10/26/13
On the way to the MI conference yesterday, I read the following poem while riding the subway down:
The Good Life
by Tracy K. Smith b. 1974
When some people talk about money,
They speak as if it were mysterious lover
Who went out to buy milk and never came back, and it makes me nostalgic
For the years I lived on coffee and bread
Hungry all the time, walking to work on payday
Like a woman journeying for water
From a village without a well, then living for one or two nights like everyone else
On roast chicken and red wine
Tracy K. seems a little young and well-educated to have lived like that, unless for student loans.
The poem brings to mind Myron Magnet's Oct. 7th article, "A Fairytale of Two Cities" http://www.city-journal.org/2013/eon1007mm.html about the Sandinista-Elect's http://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/09/23/nyregion/a-mayoral-hopeful-now-de-blasio-was-once-a-young-leftist.html reference to Charles Dickens "Two Cities" speech theme. Magnet is an expert on Dickens and the [not-so-] "Great Society" of the 1960s.
It would be difficult to impossible to struggle for a job or support a family on $8/hour in this town. It would still be even harder for women with children. Men were traditionally paid more and had administrative coverage because they had family obligations. Now that the courts award women all the obligations, this has to change. Even if you don't agree with the feminist conspiracy to get women paid, not rewarding parental breadwinners does not encourage responsible behavior or a strong society.
Welfare may actually supplement the minimum wage, as the only people who could afford the cost of working for that wage would have to live with their parents, or someone, and have additional income. So who's really the one getting something for free when someone pays more to get to the job than the job pays?
I, for one, am happier working than not working, yet it seems irresponsible for someone with children to burn money and energy needed to take proper care of the children on a job that doesn't cover some living expenses beyond what it takes to get out the door.
When Magnet started his career, there was still a corporate ladder structure. Now it is more like an invisible ladder that in reality leads to other jobs that don't pay, rather than bigger and better things. I learned in every "entry-level" job, building a body of knowledge and network that has value, yet it's sort of like Darwin's theory of evolution - it would be hard to find evidence that a species really turns into a different species, that a minimum-wage job will prepare anyone for promotion.
McDonald's makes MBAs flip burgers as their first shift. They intend to train and promote them. I believe in the American dream that hard work pays off, yet also that "work does not make money; money makes money." To the extent a job enables you to save money, that money can compound interest, though my generation has experienced significant stock market losses. The window where people made money on the sale of their homes was short. A job that costs money, considering how many institutions end up in litigation, requiring employees to retain counsel, isn't a constructive move. It isn't good for companies to hire people who can't live within the means of the paycheck, because it creates a motive for corruption.
I don't listen to the Sandinista-Elect, but I read Tale of Two Cities a long time ago. It was the book that taught my cousin's Father, a WWII orphaned refugee, to speak English, by his adoptive Mother, of a Jewish couple who took in a boy from the Catholic Committee, and got him into Princeton within a short time, married American and ended up with a big house on Fox Hall Road in our Nation's capital.
You could say there are three cities in New York: Billionaires who started something or hit the Hedge Fund jackpot, Goldman Sachs Pre-IPO Partners, and everyone else. There are a million things to do and ways to live in New York. The first two can really do it comfortably. Everyone else has to prioritize. Everyone has a lot to manage. Everyone could have more. For everyone things could be a whole lot worse.
What Magnet and the Sandinista-Elect agree on is there is an underclass. I don't listen to the Sandinista-Elect, but he probably wants what all the Socialists want -- not just to pull up a chair at the table, but to take the chair of someone else, sending them down to the underclass. They don't want to end the underclass. We do. They want the education system fixed after their children have gotten a superior education. We want it now.
I've had low-paying jobs, collected unemployment, never welfare, though "support" from those who don't want you to succeed is similar. Taking a job from someone who doesn't want you to succeed may do more harm.
Better to not think about any of this and look for a great job, or start a business. I wonder, though, if welfare recipients have the same funny memories of jobs? Do they laugh about the government the way we do about shows like "The Office" and Donald Trump's "The Apprentice"? Do they have an outlet like f*ckedcompany.com?
