Time to Say Goodbye

I often write letters to the editor, they sometimes actually print them. I usually write because of something I read that was either really stupid or really smart - or sometimes they are a combination of both. Anyway, these are a couple of my May 2020 letters one of which was printed and the other is still to be determined.

First one is about the Supreme Court considering a case regarding Electors in the Electoral College (one of the greater mistakes in the Constitution.)

SCOTUS and Faithless Electors

There is some irony to the Strib news story about the SCOTUS case,the "unfaithful electors." There are many misconceptions about the electoral college. Among them is that electors are somehow associated with political parties. There is no mention of parties in the constitution and, in fact, the founding fathers hoped there wouldn’t be any parties. Fools! And no, the Electoral College (not it’s real name) wasn’t created to help the small states or protect us from big state liberals. And nothing about faithful. It was created to assure that voters didn’t get their way through “passion” and “mob rule.” Electors were to vote for “men most capable of analyzing the qualities adapted to the station, and acting under circumstances favorable to deliberation, and to a judicious combination of all the reasons and inducements which were proper to govern their choice.” (Whew, that sure worked out!) Anyway, they could vote for anyone, not just the candidates. In essence, make sure it was someone acceptable to the founding fathers (read: someone like them, probably wealthy and certainly white.) They clearly didn’t trust democracy - and maybe now we can all kind of see why. In any event, the original concept went out the door right after Washington retired and turned into just another electoral, political and undemocratic knot that has tied our country up the last couple hundred years. Time for it to go.

This letter obviously is about two different commentaries. One on the fact that a LOT of businesses are not coming back and probably shouldn't, pandemic or no. The other is about the consequences of the elimination of jobs due to automation that seems to be coming no matter what we wish. 

Two opinion pieces in the 5/23 paper are related and gloomy. Not to mention accurate. Cowen’s commentary should not come as a surprise to anyone who has been paying attention for the last 30 years or so. I believe most thinking people have suspected that our economy has become a flimsy shell of its former self borne out by how quickly it collapsed with the onset of the pandemic. Taken over by the financial industry, our economy is now captive to vague financial “instruments” that have enriched the top 1% while creating millions of low paying jobs in the service industry. As Cowen points out, many of the “service companies” with these employees couldn’t really exist without cheap, excessive debt - thanks to the Fed – for both businesses and we indebted consumers. That reckoning is just starting.

Trivedi’s piece regarding automation is equally telling. It is clear that a huge number of the jobs that exist for the average worker today are at risk of being automated and eliminated including many white-collar jobs as well. It has often been said, and was true, that automation creates more and better jobs. In fact, it seems that, again in the last 30 years, for most workers automation has simply driven the job creation to ever lower skill and lower paying jobs. I think what Trivedi’s is implying is that the next stop on this dismal train may be no jobs created. If true then, as he says, we really will have to rethink how our entire economy operates.

The massive job destruction by the pandemic may be just a preview of what our future might look like.     

You can decide for yourself on my view.