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 | Monday, November 17, 2008 at 12:37:04 mst
Comment ID: #1
Name: Adam Reed
E-mail: adamreedatalumdotmitdotedu
URL: http://www.calstatela.edu/faculty/areed2
The opposition - the Marxists during the "Red Decades" of the 30's and 40's, the Christianists today - exploit these contradictions using the Wedge Strategy and its variants. I am in the process of writing about those strategies, with Part I at http://borntoidentify.blogspot.com/2008/11/wedge-strategy-part-i-es ... . |
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| Monday, November 17, 2008 at 13:16:46 mst
Comment ID: #2
Name: Vic P
The Big 3 Auto Companies complain that the foreign auto makers received tax incentives and other advantages from states like North Carolina and Tennessee which allowed those foreign companies to flourish but disadvantaged the states of Michigan and Ohio which are homes to the Big 3. However that's the genius of the US Constitution which made the states standalone economic entitities responsible for their own governance and economic success. Now the Big 3 are using the overgrown Federal Gov't and taxpayer money to regain a market they lost through their own mismanagement. |
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| Tuesday, November 18, 2008 at 8:54:36 mst
Comment ID: #3
Name: Paul Hsieh
E-mail: paul(at)geekpress(dot)com
URL: http://www.geekpress.com
Here's part of a first-hand account on how unions (and bad management) have put the Big 3 auto makers in their current position:
http://www.regularfolksunited.com/index.php?tab=article_view&ar ...
...[A]s a former supervisor of UAW workers at a GM facility, I will say that poor management and union malpractice made the Detroit Three uncompetitive long before the government sent in their arsonists.
To put it bluntly, the UAW takes the hard earned money of the best workers and spends it defending the very worst workers while tying up the industry with thousands of pages of work rules that make it impossible to be competitive. And the spineless management often makes short sighted decisions to satisfy the union and maximize immediate benefits over long term sustainability.
The strength of the union and the weakness of management made it impossible to conduct business properly at any level. For instance, I had an employee who punched in his time card and then disappeared. The rules were such that I had to spend hours documenting that this man was not in his three foot by three foot work area. I needed witnesses, timed reports, calls over the intercom and a plant wide search all documented in detail. After this absurdity I decided to go my own route; I called the corner bar and paged him and he came to the phone. I gave him a 30 day unpaid disciplinary lay off because he was a "repeat offender". When he returned he thanked me for the PAID vacation. I scoffed, until he explained: (1) He had tried to get the lay off because it was fishing season; (2) The UAW negotiated with GM Labor Relations Department to give him the time WITH PAY.
I supervised a loading dock and 21 UAW workers who worked approximately five hours per day for eight hours pay. They could easily load one third more rail cars and still maintain their union negotiated break times, but when I tried to make them increase production ever so slightly they sabotaged my ability to make even the current production levels by hiding stock, calling in sick, feigning equipment problems, and even once, as a show of force, used a fork lift truck and pallets and racks to create a car part prison where they trapped me while I was conducting inventory. The reaction of upper management to my request to boost production was that I should "not be naive".
One afternoon I was helping oversee the plant while upper management was off site. The workers brought an RV into the loading yard with a female "entertainer" who danced for them and then "entertained" them in the RV. With no other management around, I went to Labor Relations for assistance. As a twenty five year old woman, I was not about to try to break up a crowd of fifty rowdy men. The Labor Relations Rep pulled out the work rules and asked me which of the rules the men were breaking. I read through the rules and none applied directly of course. Who wrote work rules to cover prostitutes at lunch? The only "legal" cause I had was an unauthorized vehicle and person and that blame did not fall on the union workers who were being “entertained” but on the security guards at the gate. Not one person suffered any consequence.
Another employee in the plant urinated on the feet of his supervisor as a protest to discipline. He was, of course, fired…that is until the union negotiated and got his job back.
Eventually I was promoted to a management position where I supervised salaried employees at HQ. As I left the plant I gave management a blunt message. I told them that I expected the union to act like the union, but I was disappointed that management didn't act like management.
This is why, with deep regret and sympathy for the many fine folks who work in the auto industry, I think it is time for consequences. Let them file Chapter 11 and reorganize. Let management act like management and the union stop destroying our competitiveness. And let the government get out of the business of business... |
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| Tuesday, November 18, 2008 at 16:02:45 mst
Comment ID: #4
Name: Gina Liggett
E-mail: GLiggett(at)comcast.net
It is beyond absurd that it's gotten this bad with the union behavior and power. Their jobs can just go straight to hell... |
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| Thursday, November 20, 2008 at 21:53:19 mst
Comment ID: #5
Name: KPO'M
E-mail: ka84796(at)comcast.net
While I take issue with some of the assertions (such as that Ayn Rand is at the heart of the modern libertarian movement), I think this is otherwise a pretty decent analysis of Alan Greenspan, and on point to the theme that it is impossible to operate under contradiction.
http://mises.org/pdf/sechrest-greenspan.pdf |
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| Thursday, November 20, 2008 at 23:10:56 mst
Comment ID: #6
Name: William H Stoddard
E-mail: whswhs(at)mindspring.com
URL: http://whswhs.livejournal.com/profile
KPO'M,
It is in fact the case, historically, that Ayn Rand is at the heart of the modern libertarian movement, even though that was never by Ayn Rand's own intention.
Back in 1964, Rand endorsed Barry Goldwater's candidacy for president, if not wholeheartedly, at least strongly. Many of her followers became active in the Republican Party and in organizations such as the Young Republicans and the Young Americans for Freedom. Rand's political ideas became part of the common currency of those organizations. But there were always tensions between the Objectivists and other people who advocated laissez-faire, and the more nationalist elements, largely focused on the military draft; and by the late 1960s, the group that included the people influenced by Rand had partly walked out and partly been pushed out of the "conservative" movement. Those are the people who became the nucleus of the libertarian movement. Many of them were young, but they were influenced by older people who had formerly been associated with Rand, including Murray Rothbard and John Hospers.
The Libertarian Party emerged somewhat later, and was never endorsed by all libertarians. (The major other position was principled non-voting; many of the people who took that approach were also anarchists who considered any government to be inherently coercive.) But the Libertarian Party's original statement of principle, which was that in joining you renounced the initiation of force as a means of achieving goals, was directly inspired by Rand's principle that "force may be used only in retaliation and only against those who initiate its use."
There are lots of libertarians who've felt the need to attack Ayn Rand, and to insist that they aren't speaking for her ideas. But many of the key libertarian formulations can be traced to Rand's writings, and the typical libertarian reading lists include a lot of the books that used to be recommended reading for Objectivists, such as the writings of Mises and Paterson. Anyone trying to understand libertarianism who doesn't know Ayn Rand's writing is going to be at a loss much of the time.
Whether libertarians *understood* Rand's ideas is, of course, a different question. |
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| Friday, November 21, 2008 at 21:20:03 mst
Comment ID: #7
Name: KPO'M
E-mail: ka84796(at)comcast.net
You may be right, but I think a reader can be confused into thinking that Ayn Rand was an advocate of libertarianism. That said, I think it is spot on in terms of Greenspan, and why Rand may have been deceived by him. It is also a good defense of the common criticism that the current financial crisis is somehow a repudiation of laissez-faire capitalism. I see a major opportunity for Austrian economics to jump to the forefront (having been one of the few economic theories to predict this mess for years). Pointing out that Rand advocated Austrian economics is an important part of defending and advancing Objectivism, IMO. |
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| Friday, November 21, 2008 at 22:06:25 mst
Comment ID: #8
Name: William H Stoddard
E-mail: whswhs(at)mindspring.com
URL: http://whswhs.livejournal.com/profile
KPO'M,
That argument about Greenspan and Austrian economics is certainly valid. But I think it also needs to be noted that advocacy of Austrian economics is widespread among libertarians. The Mises Institute, for example, call themselves libertarians, and in fact appear to be out and out anarchocapitalists, but at the same time they strongly advocate the Austrian theory of money, credit, and economic fluctuations, are deeply critical of current financial policy, and were predicting economic disaster for years before it became obvious. So at least as far as the current economic crisis goes, the identification of Ayn Rand as a libertarian doesn't seem all that likely to generate misinterpretations. Rather, the libertarians face the same popular confusion that Objectivists do: the identification of the current mess as a result of a free market.
Not all libertarians hold sophisticated ideas about economics. But those who do predominantly favor the Austrian school, just as Objectivists do. There is no distinctive "libertarian economics" or "Objectivist economics" that I know of. The differences between the two are to be found elsewhere. |
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