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This is from a Walt Williams post on Capitalism Magazine. Although it mostly focuses on jobs being shipped offshore, it also addresses the "problem" of technology making less automated labor obsolete:


Recent advocacy of free trade in this column has caused considerable reader apoplexy and anxiety, not to mention accusations of unconcern with worker plight. Readers have protested loss of good paying jobs to low-wage countries such as India, China and other Asian countries. I'd like to propose a way to completely eliminate this angst, and I'm wondering just how many of my fellow Americans would support it.

Let's call it the Level Playing Field Act, where Congress decrees that: Neither a corporation nor an individual shall be permitted to employ a cheaper method of producing a good or service.

The Level Playing Field Act would be a blessing for all those highly paid workers in the high-tech, auto, steel and other industries who see their jobs going to overseas workers earning far less than half their wages. To produce the most successful outcome, Congress would have to complement this law with a similar decree on the consumer side of things, namely: Neither a corporation nor an individual shall be permitted to purchase a cheaper good or service.

This job-saving measure wouldn't only apply to jobs lost to low-wage countries, but it would also apply to automation caused by job-destroying machines. England's 19th century Luddites understood this very well, but they took matters into their own hands and went about destroying job-destroying machinery.

I can sympathize with the Luddites. After all, it's no less painful to a worker who loses his job because the corporation has moved his job overseas than to a worker who loses his job to a cost-saving machine. Either way, he's out of a job.

Being 67 years old, I've witnessed a lot of job destruction. As a young man, I enjoyed watching road construction. At that time, road construction required enormous teams of men doing everything from using jackhammers and pickaxes to dig up cracked pavement to using long two-by-fours to even out and finish the concrete. We just don't see much of this now. These good-paying jobs have been destroyed by huge machines operated by a few men who do the work that took hundreds of men to do yesteryear. Had the Level Playing Field Act been on the books, we'd still have those jobs.

Job-destroying machines haven't spared women. Yesteryear, thousands of women had good-paying jobs as telephone switchboard operators. Switching machines and later computers destroyed those jobs. Five and dime stores had one or two ladies behind every counter to help customers. Checkout stands and packaging have destroyed all of those jobs. The Level Playing Field Act would have saved those jobs.

Then there's the consumer side of things. Years ago, there were loads of corner grocery and hardware stores. Because of selfish consumers, motivated only by getting something cheap and not caring about what happens to small businessmen and their employees, these stores are mostly gone. They've been replaced by huge, impersonal supermarket chains and super hardware stores like Home Depot and Lowes. Had my proposed law been on the books, small grocery and hardware stores would not have gone the way of the dinosaur.

Some people might argue that what I'm proposing is too extreme. They might say, "We're just talking about saving all of our high-tech and manufacturing jobs going overseas." Such a position seems selfish and self-serving in the least. After all, one of the overriding values of a free society is equality before the law. That means if Congress takes a measure to save the job of one American, it's obliged to save the jobs of all Americans. No worker is more deserving than another. That means there can't be job-saving discrimination.

Your US government is trying to appease Microsoft. Appeasement never works. It only buys short term security. It doesn't work in diplomacy with countries, corporations or any relationship..

Though drawing parallels between brutal dictators and Bill Gates may seem harsh, the principle is the same. If people think they're safe now from Microsoft's monopolistic practices, they've bought into a false sense of security.

That wasn't a ballistic missile plant--it makes space launch vehicles for TV satellites. "Bowling for Columbine" wasn't a documentary, it was a mockumentary like "This is Spinal Tap". Read the truth here.

Russia has a 13% flat tax.

Since when were ex-KGB Soviet Commies like Vladamir Putin "extreme right-wing"? :)

And don't forget McDonalds for making us fat.

Actually, the largest increase since WWII

Personally, I agree with you that the Democrats, with the exception of their inane gun-control platform, are becoming a party that endorses far less government infringement upon the populace than the Republicans, especially with the latest round of PATRIOT-type legislation...

However there is an especially insidious reason to believe this market will be quite limited this time around, compared even to the depression of the 1930's, and that is the nature of the individuals in whose hands the net assets are concentrated.

When Greenspan decided to depart from his gold standard by keeping interest rates high relative to gold during the crash he in effect decided to concentrate net asset ownership in the hands of people who don't necessarily have the best of characters -- indeed they are far from the ideal of heroic capitalists so promoted by Alan Greenspan himself when he was a devotee of Ayn Rand's.

As I stated in a white paper posted to sci.space in 1992 (resulting from having spent a few years doing politics in Washington to promote commercial incentives for space launch companies):

Just as important, capital welfare severely distorts the
optimization of asset ownership in society by placing, as a
matter of public policy, ever more assets under the control of
those who already have the most assets. Capitalism expresses its
worst potentials when capital welfare debilitates the character
of the wealthy while it gives them ever more economic authority.
This asset centralization impoverishes the population at large,
ending with a collapse in consumer demand. Supply-side theory
fails to predict this collapse because it fails to deal with the
fact that the wealthy are just as prone to character erosion by
welfare as are the poor. It is even more destructive than
welfare for the poor because it corrupts the decision makers in
the economy. In the face of collapsing consumer demand and
capital welfare, acquisition of more capital assets is promoted
over the productive use or investment of those assets.

Political rhetoric defining "the rich" or "the wealthy" as those
with high levels of income or capital appreciation, focuses
public sentiment against the most productive members of society
and away from the centralization of net assets as the underlying
problem.

The incentive for productivity in the economy, left after the
disincentives of capital welfare are subtracted, is the long-term
economic growth rate minus the interest rate on the national
debt. When the interest rate being paid on the national debt
equals the growth rate of the economy, the fruits of all
productivity are being confiscated to pay capital welfare and the
incentives for productive investment and labor disappear. When
the incentives for productivity become negative due to capital
welfare in excess of the economic growth rate, wealth is
structurally centralized at the expense of others in the economy.
The absolute level of net assets owned by the general population
actually decreases so as to increase the net assets of the
wealthy. This not only removes all incentives for production and
entrepreneurial investment from the economy, but consumer demand
collapses as credit is liquidated to pay for necessities.
Depression ensues. It is under these circumstances that demands
for socialist intervention in the economy via "pub

Face it: if Ellison and his buddies hadn't bought congress to get the H-1b program, most of the folks reading this would be in a far better economic position. For that matter if McNealy's co-religionist Greenspan(McNealy and Greenspan are both Ayn Rand fans) were consistent in his policies, instead of playing games that centralize assets you'd be a lot better off.

There would be a slump right now even without H-1b, but instead of 500,000 unemployed engineers, we might be looking at 50,000 or so-it that.

There are still a lot of high leverage areas in software: embedded systems, bioinformatics, robotics. What isn't clear to me if dinosaurs like Oracle,Microsoft, Sun really should be playing any role in the new software business. I say that we just Open Source all the technology of these companies-starting with Oracle.

JBOSS is a decent application server that completed head to head with Oracle Application Server. Postgres can be made better than Oracle(big missing feature is replication which is coming along fast). The accounting packages Oracle sells can be replaced by stuff that evolves from stuff like SQL Ledger. All in all, I think Oracle will be dead before Microsoft. Good Riddance.

And this is based on what facts and years of experience in economics? How about all the republicans who have voiced opposition to the tax cuts or allen greenspan's recommendation the tax cut is foolish and inappropriate given the current economic conditions. Does the president really think he knows better than 100's of experts who collectively have several hundreds years of experience with economics. For god sake, read both sides of the story and think for yourself. How about article by business week, usa today, capitalist mag, abc news, or washington times. there are articles for and against the tax cuts. Tax cuts are only good when spending is kept in check as others have stated. Trickle down economics doesn't work as the 80's proved. Finding a good balance is tough, and luckily the president has to convince the senate and congress.

I mean, really.

First of all, the war is not over. Yet.

Second, what the hell kind of question is Should geeks around the world take the lead in getting Iraq back online? "Take the lead"? Yeah, let's all go to Home Depot and pick up spools of cat5e cable and get on one of those "human shield" buses that aren't needed any longer and get to stringing. Not only are there many other priorities as others have pointed out but more likely than not you're calling on people that don't do volunteer work in their own communities to do some unspecified good deeds far far away.

You don't need to ask slashdot if there are things to be done. If you want to help, then help, but you're asking the wrong people. You need to ask the Iraqis what they want and need (see above link on human shields). Perhaps you can contact the Iraqi Forum for Democracy or take a look at iraqipages.com for other contacts. If you are of a mind to do good works, help in your local community, which probably needs it since international attention is not focused on it and there are no lucrative contracts to be had.

I'm not knocking your willingness to help. I think it's great. I think posting here is barking up the wrong tree though. Perhaps you can find out what really needs to be done and make a page for others to visit and contribute what they can.

I don't need 1xEV-DO at work, because work is crawling with Ethernet cables. I don't need 1xEV-DO at home, because it's cheaper to buy WiFi equipment directly instead of paying for wireless by the packet. The only reasons I need wireless data in my car are for driving directions when I'm lost, which - being male - I wouldn't use anyway, and for streaming audio, for which I have a hi-tech device called a "radio" (or, more likely, a "six-disc CD changer").

By the time 1xEV-DV gets to market, McDonald's will have WiFi and you'll get free bandwidth with your Happy Meal. (They'll sell your data to advertisers and interrupt with McDonald's ads, but, hey, free bandwidth.) WiFi destroys the business case for cellular data, just as the unregulated Internet destroys the business case for pop music, and in the long-term WiFi even threatens the core cellular business of providing wireless voice.

Perhaps the real question is whether the Cellular Telephone Industry Association (CTIA) will someday find itself where the RIAA is today - fighting its customers in a desperate effort to squeeze the last dollar from a dying business model. Time for the Free Spectrum Foundation?

but if the US had data protection laws like the EU...

As a libertarian myself, I feel the need to forestall an argument that some of my fellow libertarians might make: that such laws cannot be justly applied to the telecommunications market; that they are an improper restraint on legitimate trade, or free speech; etc. The fact of the matter is that the telecoms system as we know it is a construct of government regulation. Its "privatized" structure is merely a corporatized extension of national governments, like the old colonial "Companies" (think "British East India Company", etc.) which enriches investors whilst furthering government policy.

Free-market telecommunications have been systematically denied any chance to establish themselves. Most Americans believe that AT&T was a monopoly created by the market and dismantled by the government, for instance, but this is far from the case. The Cato report "Unnatural Monopoly" details the United States Federal Government's actions in creating the AT&T telephone monopoly, for various political and nonmarket purposes. In doing so, members of Congress went so far as to characterize market competition as "duplicative, destructive, and wasteful." (Many European nations did not even bother to allow private telecommunications systems, building them as government monopolies. In some cases, these were later "privatized" in such a way as to preserve the majority of their monopoly positions, while making money for rich investors. This is not a free market; it is state-capitalism.)

Much the same applies to radio, of course: the FCC and its ilk created an artificial scarcity of the radio spectrum, parceling out freedom of speech via radio as if photons were the government's own creation. Those who choose to speak without a government license to do so, it criminalizes as "pirates". Radio equipment is inexpensive and not difficult to maintain; it is radio licensing that reserves the medium as a playground for large corporations. Moreover, when the government has the power to license speech, it has the power to censor, say the courts: hence the countless "words you can't say on television" though you may speak them freely in a meeting-hall.

(Too US-centric for you? Here, try Panama, where the telecoms monopoly is using government threats to force ISPs to block competition in the form of voice-over-IP services.)

The telecommunications industry is not a free market; and its constructs are not private enterprises, no matter how many investors they may enrich (or bankrupt). They were created and empowered by regulation. Their markets are patrolled by censorship. They are firms granted the power to tax; government agencies granted stock-market symbols and an oligopolic pretense at competition. As such, they are no more entitled to sell data about their taxpayers (aka "customers") than is, say, the Internal Revenue Service.