Here in my small town there is a factory that has several job openings for about $9 an hour. There are not too many takers. There some mexicans or guatamalans who do work here though. They rent a hotel room for $99 a week at an old motel and sleep 6 to a room. They get clothes from the good will boxes. They send $5000 a month back home where their entire families live in shacks that do not come close to the barn where my cows stay. The people on unemployment make that much or more. Going to work for the same money as unemployment is not patriotic or ambitious, it is just stupid. If you have unemployment, your time is free. People buy and sell things on the net, rummage through flea markets, work off the books for their brother-in-law, do whatever they can. Most dont just set there, they just have to go underground. The competition are people who are living in medieval conditions, their great goal is having a shack that has electrical power, plumbing, or refrigerated food storage. I do not blame them at all for wanting to be here, any sane person would. If they were put in jail here it is so much better than where they came from why would we think it is a deterrent?
America has always been a nation that lived on subsidy. We did not "buy" anything, we simply came here and took it. The natives had lived here for 10's of thousands of years, but had not "progressed" much. Though not intentionally, we killed off about 50 MILLION people through smallpox, cholera, and then intentionally through war and habitat destruction. We WERE progressing. Now, the next great revolution is taking place, from manufacturing to IT and computer/ AI functions. All of these simple things can best be done by machine, CAD/CAM applications. The things remaining, like cleaning your toilet, are what is left. That and what can e shipped to overseas where there no safety regulations, environmental regulations etc. The fact is, we do not NEED the number of people now alive to DO all of the things we need done. We just want them because they reproduce on their own and ere expendable, so they are too cheap to pass up.
When you have to shift from simply going next door and taking what you want, to going to an auction and bidding on it, that is an extreme shock. Welcome to globalization. Much of how you feel about yourself is based on the relationship to those around you. The growing imbalance is changing that relationship. The great middle class is shrinking, most of it going downward. Expectations are having to be lowered, in many cases radically.
A good blue collar job when I was growing up got you a decent house, a car, maybe a boat. If you were a 2 income family, a nice house, 2 cars, a few toys, and kids in college. Those kind of jobs are now over seas. That pair of shoes that cost $12 to make here and sold for $100, now cost 89 cents to make, and are sold for$ 99.95. So the stockholders, or individuals who own the company pick up the extra 11.06, and the worker is out of a job.
Have you ever thought about why your pets don't eat you? It is because you feed them, you provide for them. When you abandon pets, they become feral. Do you know what that is? That is the reverse of domestication, the process by which wild animals entered a relationship with homo sapien because it proved beneficial. Feral animals are far more dangerous than wild animals. The wild ones try to avoid humanity, they have an instinctive fear, they do not have knowledge of them. The feral do not have that fear, and they are familiar with our habits.
That is why the crap about free market capitalism and how we should let this or that fail does not work out so well. Those are people out there. If it was just money and machines it would be different. When you kick a machine, it does not care, when you kick your dog, sooner or later it will bite you.
