You Want Jobs? Try WAR.

Dear Dr. Bones,

I have decided to spare Comrade Blow of the NYTC and his corporate employer’s Letters Editor the following

Are too many (icky, selfish) organic citizens chasing too few jobs created by (clean-cut, futuristic) Corporate Citizens? Not a hard problem: FOR JOBS, IT’S WAR! " Only conscript the Bad Poor _quantum sufficeat_ and put them to work -- or ‘work’, if you insist absolutely -- in the Violence Sector. Why, ¡the conquest and occupation of Cathay alone . . . ! Bomby days.

effusion of McMerriment.

Our Betters will probably figure it out for themselves soon enough, now that they have resolved to boldly reconsider formerly closed and _tabu_-sealed policy questions. Even only a sneaking suspicion that Cap’n Ludd [1] may have been at least partly whight about the Jobs Plague must open the door, I think, for Officers Club nobility and gentry of hire rank to step through and give the Bad Poor an’ Lesser Breeds Without a refreshin’ dose of _sich durchzusetzen_.

Cornet von Blow (let us thus exalt his horn, _honoris causâ_) and Commodore Clifton, commanding the "U. S. S. Gallup," are, of course, to be commended for reopening the Ludd dossier. Equally of course, of course, nobody except ourselves who actually notices what they have been up to will have anythin’ but factious abuse to offer them. ¿What becomes of the AEIdeology, once word gets out about "five billion people over 15 years old .... [and] only 1.2 billion full-time, formal jobs"? ¿Of "The Middle Class," what? [2]

Be that as we shall see, short of actually naming the _innominandus inter Christojudæanos_ Ned, Cornet Blow and Commodore Clifton could not have made it plainer whose banner they have enlisted under.

For the record, let us have the whole swearing-in ceremony, shall we?

Clifton explains that of the world’s five billion people over 15 years old, three billion said they worked or wanted to work, but there are only 1.2 billion full-time, formal jobs. Therefore his conclusion “from reviewing Gallup’s polling on what the world is thinking on pretty much everything is that the next 30 years won’t be led by U.S. political or military force. Instead ... the world will be led with economic force — a force that is primarily driven by job creation and quality G.D.P. growth.” And guess who is vying for the lead? That’s right: China. And I [Carolus Jungherr von Blow] must say, we don’t appear to be poised to fight this war.

Oddly enough, the good Cornet does not, unless I have missed something, include Luddophobia amongst poise-disturbing factors. One might think he had just enlisted with St. Ike, not Captain Ned! Instead of justifying that all-but-pornographic diagnosis, the younker wanders off in quite a different direction:

In education we’ve gone from leading to lagging, our infrastructure is literally crumbling around us, ever-expanding health care costs threaten to suffocate us and our politics have succumbed to paralysis (...) the recent American educational achievement gaps — between black and Latino students and white ones; between low-income students and the rest; between low-performing states and the rest; and between the United States as a whole and better-performing countries — not only cost the economy trillions of dollars, they also “impose on the United States the economic equivalent of a permanent national recession.”

A much more familiar direction, that one. Exactly the direction, indeed, that the Muses and comrades and you and I would have expected from the Mark I civilian Blow before he heard the Word of the L*dd and neopented on the spot.

Now, although I think Luddism very well worth a second look, almost as worthy of revisitation as the (other) dogmata of Absolute Free Trade, nevertheless this is not a case for "Anything worth doing is worth doing badly." Cornet von Blow and, to a slightly lesser extent, Commodore Clifton, are headed in the whight direction, but there are serious problems about their evangelical methodology. In particular, it requires real dexterity in DDoubleThThink to maintain that the solution of "too many organisms, too few niches" can involve cranking out more, and perhaps still worse ‘overqualified’, ergozetetic organisms than ever.

It looks plain as day to me that Cornet von Blow is trying to use his new Peruna to cure himself of what now turn out to be imaginary diseases previously misdiagnosed by quacks who knew not L*dd. Were he to go all the way back to Square Zero as the good neovert should and start over from scratch, he would forget about his silly ‘gaps’ and tackle the Jobs Plague head-on Not necessarily by forcibly neoliberating the heathen Chinee, as this keyboard has modestly suggested, but certainly not by wallpapering over "educational achievement gaps" either.

The good Commodore is not much better. As quoted by a perhaps overzealous subordinate and recent neovert down around the bottom line here, his freelordship seems to have hatched a variant form of Neoluddism designed to join ’em rather than lick ’em. Clifton evidently accepts his Cap’n’s basic diagnosis -- ever fewer and fewer niches for more and more organisms -- but supposes that one can set up a local _refugium_ inside which entropy runs uphill. Just circle the wagons and the "1.2 billion full-time, formal jobs" immediately around Cap’n Ned and Commodore Clifton and Cornet von Blow, and _¡voilà!, the 3.8 (or howevermany) billion Bad Poors are effectively disappeared! They will not be out of sight and mind forever, presumably, yet at least we happy Peruna-imbibers of Greater Europe will be the last to succumb. Anyway, "In the long run, we are all dead." Tra-la-la.

Ludd-Cliftonism is most plausible, I suspect, when viewed through Antisocial Darwinist spectacles. If you pass up my chosen claptrap of ‘organisms’ and ‘niches’ and _refugia_ &c. for comparable Antisocial Keynesian paraphernalia, Dr. Bones, then Ludd-Cliftonism looks a lot like "beggar thy neighbor," ¿does it not? Which leads whight to the conceptual difficulty of working out how we shall get/stay richer than Croesus whilst marketing the fruits of our neoproductivity to beggared customers. True, mere vulgar Luddism, all Luddism simply as such, assures us that there must be always more and more of the latter, yet what we really want is, I take it, not an immense horde of ragpicker ‘patrons’ but more like scads and scads of Accounts Receivable paid in full, complete with penalties and interest. Plus, ideally, a tip on top., it bein' obviously always a pleasure to service Wunnerful US.

Though Cornet von Blow’s citations look pretty conclusive, ‘damning’ even, I daresay we really ought to look at Commodore Clifton’s book ourselves to make sure we are 100% accurate and fairembalanced about Ludd-Cliftonism.

Meanwhile, my own violence-pro approach -- "¡Draft ’em all an’ ship ’em out to police the boondocks of the world!" -- is a policy tub that stands on a completely separate theoretical bottom. One might, though, make certain concessions to the Ludd-Cliftonites. Cornet von Blow might be reassured, for instance, that there will be an immense need for Mil. Sci. instructors over on the Educationalism Front. It makes no material difference that I can detect whether we label our loci of instruction "basic training barracks" or "high schools." And since almost the whole curriculum will be new, previous gaps need not apply.

Commodore Clifton is (probably -- we really do gotta read him) likely to be more worried about what the Chambermaids of Commerce will think than about the Officers Club crowd. To him we may bark sharply "¡Military-Industrial-Academic Complex!", which is not, to be sure, a full explanation-cum-justification in itself, but strongly suggests there must be one lurking somewhere in the nearby bushes. If nothing else, we could pick up a lot of valuable curios after we neoliberate the Chicoms. [3]

Bomby days.
--JHM

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[1] R.H.I.P. (or grade inflation) applies even to urban mythology: in addition to the solid middle-class, the "respectable cloth-uniformed Republican O-3," as it were, Big LEW says the folkloric character of Captain Ludd [was] also known as ‘King’ Ludd or ‘General’ Ludd .

We humble are content to leave General His Highness the Prince of Ludd to confer with ‘Dr.’ Greenspan an’ with all the kernels in Kentucky.

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[2] I realize that I have been boring thee for years, O Bones, with my notion that nobooby who insists on wailing or railin’ about "The Middle Class" every chance she gets has any contribution to make to grown-up political sociology. Only this moment, though, have I noticed that the violence pros are not troubled by this pestiferous baloney: either they let you in the door at the Officers Club or they keep you out. Period. The entire category of ‘middle’ is delightfully absent -- unless one were to count warrant officers, which would be plumb dotty.

***

[3] Mil. Sci. has sadly and strangely neglected the matter of Loot, _le pillage_, since about the time of Napoléon _Ier_. This oversight should be corrected at once, and then, to insure a steady income over and above our initial windfalls, naturally we will persuade everybody on the block that they ought to treat Big Sam Globocop at the local (equivalent of) Dunkin’ Donuts both early an’ often.

¡Go[es] without sayin’, that oughtta!