Imagine that you pass from this world and
arrive at the gates of the afterlife. The gatekeeper hands you a bundle of work
clothes, your schedule and a benefits package with forms to be signed. You are assigned to the grounds keeping crew. The guy behind you is put to work filling pot
holes. The next in line gets brushes and
rollers and put on painting detail.
You have guaranteed eternal employment.
WTF, you think, is this heaven or is this hell? Well it certainly isn’t heaven.
Heaven would be a state of perfect contentment
where all needs are met and nothing needs to be done. Not so here on earth.
On this planet, human life is an unending
process of becoming. Success is short
lived, pleasures are fleeting and all victories have the seeds of defeat within
them. There is always something gone
wrong and more to be done.
To live with some degree of comfort, humans
apply their brains and effort to the gifts of nature to create things that are desirable
to themselves and their neighbors.
One thing that makes American life heavenly is burgers. The other night I had Pork and Lamb Burger
topped with Balsamic Marmalade and washed down it with small batch bourbon
and craft beer. That set me back about
$40 U.S. dollars. Lest you think me a
snob, I am seriously looking forward to trying Mickey
D’s new Jalapeño Double Burger.
Two of those suckers with fries and Coke will fill me up for less than a
ten spot.
My gourmet burger was chef created, cooked to
order and made from premium meats that were custom ground and mixed. My libations were attentively crafted by
artisans using hand selected ingredients using processes that extended over
weeks and even years. All of this was
delivered to my table by an attentive and gracious server.
The McDonald’s burger that I am eagerly
anticipating will come to me at the end of highly automated, mechanized,
digitized and globally sourced supply chain.
The heroes in this process are not trained chefs, experienced cooks and
artisans. They are marketing analysts, food
scientists, engineers, and logistics professionals. Also, let’s not forget the legion of
franchise investors who make Mickey D restaurants a convenient five minute trip
for most Americans.
Somehow, the people at the end of the McDonald’s
supply chain have come to believe that they are a vital and irreplaceable cog in
this machine. They that key my order
into a computer and then assemble the product based upon written instructions. In cities across the U.S.A. fast
food workers are agitating to attain compensation commensurate with
their self assessed value.
Enter the
Burger Robot from Momentum Machines. This bad boy can bang out 360
burgers per hour. It will grill the patty, slice and dice vegetable
toppings, apply condiments and then assemble and wrap the sandwich.
The robot’s inventor, Alexandros Vardakostas pulls no
punches. This "device isn’t meant to make employees more
efficient. It’s meant to completely obviate them." The
manufacturer’s website takes no prisoners claiming their machine "does
everything employees can do, except better."
Sensitive to charges that they are simply creating jobless,
Momentum Machines responds that they really adding value to society:
“The issue of machines and job displacement has been around
for centuries and economists generally accept that technology like ours
actually causes an increase in employment. The three factors that contribute to
this are 1. the company that makes the robots must hire new employees, 2. the
restaurant that uses our robots can expand their frontiers of production which
requires hiring more people, and 3. the general public saves money on the
reduced cost of our burgers. This saved money can then be spent on the rest of
the economy.”
(Thereby creating jobs in other sectors – my comment)
(Thereby creating jobs in other sectors – my comment)
Ludwig von Mises is unambiguous in asserting that power in the free
market lies entirely with the consumer.
“The consumers patronize those shops in which they can buy
what they want at the cheapest price. Their buying and their abstention from
buying decides who should own and run the plants and the farms. They make poor
people rich and rich people poor. They determine precisely what should be
produced, in what quality, and in what quantities.”
It’s not the franchisees who are the hard hearted ogres,
Mises says, but their self serving patrons:
“They are merciless bosses, full of whims and fancies,
changeable and unpredictable. For them nothing counts other than their own
satisfaction. They do not care a whit for past merit and vested interests. If
something is offered to them that they like better or that is cheaper, they
desert their old purveyors. In their capacity as buyers and consumers they are
hard-hearted and callous, without consideration for other people”
Therefore, fast food workers seek to subvert the
labor market and use the
“political means” to improve their wages. That is to employ State coercion to force
employers to raise the pay scale.
What the strikers fail to see are the consumers
who will eat elsewhere and the Burger Robot who will eat their jobs entirely.
Not too long ago, investor and media
personality Peter
Schiff intercepted Walmart shoppers asking them if Walmart employees
deserved better pay. Soft hearted
Americans answered “yes”. When he
followed up by asking if they were willing to pay 15% higher prices, the cheap
bastards said “no way”. Clearly they preferred
money in their own pockets rather than those of Walmart workers.
In his new book, Please Stop Helping Us, How Liberals Make It Harder For Blacks to Succeed,
Jason Reilly exposes how government meddling makes the poor poorer and keeps
them that way. During a recent
interview on Reason TV, Reilly addressed the minimum wage head on.
reason: Young blacks without skills, like all young
workers who have relatively low skills, are they priced out of the labor market
and then they just can’t get work? Or are you saying that it’s anti poverty
programs that allow them to get by…
Jason Riley: Well it’s a number of factors. One is, yes,
pricing people out of the labor force.
When you make it more expensive to hire people, fewer people get hired. And you
are particularly hurting less skilled, less experience workers by raising the
cost of hiring them. Now the left sells this as an anti-poverty
program, but most poor households are
in that category because they have no workers, not because they have workers
that are paid too little. You can’t confuse poor households with
households with minimum wage workers. And a lot of that confusion results in
trying to use the minimum wage as an anti-poverty measure.
Returning to our original “heavenly” premise,
we see that by promising heaven on earth, welfare statists create a living
hell.
Ironically, in the former workers’ paradise of
the East, robots
are replacing workers in Chinese factories. Even former commies turned fascists see that the
consumer is king and that you must innovate and cut costs to compete.
Related
Posts:
Burgers and Bullets
Of The Employees, For The
Employees And By The Employees
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"Half the people are stoned and the other half are waiting for the next election.
Half the people are drowned and the other half are swimming in the wrong direction."
- Paul Simon
Half the people are drowned and the other half are swimming in the wrong direction."
- Paul Simon
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