Tuesday, July 13, 2010

If things were going well

Stated by a liberal, blithely, apparently without any need for explanation:
If things were going well in the US, unemployment would be about 5,000,000, or around 3% of the 153,741,000 people in the total US labor force
Now, I am firmly of the persuasion that no one needs jobs, that in fact we'd all be better off, individually and as a society, if no one had jobs.

However, in the United States as currently constituted, in the reality that liberals pride themselves on living in, people need what jobs get them. Jobs give people scheduled permission to acquire goods, and we need that permission even, or especially, to acquire necessary goods. But if "things were going well," according to Jacob Davies, there would still be five million people (five million Americans, the most sacred of all kinds of people) going without that scheduled permission to acquire necessities--the permission to live.

This being the internet, Davies brings zombies into it, making some kind of wretched, belabored metaphor about the unemployed being in peril along the lines of a zombie attack. However, while this seems to indicate that he recognizes the disaster that is being unemployed in our society (or at least recognizes it on some level covered over by internet-style "awesome!!" and by his continuing to talk in financial terms, which would seem to make the whole metaphor pointless), he only applies this metaphor to the unemployed population that rises above his "doing well" level. So those five million, what--they deserve it? Is that what I'm supposed to make of this? How do we pick which five million are the healthy-functioning-society unemployed population, and which are the ones under attack by zombies?

I realize that late-stage capitalism, in order to survive, requires some level of unemployment. But surely it's not capitalism but rather human beings that we're trying to help survive. Right?

PS I'm deliberately ignoring everything else in Davis's article.

2 comments:

almostinfamous said...

another jerk wearing a NAIRU straitjacket. somebody get him some meds!

PS: i hope there's nobody nerdy enough to get that joke :(

Ethan said...

I'm finding the image hilarious, but I don't think I'm getting it...