Ainda a Frase de Obama

Googlei a frase de Obama. Não fui o único a citá-lo. Vejam o que se escreve por aí, sobre o assunto.

National Review Online:

Indeed, globalization does weaken the position of a worker who works for a company that has no interest in exporting its goods to a foreign market. Globalization is indeed harmful to the interests of workers and companies who believe that Americans should be barred, or strongly hindered, from buying goods made overseas. Globalization is harmful to workers who don’t want to work for foreign automakers whose plants are based in places like Marysville, Ohio and Tupelo, Mississippi.

Technology weakens the position of a worker who makes buggy whips, rotary phones (no, wait, they can still make kitschy versions for Restoration Hardware), and the Edsel.

Technology like iTunes weakened the position of Tower Records. Much better that consumers be forced to buy the whole CD for $16.99 instead of buying only the songs they want.

Automation weakens the position of bank tellers, but not ATM repairmen. Automation has been brutal for the folks who make library card catalog notecards. Cellular phones and Blackberries have been terrible for those trained to install and fix public phones.

Don Boudreaux no Cafe Hayek:

According to today’s Wall Street Journal, Barack Obama alleges that “Globalization and technology and automation all weaken the position of workers.”  If this presidential wannabe is correct, then some of the world’s most prosperous workers must be the people in that newly discovered tribe in Brazil — persons with absolutely no contact with the global economy or with modern technology.

Less extreme cases, of course, include persons not so cut off from the world as these Brazilian tribes.  Sub-Saharan Africans should be more prosperous than eastern Europeans, who, in turn, should be more prosperous than Americans and western Europeans.

Of course, if the facts don’t follow this pattern, then I guess that Sen. Obama will soon publicly apologize for either misspeaking or admit that his thesis is flawed.

Chicago School:

How is trading goods and services a net loss to workers? Does he propose we not trade across state lines, county lines or outside our homes? Is his proposing a return to an agricultural society in which a family produces itself pretty much everything it consumes?

And how does technology and automation harm workers? Sounds like Ned Ludd. Does technology not increase worker productivity and thus increase the wages of workers?  Does Mr. Obama mean we should scrap our technology, our labor saving devices, to produce more but lower-paid jobs. Sounds like he wants to put every man, women and child back on the family farm. Should we dump the bulldozer and replace it with shovels. Perhaps a shovel is too high-tech for Mr. Obama. Spoons could create even more jobs.

Israpundit:

This is what we might expect from a political science major who experimented with Black Nationalism (per his own book, “Dreams From My Father”) and who may still subscribe to it. He believes that technology and automation “weaken the position of workers” and supplant “a lot of work that used to be done by middle-class workers.” The idea that automation supplants workers is the foundation of abject poverty, and indeed actual slavery, as shown by a brief history of the evolution of labor.

Thousands of years ago, people lived lives of subsistence because their hands were their only means of production, and their legs the only means of transportation. They could in fact own only what they could carry. The domestication of animals like horses and oxen allowed a much higher standard of living even though one animal could “displace” several men from backbreaking labor. The ancient Romans and Chinese, however, had ideas similar to Mr. Obama’s. Both societies invented animal-drawn reaping machines that could do the work of several slaves or peasants, but they dropped the idea for fear of idling the slaves. In other words, Mr. Obama’s ideology is a basic foundation of actual slavery.

The next step up from slavery was the laborer who worked for slave wages, e.g. as a 19th century coal miner or cotten harvester. He was free to change employers but, because all he could offer was his physical labor, he could earn barely more than a subsistence wage. The Luddites were willing to accept this as the price of “job security,” even though a machine that did the work of ten men might allow one man to earn the former (low) pay of five or ten workers. Technology and automation as deployed by the Ford Motor Company created the American middle class by empowering the blue-collar worker, the “bitter” small town person who “clings to guns and religion” who is now the backbone of the Democratic Party, to earn more than a subsistance wage. Automation and technology provided the laborer with discretionary income while bringing the cost of what were formerly luxury goods to everyday status. While it took fewer workers to produce a given amount of goods, the goods became less expensive while more people could afford them. This was not merely Henry Ford’s theory, it was how he sold millions of automobiles to autoworkers who could at last afford the product they made. This, in turn, created more as opposed to fewer high-paying jobs.

Thinking Things Through:

The things that Senator Obama laments are the things that improve people’s lives – even Senator Obama’s.

You can’t have progress without new and better things replacing older inferior things. This is bad news for the old industries and workers employed in old industries. But would it be better off if we had outlawed refrigeration in order to keep the ice man employed?

I doubt that Senator Obama is actually opposed to progress. Maybe he just wants to slow it down. Or maybe he wants to provide mitigation for the people who are adversely impacted. But any mitigation diverts resources from the system that produces progress – so it’s just another way of slowing down progress.

So here’s the thing to think about: should we slow the rate of progress in order to reduce the disruption to people ensnared in the “old ways”? If we do, we will pay a price. Our children, and their children, will pay a bigger price. Think it through.

Lou Minatti

So someone clue me in: Why is factory automation a bad thing? Shouldn’t Americans strive for something better than working on a factory assembly line manually gluing a plastic part onto another plastic part 4,000 times a day? That’s not a job most of us would or should aspire to. Isn’t globalization good for our high-value manufactured exports like airplanes and tractors and earth moving equipment? Those are the kinds of manufacturing jobs we should aspire to keep. And technology is bad for workers? WTF?

Blogo Wogo:

Damn that globalization, technology, and automation! Now please be quiet while I watch the US Open being played in La Jolla, Californa, while I’m on a campaign bus in Flint, Michigan.

Há mais, por aí.