50 Is the New 65: Older Americans Are Getting Booted from Their Jobs -- and Denied New Opportunities

[Demo_Chris]

21. Yeah, it's bad all around, and there really are no easy solutions...

Politically or practically.

These kinds of issues are inevitable with technology, and the computer revolution was guaranteed to be a brutal one for workers regardless of any policies out of Washington. For example, many people today are unaware that at one point every piece of signage and lettering that wasn't typeset was hand drawn. All of it. I am including here things like magazines and movie posters and even company fliers and brochures. This was beginning to change when I was in my twenties, technology was making things easier, but it still required an artist to make it happen. There were hundreds of thousands, or perhaps even millions, employed doing nothing but this. The same happened in every field. House painters used to use these things called brushes, they were little handles with hair on them and you dip them in paint and slather it on a wall. Then they invented paint rollers, the unions hated them because they put painters out a job, but they caught on anyway, until those were replaced by paint sprayers, and suddenly anyone could blast out a house using unskilled labor.

That's just progress, it happened in every field, and there is nothing you can do to stop it. Innovation and invention will ALWAYS and INEVITABLY reduce the need for labor -- that's the point of it. As a nation, you can only hope to keep up by replacing the jobs destroyed with new (and hopefully better) jobs in new fields, perhaps providing that innovation. It can work, but only so long as you have trade policies that protect the citizens of a nation.

And that's what we didn't do. Instead, OUR party decided to fight for free trade and against securing our borders. This is not a slap at any one the wonderful people around the world who now manufacture the products we once made, or the wonderful people who have fled here willing to work at any price in order to feed their families, but rather a simple statement of fact: there are only so many jobs, and when the supply of labor exceeds the demand the cost of that labor will fall. Our leaders in Washington, working for their owners in the private sector, have ensured that the supply of labor drowns the supply of jobs, thus ensuring that the only people making anything out of all this are the people who own the companies.

A changing in the minimum wage doesn't solve this -- there will still be dozens of people for every job and more coming here every day -- and it might even make it worse as it increases the labor costs for any start up and for the companies that cannot afford to outsource their production. In the new global economy, basically no one is safe. The only jobs that cannot be outsourced are those which absolutely must be done here, servant class jobs for example, and even there they can and will continue to import the labor to meet their cost objectives. The wealthy don't want workers, they want slaves.