From: egnilges@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Ed Nilges)
Subject: Re: Why do Americans get so little vacation time?
Originator: news@nimaster
Organization: Princeton University
Distribution: usa
Date: Wed, 2 Sep 1992 14:12:16 GMT

In article <1992Sep2.082556.24395@weyrich.UUCP> orville@weyrich.UUCP (Orville R. Weyrich) writes:
>>
>>Hmph?  As defined by old Orville?  Explain.
>1) It would probably be much easier to prevail on Congress to force 
>the EEC to allow an equal number of Americans access to the European job
>market as the US allows Europeaners access to the U.S. than to affect the
>changes in the job market that you favor.

Congress is far more concerned about the jobs of the stay-at-homes, and
given the European perception of Americans as ill-informed, uneducated
people who don't know foreign languages, there is resistance to hiring
Americans that would be difficult to overcome.

>
>3) Where there is a will, there usually is a way, IF you really want it
>bad enough.

Workers do not stay close to home because of a weak will.  Most of them
wish to stay close to people who need them, and their friends.

>
>However tight the grip the big boys have, giving the U.S. Federal
>government comparable power would be far worse. Consider the power 
>and compassion of the IRS, for example. :-)
>
The difference is that even the IRS is ultimately beholden to you in
ways that a private company is not.  Whereas I am certainly aware of the
ways in which  government bureaucracies abuse their power, government
also provides you avenues of appeal which libertarians typically
underuse, blinded as they are by their preconceptions.

Since the IRS' mission is to extract taxes from citizens, it is not
going to be a cuddly agency.  However, in recent years, owing to citizen
pressure, the IRS has been forced to acknowledge the rights of taxpayers
to be free of abuse. 

And the IRS functions in a society in which people who pay their fair
share of taxes are considered to be fools, so its institutional cynicism
concerning the honesty of the typical taxpayer is somewhat justified.

The bottom line is that this libertarian cynicism itself produces apathy
such that (in the case of the IRS) taxpayers under tax investigation
assume that they are powerless and do not fight for their rights.
Libertarianism, once again, produces through apathy that which it
decries.
                              
>
>But too bad! Once out of the depression, deficit spending has historically
>INCREASED, justified by the "growing economy. Just look at all these
>great entitlement programs that we can introduce now that the economy
>is on a roll." WRONG. TIME TO CUT BACK.

No new entitlement programs of any scope were introduced during the
Eighties boomlet, so this sounds like Yet Another Microeconomic Fairy
Tale (YAMFT.)  And the pressure for entitlement programs comes from the
middle class (including a lot of conservatives and "libertarians"), not
from government.  
>
>
>>government's response to Hurricane Andrew was delayed by the need to
>>kowtow to the "free" market (and wait for private bids for the
>>installation of temporary plastic sheeting) is one small example.
>
>I wonder how fast the response would have been in Soviet Russia? 
>Hint -- consider Chernoble. 

Grigori Medvedev makes clear that ideology was not the reason for the
creation of Chernoby's preconditions, or the lack of quick response.  He
charges that an engineering careerism which attracted unqualified people
to the Soviet nuclear industry was largely at fault and his portrayals
of the pathetic men (like chief engineer Fomin, who went insane) behind
the Chernobyl disaster resemble  men in the capitalist USA who use
phrases like "the big picture" as an excuse for ignorance of technology
for which they are responsible.  Medvedev's book The Truth about
Chernobyl should be read in tandem with the late Richard Feinman's
appendix to the official report on the Challenger disaster, for Medvedev
and Feinman decry the identical lack of dedication to truth and lack of
familiarity with the relevant technology as being at fault for the
disaster.  Here's Medvedev:


     "We have a Russian saying-'It doesn't take gods to make
     earthenware pots' (meaning that one doesn't have to be a
     genius to perform certain tasks)-which various high officials
     were fond of quoting when challenged on the issue of competence
     in nuclear matters.  Here, however, we are dealing not with
     earthenware pots but with nuclear reactors, which can themselves
     become very hot indeed."


These "earthenware" cliches are exactly paralleled by statements made by
managers in the capitalist West.  Statements like "think like a manager,
not an engineer" (which the engineer attempting to raise the alarm on
the Challenger's O-rings was told) and "look at the Big Picture."  I
suggest that the creation and response to Chernobyl resulted not from
ideology but from careerism and selfishness, attributes encouraged by
capitalism.

>
>When you try to protect people from too much government, sometimes it hinders
>rather than helps. More often it helps. And in any event, why were Florida
>officals lacking in their own preparations? They have known for many
>years that hurricaines happen in Florida. Why did their contingency
>planning not address such issues? Because Good O'le Uncle will kiss it
>and make it all better?

The severity of natural disasters like California earthquakes and
Hurricane Andrew is considerably increased by high population density
and overbuilding; with respect at least to earthquakes, there's a saying
"earthquakes don't kill people, buildings do."  So the "contingency
planning" to which you refer would have involved caps on growth, which
you doubtless would have decried as nasty government interference.
Government is damned by this mindless libertarianism if it fails to
address potential problems in ways in which the libertarian, acting much
the Monday morning quarterback, thinks it should; government is also
condemned for addressing potential problems in ANY effective way.

People decry the lack of leadership in our society, from fathers
abandoning their children to pols and CEOs who are concerned only about
their own comfort and pleasure (and the Economist, a respected British
periodical, brought these seemingly remote concerns together in a recent
cover portraying George Bush as a deadbeat dad.)  Small wonder, however,
that men in particular don't want to lead, given that they are targets
by blame-finders from faux-feminist middle-class wives to libertarians
who sit back and decry helpers and "do gooders" instead of pitching in
to help!
>
>>
>>     *  In one and the same recent edition of the Wall Street Journal,
>>        a staff reporter describes how Rich Miller destroyed Wang
>>        Labs by treating its minicomputer business as a cash cow and
>>        ignoring his own technicians' calls for developing PC connec-
>>        tivity tools, and a book reviewer makes the claim that Rich
>
>So Wang Labs goofed. Not nearly the disaster that might happen if
>the central government had controlled the planning for the entire
>computer industry and had made the same mistake. The more centralized the
>control, the bigger the mess when central authority makes a mistake.
>
The urban legend is that the computer industry in the United States is
pure capitalist adventure whereas the reality is that it represents a
massive cashing-in on GOVERNMENT investment from the forties to the
early seventies.  When I was a consultant at Motorola in the late
seventies, helping them to develop some of the software for the earliest
mobile telephony systems, I and my coworkers were struck less by the
originality of the then-novel microcomputer hardware and software with
which we worked, developing mainframe support tools, than by its
then-primitive nature and the fact that we were, in effect, "reinventing
the wheel."  We were developing things like assemblers which as
mainframe programmers we had for years been accustomed to getting from
IBM, and we has a saying, "return with us now to those thrilling days of
yesteryear."  

The tools like Basic and MS DOS which made the pioneers of the early
Eighties wealthy had begun to be developed in embyronic form in
countless government and (largely government-funded through defense
contracts) aerospace computer installations in the Fifties.  The fact
that today's tools are much more usable than the tools of the Fifties
should not blind us to the fact that today's millionaires are indebted
to the geeks of the Fifties.

The same process is occuring in the Soviet Union.  Despite bureaucratic
bungling, the Soviet Union did develop a computer industry in the
complete absence of capitalist incentives, and both Westerners and
ex-Soviets are attempting to cash-in on the investment from 1955 thru
1989 by paying the highly-skilled Soviet workforce 40% of what Americans
are paid to develop contract software.  The Soviet workforce (some
representatives of which I trained in the C language in classes that
included Americans and Soviets, classes in which the Soviets shined in
comparison to the Americans) has been educated excellently by a
"massive, centralized" bureaucracy, yet Western entrepreneurs are not
loth to cash in on this fact.
>
>But the antitrust laws are another example of government interference in
>the free market. Are you arguing in favor of a free market or against it?

The antitrust laws were an attempt to save the free market in the face
of monopoly and as such they are meaningless as applied to non-profit
institutions.  By your account, ANY law interferes in free market.
>
>
>What you are saying is that even though there are observable increases in 
>productivity, the increase doesn't repay the increased costs. Or to put

No, I am saying that you completely neglect the element of time, an
element of which business types are intuitively conscious and one that
distinguishes the engineering perspective from that of the manager (who
is often secretly cynical about your defense of the capitalist road.)  In
other words, a situation of a commodified product and sharp competition
(the contemporary situation of the computer business, for example),
countless situations occur in which consumers or their proxies must make
rapid decisions in partial information.  People tend to make these
decisions leaning towards the shortest payoff since quicker payoffs are
more predictable.  As such, issues of employee comfort get set to one
side, even in cases where you think you can demonstrate a long-term
saving.  In today's computer industry, managers see little reason for
increasing employee health and safety; it is far easier, given the way
our tools are set up (100% available workstations, for example) it is
far easier to force the employee to work 20 hour days.

>it another way, while the productivity as measured by work accomplished
>per person-hour may increse, the productivity as measured by work
>accomplished per dollar spent decreases. Someone has to pay for that
>decrease -- loss of foreign market share, reduction in quality, reduction
>in pay, or something else undesirable has to happen. 

The NORMAL way it is paid today is the employee works extra, unpaid
hours; a way so normal, indeed, that it (in somewhat the same way as
women's work is unaccounted-for) never enters the books.  Your fetish of
cost accounting neglects this.  Defenders of the free market palaver
about the "real" costs of a policy as if such costs were determinable in
the first place, whereas there is ALWAYS an interest in concealing SOME
costs.  Womens' work is one such cost; another is exemplified by the
fact that only rarely do data processing employees report more than
forty hours per week on timesheets, whereas the reality is that we often
work far more hours.

>