(A note from a friend)
In the late 1800s, things in the United States were going pretty darn good. We were between wars. The sweeping depression of 1873 had about run out of steam. The American Association of baseball had cemented its status as National Pastime by offering beer and whiskey at their games, offering those in attendance a total of two of the three most popular American interests.
The population of the United States was mainly hardworking. Nearly everybody that wanted to work had a job and knew what work was. Preparing for a career was easy. Slightly over 9 out of every 10 workers in the U.S. were somehow engaged in the agricultural field. Virtually every teenage male knew how to plow behind a horse or mule. They knew how to tend livestock, breed them, raise them, treat them for their illnesses, market them. They grew crops, hand-plowed, sheared, neutered, mowed (also by hand), bartered, shoed, shoveled, hoed, sowed -- generally worked their rear ends off to provide for themselves and their families. Blisters on the hands were the rule rather than a rare sympathy-getter. “Gov’mint” was just a curious abstract one kept as far away from as possible. Life was good but required physical labor.
In the late 1880s a guy named John Froelich was making his living threshing crops through Iowa and the Dakotas. He hauled his crew and a heavy steam-powered thresher from farm to farm threshing crops for a fee. The farmers that could afford his services were able to cut their employees by nearly one half. But there was a downside -- his thresher was an accident waiting impatiently to happen, for one spark from the boiler could set fire to farms and prairies alike. Froelich and his crew divided their time between threshing and fire-fighting. He was seldom invited back to a scorched farm.
Tired of his costly pyrotechnical mishaps, in 1890 Froelich tried something new and innovative.. He and the local blacksmith pulled the capricious boiler off the threshing rig and replaced it with a one-cylinder gasoline engine. Froelich's resulting gasoline powered contraption may have only chugged along at three miles an hour but, using just 26 gallons of gas, he could thresh more than a thousand bushels of grain every day of the harvest season. And he did it without starting one single fire! Move over, sliced bread, there was a new hero in town. It was called a tractor.
But life’s kinda’ fickle. It seems like every time something goes up, something’s gotta come down. And so it was with this revolutionary tractor. It wasn’t long before a whole bunch of farm-hands found themselves out of jobs . . . and I mean, a whole gol-dang bunch. In many areas more than half the human force had been abruptly displaced by the newly-arrived “technology” of that era. Many small-farm operators soon let all their employees go. Farming, with its gasoline and diesel powered time savers, would never be the same . . . nor require the manpower. (In 1918, an outfit called John Deere Plow Manufacturing Company bought Froelich’s Waterloo Gasoline Traction Engine Company for $2,300.)
Whoa! (Gee? Haw?) Where the heck are you taking us, Ron? Who gives a tinker's damn about farming and threshing and gasoline tractors? Well, dear reader, YOU should! Maybe you'll never step foot on a farm, but if we don’t learn from the past, we’re sure as shootin' destined to remain just a little dim-witted. (Dim-wittedness is the third most popular national pastime these days. Did you flunk that one?)
Old man "normalcy bias" had us believing things would always be as they were. Junior grew up in bib-overalls and by the time he was five had learned how to steer a balky mule. Back then, new wives had better know how to milk old Bossy and work a churn. Farming/ranching provided a major part of the gross domestic product. BUT, as little in life remains constant, the working force had changed almost over night when the tractor arrived.
By 1930 there was no great demand for farm workers in America. The U.S. work-force had shifted to manufacturing. American workers turned out excellent appliances, furniture, autos, electronics. "Made in America" was a sought-after logo and our exporters had no trouble finding international markets. Times in the U.S., while still not easy, were tolerable, and no one went hungry. Incomes across the board improved. The poor in the U.S. were better off than the middle class in Europe and the upper class in Asia. The Europeans and Asians grew envious and knuckled down to "catch-up." The Americans responded with complacency and invented the three-day weekend and the strike.
At the beginning of 1930, with a population of 122 million, there were 1 million UNemployed. Then, and thanks to the world's Great Depression, at the end of that one year the unemployment had reached 2.5 million. By 1932, 24% of the American workforce was idle. By the end of the 1930s only a World War put Americans back to work, and not on the farm.
By the onset of the Twenty-First Century, the population in the United States had tripled from the times of John Froelich. Conversely, labor-saving machines and technology had continually and dramatically lowered the need for human labor. As a percentage of total population, the work-force never regained the strength it had in agricultural times. Constantly seeking an easier way to support themselves, Americans were relentlessly inventing themselves out of a livelihood.
During that same period, the need for trained human minds had increased while human knowledge had decreased. Today the youth of our land write poorly. Their comprehensive skills have diminished along with their ability to read, write and spell (thanks to things like shortcuts in speech and an "innovation" called texting). Their mathematical abilities have withered thanks to the availability of iPads, "smart phones," and plain old cordless calculators. Book reading is a thing of the past. Anyone over fifty listening to everyday conversation is appalled by the sophomoric language liberally sprinkled with "y'know" and splattered with "uhh." It took humanoids nearly a million years to learn to speak coherently and, from the looks of things, it will be lost in just another couple of generations . . . "Uhh, y'know?"
Another hurdle to present itself to generations in the U.S. following WWII was called "a world market." While American youth were honing their hedonism and experimenting with cannabis, a great deal of the young of foreign countries was striving to become better educated. As I write this, entry-level workers in the U.S. (averaging $10 an hour) are demanding $25 an hour. In contrast, there are counties in India that have a minimum wage of 38¢ an hour. At certain levels of manufacturing, they are turning out a superior product. Does it take a rocket scientist to understand why American companies are outsourcing? Why jobs that were once here have gone overseas? And, like all those farm jobs, they aren't coming back!
The most popular major at U.S. colleges is Liberal Arts. Where only ten percent of males graduated from high school at the turn of the 20th Century, today's youth spend an average of six years getting a bachelor's degree. Nearly half of them go on to a master's degree. There is little attention paid to the product of their education: what they learn to do. To illustrate, I reported last summer that, of the 42,000 law school graduates, less than half found work in the legal field. Over 20,000 of them are vying for those entry level jobs. A great percentage of them get out of school owing $49.000. in student loans. They learned nothing of value in the trades, only how to research legal precedence. Ask one of them to connect a circuit breaker into an electrical system or plumb a bathroom and they'd be stymied.
But, just as technology in the form of a tractor replaced the farm-hands, crypto-currency is replacing money. Robotics and artificial intelligence are replacing the human brain. Yet, and despite the lessening need for people skills, our parasitic government continues to grow, draining the income of the nation's workers. Hastening the inevitable financial imposion due to more Americans taking than are giving, the labor unions continue to provoke the government to "legislate" wage increases.
Any economist worth his salt knows you cannot pass laws forcing larger profits in competitive enterprise (note I didn't say "free" enterprise . . . nothing about enterprise is "free"). Each company is like a lemonade stand, some just bigger than others. You work harder to turn out a better lemonade than your competition. As the person who owns the stand makes more net profit, the more he is able to pay his help. If he doesn't increase the pay to coincide with the increased net, he will lose his employees to another lemonade stand.
Why is it so difficult for Americans -- especially young Americans -- to understand this basic principle? The tractor ended the era of agriculture-by-hand. Barring something drastic, we will never return. What's more, we've overpopulated to the point that arable land is buried beneath concrete and asphalt. Twenty accountants in an office have been replaced by ONE with a digital computer. The human assembly lines of Henry Ford have evolved into a bunch of robots that never ask for time off.
Yet our youth still train for these disappearing jobs. Remember last year's 42,000 grads competing for 20,000 jobs in the legal field? That is not an unusual occurence. We spend huge amounts to educate our kids and, in many cases, prepare them for jobs that we've allowed to swim to foreign shores. "All dressed up with no place to go" comes to mind. Yet our products are labeled "Made In China" or plain "Bangladesh." Why? Because our new entries into the labor field CAN'T MAKE ANYTHING.
How do we combat this self-destruction? Collective bargaining can't help. A group of demonstrating employees coercing their employer to raise their wages (in some ridiculous cases, double them) can ONLY result in their own ultimate unemployment. And what does an incompetent government do? They mandate wage-increases. What idiocy! Only a group of morons who had never been in the trenches of the private sector could come up with such a stupid idea. Legislating wealth? Sitting in an ivory tower and creating wealth "with the stroke of a pen and a telephone"? IMPOSSIBLE !!!
