Fighting Against Economic Reality

AT BANKRUPT Delta Air Lines union pilots who earn an average of about $150,000 a year are resisting 18 percent wage cuts to keep the airline flying. In France students riot in the street to protest the idea of postponing for two years the French guarantee of lifetime employment. In Italy Prime Minister Berlesconi is voted out of office (just) after failing to pass legislation in his five year period in office that would make Italy’s labor market for flexible and Italy more competitive. And, let us not forget the German electorate that nearly died of fright last fall when an advisor to candidate Angela Merkel proposed tax rate cuts.

Now George Will writes about the agonies of General Motors, a corporation that pays $100,000 to $130,000 a year to keep 14,700 laid-off workers in a “Job Bank.” And the United Auto Workers union is threatening a crippling strike if bankrupt Delphi gets the bankruptcy court to cut wages of its members.

What goes up comes back down, especially in the marketplace. But the welfare state is founded on the notion that a government can legislate economic relations and that people should never have to suffer unemployment or reduction in wages.

The beauty of the market system is that is spreads risk around. The danger of the political system is that it concentrates risk, and it encourages people to resort to political power to avoid losses and setbacks.

The history of the industrial era teaches us that it is essential for the market to adjust to new conditions every day. If you try to resist economic change you just put it off, so that the eventual change becomes wrenching, or even catastrophic.

But some people never learn.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Mutual Aid

In 1911... at least nine million of the 12 million covered by national insurance were already members of voluntary sick pay schemes. A similar proportion were also eligible for medical care.
Green, Reinventing Civil Society

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

Living Under Law

Law being too tenuous to rely upon in [Ulster and the Scottish borderlands], people developed patterns of settling differences by personal fighting and family feuds.
Thomas Sowell, Conquests and Cultures

German Philosophy

The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since 1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and philosophical conception of man and nature... has been shown by indisputable evidence to be inadequate.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West

Knowledge

Inquiry does not start unless there is a problem... It is the problem and its characteristics revealed by analysis which guides one first to the relevant facts and then, once the relevant facts are known, to the relevant hypotheses.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Logic of the Sciences and the Humanities

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

Democratic Capitalism

I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Action

The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness... But to make a man act [he must have] the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

Churches

[In the] higher Christian churches… they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Living Law

The recognition and integration of extralegal property rights [in the Homestead Act] was a key element in the United States becoming the most important market economy and producer of capital in the world.
Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital

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