Half-Baked Marxism

Doomsaying futurists (is there any other kind nowadays) offer us a warning: The robots will take all our jobs!

Their assertion is that advancing automation and artificial intelligence will eventually displace too many human workers for the economy to retrench. Remedies - when they are offered - usually involve some sort of handout, as in "we" (aka the government, funding itself by a blend of taxation and money-printing) need to provide for the displaced. Whether that be the patchwork of money and benefits provided now, a universal basic income, or both, their message is always the same: Our society's advancement is creating a problem only coercive redistribution of wealth will be able to resolve.

We've been hearing the same bleat for a couple hundred years. Ever since the first machines replaced the first human laborers (see: Industrial Revolution, c. 1760-1840), doomsayers have doomsaid the same thing. "Where will all the farm hands get jobs when machines have displaced them?"

Prior to industrialization, well more than half of the West's labor force worked in agriculture, and 90+% of Americans lived on farms. Today, the agricultural labor fraction is in the low single digits, and fewer than 1% of Americans live on farms. Yet, we aren't suffering widespread unemployment. In fact, we are witnessing the opposite today. Even with rapid inflation, a recent recession (that shall not be acknowledged), and the potential for another one on the horizon, the unemployment rate stands at 3.5%. Anything below 4% is considered full employment, by the way, given that there are always frictions and transitions at play.

In fact, talk to many employers, and you will hear tales of labor shortages all over the place, in all sorts of jobs, both high-skill and low.

In NYC, there was a brief but scary nurse strike that delayed or denied many people the medical care they needed. It highlighted the long-running plaint that there is a shortage of nurses in health care. Apart from what we can expect to happen if the government eventually socializes health care, I don't see this shortage resolving itself - either by automation or by more young people pursuing that career.

This is a canary-in-the-coal-mine symptom of a broader societal problem. It's not the only canary either. There's been a shortage of skilled tradespeople for a couple decades, and the reality of our educational system coupled with what is exalted in our society today tells me that these shortages are not going away any time soon.

Thus, we have exactly the opposite of "robots taking all our jobs" at hand. We don't have enough people to fill the jobs that a healthy economy and free-market innovation create.

Perhaps as many as a third of American men of working age don't work, choosing get by on government handouts or savings or family largesse, and if that doesn't depress you, consider that one young person in four aspires, as a career path, to be a social influencer. This strikes me as the modern equivalent of joining a band. Millions do it with high-flying dreams and aspirations, but only thousands ever make a living from it.

Yes, indeed, the thirst-trap that is social media has lured a large chunk of America's youth in.

As has the other false promise known as socialism.

But only half-way.

Marx's "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" is a victim of the same short attention span symptom that has so many of us checking our phones in the middle of movies and unable to have a long single-topic conversation about anything anymore. The young people drawn in by the collectivist's siren song forget the first half by the time they've finished reading the second half. This makes their attention spans shorter than even that attributed to goldfish (alleged (spoiler alert - not true) to be about 5 seconds). By the time they hear "Oh, great! A system that'll take care of my 'needs' instead of me having to fend for myself!," they forget that this system expects them to subordinate their preferences to the collective when those preferences don't align with their best abilities. Or, more generally, that this system expects them to actually contribute rather than leech off others.

This stands above the longer running baseline of government dependence, aka the welfare trap. Many well-meaning people, both hard workers and dilettantes, who lament the plight of the nation's poor choose to address it by electing handout-happy politicians. Handing off responsibly to the vague notion of "the government," they consider their job done.

The government, as is so often the case, has made a total hash of that assignment. Rather than helping the poor with the leg up they might need to get to self-sufficiency and productive contribution, the patchwork of programs actually impedes that transition, trapping many into a lifetime of dependence.

Mammals, humans included, know instinctively that, at some point in the growth of their offspring, they must wean those offspring off their dependence on 'mother's milk' and guide them toward self sufficiency. Our modern, more-enlightened-than-thee Best-and-Brightest, on the other hand, have been working to delay or totally eradicate that idea. The more cynical among them know that the permanently dependent are most apt to vote for those who continue to promise them the free lunch. The rest? Victims of shallow thinking, they come up with such hare-brained coercions as "thou shalt insure thy customer's offspring until age 26" delays of adulthood.

Many among the young complain they can't find good jobs. Many among the young make those complaints after getting useless degrees in [choose an identity group] Studies or Comparative Underwater Basketweaving while incurring six-figure debt for the privilege of four years of whining and pity-parties. If they only kept in mind the first half of Marx's mantra, they'd have those Best-and-Brightest assess them and tell them "thou shalt study X in pursuit of a career in Y," their personal preferences aside.

Of course, this is one of the myriad reasons why Marxism doesn't work, and never will. Humans simply aren't wired to concede their lives to the collective. We are social creatures, but not hive members. We're wired to cooperation, not dead-end self-sacrifice.

This is the way with so many reimaginings of failed ideas. The "good stuff" that was part of that idea gets highlighted, with a "they simply did it wrong last time" dismissal of criticism. The "bad stuff" gets either ignored or replaced with some fantasy, as in "if only we all come together and do exactly what I think, it'll all be great, believe me!"

And then there's the shoehorning. Though I haven't heard it much lately, Bernie Sanders and his "bros" were so fond of pointing at Sweden as proof that Democratic Socialism not only worked, but produced wonderful outcomes. Problem is, his platform was so far removed from what they're actually doing in Sweden that he might as be selling kits to make fruit pies that contain neither fruit nor sugar nor flour nor shortening. His loyalists might very well tar and feather him if he actually proposed the Nordic model as it actually operates.

Marx was a schmuck. His ideas were lifted from Engels, as was the money he lived on. He concocted a cockamamie vision of the world, totally at odd with basic human nature and uninfected by reality, that offered false but enticing promises, and thus put forth a toolbox that dictators, autocrats, and other malefactors used with great effectiveness in turning gold to shit around the world, with a couple hundred million dead as their legacy. That he and the rest of his spawn (Lenin, Stalin, and the rest of the Soviets; Castro, Guevara, and the rest of the Western Hemisphere communists; Mao, Deng, and the balance of the CCP; Ho Chi Minh, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, Mugabe, and the various Kims, to name just a few) aren't as anathema on the lips of today's young people as Hitler is beyond travesty.

Yet here we are, with prominent activists openly embracing Marxism, and scads of young people buying their repackaged snake oil. While I neither see nor intend any connection with the pot legalization movement, the "half-baked" nature of this modern embrace of that awful philosophy screams for correlation and conflation. Given that, on any given jaunt around NYC (or even its roads and highways with the windows down), I almost invariably catch a whiff of that tell-tale skunk odor, the stoner jokes write themselves.

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