staff on Capitol Hill. Conservatives told stories about the absurdity of OSHA, the agency that regulates safety at work sites. They got their complaints from employers. Democrats in general got their complaints from union officials and ideologues who declared their sympathy for The Working Class.

All I knew about work sites was the places I had worked and the working people I had talked to. On OSHA, I followed a course as simple as the Mantra and damned near as heretical. I wrote an amendment for John that required a cost-benefit, real accidents report on a work site before a regulation was passed.

Workers were stunned by this naiveté, but the only other choice was having no OSHA at all.

I worked on plants before the rules were made, and I was about the only conservative who didn’t oppose OSHA on principle. But OSHA was also the product of the other set of halfwits.

Follow the money. OSHA was part of those programs Mommy Professor naturally advocates as a way for Intellectuals and Idealists like themselves to run industry for the benefit of The Working Class. It was staffed accordingly, with budding intellectuals, not with the poor, simple-minded working class that they tell their students about.

There were some Democrats who actually had seen real live working people. We made changes, but the whole subject is so complicated and the results so partial that, believe me, you don’t want to hear about it and I am too tired to remember most of it.

But halfwits only see Capital, represented by corporation executives who come up through bureaucracy, and Labor, a bunch of people who must be protected, not least from themselves. Look at all those Wallace votes!

Millions of working people voted for Wallace, and no Democrat will ever admit that what he said should be listened to.

The years it took to get Republicans to get the Wallace vote, now known as Reagan Democrats, show that they had the same view of working people that their fellow country club members who were limousine liberals had.

A good example of the results of this kind of thing was OSHA. Either no OSHA or Mommy Professor’s OSHA.

The point is that the people in charge ARE half wits. But it is high time we stopped grieving over it and looked at WHY this is the case.

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