Courtesy Of The Productive
Funny, but infuriating considering the underlying truth.
Ken Pool is making good money. On weekdays, he shows up at 7 a.m. at Ford Motor Co.’s Michigan Truck Plant in Wayne, signs in, and then starts working — on a crossword puzzle. Pool hates the monotony, but the pay is good: more than $31 an hour, plus benefits.
“We just go in and play crossword puzzles, watch videos that someone brings in or read the newspaper,” he says. “Otherwise, I’ve just sat.”
Pool is one of more than 12,000 American autoworkers who, instead of installing windshields or bending sheet metal, spend their days counting the hours in a jobs bank set up by Detroit automakers and Delphi Corp. as part of an extraordinary job security agreement with the United Auto Workers union.
The jobs bank programs were the price the industry paid in the 1980s to win UAW support for controversial efforts to boost productivity through increased automation and more flexible manufacturing.
As part of its restructuring under bankruptcy, Delphi is actively pressing the union to give up the program.
With Wall Street wondering how automakers can afford to pay thousands of workers to do nothing as their market share withers, the union is likely to hear a similar message from the Big Three when their contracts with the UAW expire in 2007 — if not sooner. [emphasis mine]
We know at least one way they can afford it. If a company wants to waste money by paying someone for idleness, that’s their choice, but to do so and then beg to be bailed with looted wealth is a tremendous feat of evil.
Through confiscation at gunpoint is the only way these companies will ever receive a penny from me.
And, apparently Ben Stein has tricked people into considering his economic perspectives, which are as flimsy as his “scientific” ones.
Why not be smart about it and NOT LET AMERICANS GET UNEMPLOYED IN THE FIRST PLACE? (Please pardon the shouting.) There are millions of Americans already hard at work making great American made cars and trucks. Why not keep them on the job? Wouldn’t that be smarter than allowing the whole upper Midwest to fall into oblivion and then rescue it over a fifty year period?
And what’s his moral justification?
Let’s stop the Depression before it starts. Let’s show some fairness and good faith to our own. Let’s bail out the Big Three, help them slim down, shape up, and keep making great cars and trucks. The Big Three are us and if we cannot help ourselves, who can we help?
Until this passage, I dismissed him as a pragmatist willing to compromise his principles for the sake of the moment, but here he reveals the opposite. These are his principles.
Ben is an altruist, his morality is vested (at least partially) in sacrificing himself for others. He is a collectivist, he has no issues with extending and enforcing his altruism (by force) on others, condoning their sacrifice on behalf of the collective. Therefore, Ben thinks it’s fair, by his altruistic-collectivist standards, for government to tax me at gunpoint and handout the loot to a crumbing company rank with incompetence and infested with professional moochers, or to a lazy, freeloading vagrant, or to an elderly person with no savings to live off of because they evaded financial planning for a lifetime. As long as someone’s needs, any needs, are nurtured, the ends justify the means for Ben.
Something is very wrong here.
Indeed.
