"Trump's Not Getting Anything Done"

I had lunch recently with a liberal friend who declared that Trump wasn't getting anything done.

So I had the option of silence or disagreement.

I decided not to disturb this New York Times reader. After all, why argue the point? As far as I know, President Trump is doing a pretty good job of reversing tons of regulations pushed through by the phone-and-pen Obama administration. He seems to be cleaning up ISIS in Syria; he is putting the brakes on full-bore green energy. He seems to be putting the kibosh on "net neutrality." His Education Secretary  seems to be moving forward on a conservative agenda, maybe introducing a smidgen of choice.

Trump has not, of course, repealed and replaced Obamacare, and I don't know if that is good or bad. I'd say that the time to fix Obamacare will be when Democrats are shouting the house down that Something Has to be Done, because their voters are being hurt. Obviously we have not reached that point, and meanwhile Democrats are enjoying the fun of making Republicans squirm and look foolish.

All in all, I am not sure if Trump  is an idiot, as his opponents insist, or that he just plays one on TV.

What I would like to see is tax reform, simply a bill to reduce deductions and carve-outs and replace them with lower tax rates. Especially for corporations.

Recently, I read an article arguing for the return of "regular order" to Congress, where bills would be introduced in committee and marked up and then brought before the full houses of Congress. Instead of the current system where bills like Obamacare and Obamacare replacement are cooked up by the leaders of Congress in congress with the special interests and then submitted for up on down votes by the members. And where appropriation bills are replaced by year-end "reconciliation" omnibus bills.

Yes, but. The problem is that government is so big that it is meddling in too many things to allow each issue to be worked out in subcommittees and committees. Even the big omnibus bills can't do the job. That's why they stuffed Obamacare full  of directives for the Secretary of Health and Human Services to develop regulations for this and that. And why Obama bypassed the legislative process with his phone-and-pen executive order policy.

Only, it is a century since Ludwig von Mises argued that socialism could not work because it could not compute prices. And the same applies to all centralized administrative systems. But it hasn't stopped the merchants of power, because people come to government precisely to use its force to dodge the directions of the market and the price system.

That is why all the big government programs are a mess; that is why omnibus bills and reconciliation are a monstrosity; that is why it is not possible for Congress to legislate using "regular order." All these  approached to social cooperation are trying to substitute the force of government for the give and take of the price system and the natural instinct of humans to resolve their differences peacefully. And these cheap resorts to force are all doomed to fail, at the cost of much human suffering: hello Venezuela.

Meanwhile Trump is dodging and weaving, trying to get something done, and the readers of The New York Times are being taught that he is not getting anything done.

Someone is going to be wrong about that one. I just hope it isn't me.

Universities Have Not "Drifted from their Historic Mission"

What is a university for? As soon as you start to try to answer that question you get buried in an avalanche of ordure. Perhaps nothing provokes a tsunami of blather like the question of the role of the university.

Here's one lament that moans about universities drifting from their historic mission. Or this young academic that has suddenly discovered the monster of bureaucracy, and is off to Germany, the birthplace of bureaucracy.

Is the mission of the university to prepare well-born youngsters for political leadership? Is it to teach the canon? Is it to advance the frontiers of knowledge? Is it to provide robust venues for argument and debate? Is it to protect the rights of minorities? Is it to indoctrinate the youth in ruling-class ideology? Is it to develop big bombs for the military?

Well, you tell me. The answer is that all kinds of actors are interested in the minds of the young, and are willing to spend money and time on that project.

And the thing about universities is that they are "non-profit"organizations. Which means that... it makes it much harder to figure out who is profiting from the university. Is it the students getting an education? Is it the professors that get to reorder young heads full of mush? Is it the donors who get to push the university towards their vision of the universe? Is it the politicians that fund its research? Or is it the senior administrators that get to use the university as an ATM?

What, indeed is the "historic mission"of the university?

Strictly speaking, a university is a gathering of scholars and teachers that offer to teach youngsters that gather together in residential colleges to receive instruction from the masters. Yes, back in the day the students ran  the residential colleges: imagine! But it was never that simple, because the powerful took an interest in the universities. Thus, for many years, the great universities like Oxford and Cambridge in England were primarily involved in training up the second sons of the nobility for the church. When Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries, the universities trained young men for the Church of England, the established state church. Even as late as 1832 we get the bourgeois mayor of Middlemarch sending his son Fred off to Cambridge to raise the status of the Vincy family. Only Fred didn't really want to become a priest.

The Germans had another agenda. Deep in the humiliation of the Napoleonic era they founded the University of Berlin as a vehicle of state power. They would educate a new generation of Germans to take it to the French, and invented the research university as one of the means to that end.

In the US, it was the various churches that built universities. Harvard was  founded in 1634 by the Puritans to train up clergy for the new commonwealth. But by 1800 more liberal religious ideas were in the ascendant, and Harvard became Unitarian. Yale was founded by clergy in 1701 to educate Congregationalist ministers. The first Catholic university in the US was Georgetown, founded in 1789. The first university after the German model was Johns Hopkins, founded by Daniel Colt Gilman in 1876. Notice that the university was funded by Johns Hopkins, entrepreneur, investor, abolitionist, and philanthropist. He was not a church.

So you can see that everyone that got into the university game had an agenda. They weren't interested in discovering what parents and children wanted in an education; they already knew what was good for them.

It is not surprising that as progressives/liberals/leftists rose to power and prominence that they would seek to remake the university into an institution that would raise up good little progressives and leftist activists. They did not want universities to be seminaries that churned out ministers to send out to the wilderness, or priests that would preach to the embattled Catholic faithful,  or founts of science and state power. They wanted to create secular seminaries that would produce social activists that would go forth and preach the gospel of equality, or rights, or, as now, "intersectionality." Of course they did.

But we, whoever we are, have a different agenda, and the university as secular seminary is a direct attack on everything we hold dear. No wonder, of course, that in today's university, "conservatives need not apply." You don't want no stinkin' heretics in your school of secular orthodoxy.

But what do we do about it? My guess is nothing. The revolution in learning that issues from the internet means that you can learn anything anywhere. You do not have to go to an approved school to get the credentials to make you a safe hire.

I suspect that the modern bureaucratic system of education is a one-off, not to be repeated, the attempt of today's ruling class to ape the structure of the big corporation and big government, which seemed to be the wave of the future a century ago.

But we know that the world doesn't work like that. Big institutions are mature institutions, and the only way for them to go is down. Moreover, I would argue, non-profit ownership is itself a problem, because it fails to establish who is in charge and who is to take the profits and absorb the losses.

We know, with the advent of artificial intelligence, that the world is going to change more than we can possibly imagine. If there is one thing we should have learned from the successive economic revolutions of the Great Enrichment over the past 200 years, it is that the only thing to do is to change as well  as you can when  the new economic era dawns. The  worst thing to do is to resist economic change and erect non-profit institutions and government programs to create a walled garden that keeps the outside world from challenging the status quo. For now.

So the current conservative rage against the PC university misses the point. The current disappointment that universities have "drifted from their historic mission" is beside the point. Everything is going to change and the folks that imagine they are protected from the future by ivied walls or by government favor are living a fantasy.

Has The Left's Strategy Reached Its Bridge Too Far?

My claim to fame is the simple idea that the whole point of the left is to find a group "outside the system" and advocate for it.

The brilliance of Marx and Engels was to realize that their rich-kid revolutionary cult needed a reason to use the violence of revolution. And they found their reason in the workers. In the 1840s, when their young heads full of mush were cooking hash, the workers wanted what the middle class had got in the British Reform Bill of 1832. They wanted the vote. So they marched and Charted, mostly peacefully.

Imagine you are a rich kid who has been to university but who doesn't deign to actually work for a living (Marx) or or doesn't really want to deign to work in Daddy's textile firm (Engels). What better than to lead the poor excluded workers to bloody revolution?

But then the evil bourgeoisie upped and gave the workers the vote. So the workers lost their interest in riots in the streets. They settled down to getting free stuff from their elected representatives.

Now what?

Perfectly simple. A new generation of German rich kids, your Horkheimers, your Adornos, and your Marcuses, came up  with a replacement revolutionary creed. The workers be damned: the real wretched of the earth were women and minorities, not to forget the helpless victims of colonialism. Now woke rich kids would lead them to bloody revolutionary victory.

Only, the bloody bourgeoisie was perfectly happy to give women the vote, and minorities civil rights, and walk away from their colonial empires.

Anyway, imperialism got you into a real mess, like when the British Lord Salisbury argued against Home Rule for Ireland on the notion that it would encourage the natives in India to demand the same. The idea!

Anyway, now we have gay marriage and safe spaces on campus, so the only people left outside the system are illegal immigrants and Muslims.

So  of course the left is advocating for illegal immigrants and Muslims, because they are the only people left on the planet that are not already completely incorporated into the system, and for whom violence is still a viable option.

The question we must ask is whether bloody revolution on behalf of illegal immigrants and Muslims is going  to be a winner for the left, for whether it will turn out to be a bridge too far.

The simple answer is that We Don't Know.

It probably depends on the battle to come.

Will the people here in the US and in Europe rally to politicians that address them as the citizens and voters of nation states? Or will they rally to politicians that address them as members of racial or gender tribes, or as citizens of the world.

In the case of Muslims, I think the issue is whether Muslims can deal with the western notion of the separation of powers, that government and religion should be separate but equal. Over the 2000 years of Christianity a condominium has been established between temporal powers and spiritual powers. It is telling that both the left and Islam believe in totalitarianism. The one believes in a totalitarianism of secular politics; the other believes in a totalitarianism of the religious community: a theocracy.

Personally, I think that both the illegal immigrant and Muslim problem can be solved with strategic deportation policies. It took less than 500 deportations to deal with the US "anarchists" in the 1920s, and I should think that same would apply today. It is tremendous fun to rile up the ΅undocumented" and would-be Muslim terrorists. But the truth is that more than fun-and-games, people want to live in the prosperous West and wive and thrive here.

Anyway, we are living through the resolution of this great question: Where do we draw the line between the in-crowd and the outsiders? Are illegals and Muslims to be kept beyond the Pale. Or shall  we let them stay?

Meanwhile, what about the transgendered? Shall we let them serve in the military or not? Now there is an issue for the ages.

My Better Deal for Americans

Last Sunday Chuck Schumer came out with a "Better Deal" program for Democrats going forward. According to IBD it is nothing new, just the usual Democratic program list, including a higher minimum wage, negotiated drug prices, new anti-trust vigor, and corporate tax credits and training for displaced workers.

So nothing new.

Seriously, what should government be doing in the immediate future to protect Americans?

First, what government should not be doing is mucking up the labor market with minimum wages. There is only one minimum wage: $0.00. That is the wage you get paid for your first internship, or the first months of your apprenticeship. Nor should they be mucking about with drug prices. Maybe we should encourage the drug companies to license their drugs, or ease up on the stifling FDA regulation. But mucking about with the price system is baloney. Nor should we start mucking about with anti-trust. What good did it do with Standard Oil? Or IBM? Or AT&T? In all three cases, the government acted just as the market did for the monopoly: by discovering oil in Texas (as in Texaco), by dumping the mainframe world for minicomputers and desktop microcomputers, and by changing the phone world forever. And what good did regulation do for the railroads except put them to sleep for a century?

But I get the Democrats and what they are doing. Government is force, so if you are close to the levers of power, you think about what you can do to use government power to reward your supporters.

But what should, what could government be doing to help and protect the American people?

Let us look at a few Big Problems in the world today.

First, there is the baby drought. In Japan, young people are turning off sex and family. In Germany, 30 percent of adult women are childless. Here in the US the liberal left is anti marriage and family all the way. I am talking about the sexual revolution that makes women into sex objects; feminism, that teaches women not to have children; the whole LGBT cult that leads young people to vote themselves off the planet. And the whole left-wing culture that encourages people to live as subordinate serfs instead of as responsible individuals.

The fact is that the only way for about 97 percent of people to have a meaningful life is to get married and have children. And grandchildren. Unless you are Albert Einstein or Steve Jobs or Barack Obama nobody will remember your name except your descendants. Your claim to immortality will not be in some amazing work of creative innovation, but in the children you created with your wife. Over the past century and more we have taught the sons and daughters of the educated that the meaning of life, the universe, and everything is to live a creative life, writing a novel, starting a company, advocating for justice. This is mere conceit. Creativity is having children.

Second, there is the world of work. Everybody says that we will all have our jobs taken by robots, and maybe they are right. But "everybody" has been wrong about just about everything in the last 200 years, so I am not holding my breath.  Let us try to think about this differently.

In the old days of the hunter-gatherers, men defended the borders of the tribe, and women gathered the food and raised the children. The meaning of life, the universe, and everything was to hang onto your patch of territory and create enough children to defend and propagate in that territory. But then the world changed.

In the agricultural age men were not all needed to defend the borders, so what were they to do? Peel potatoes? Fortunately there was something for them to do. It was to plow the fields. Plowing was heavy work and women tended to miscarry if they did the plowing. Yay! Men were not surplus population. But women still did nearly all the work of child-bearing, -raising, and food preparation. And, of course, all the men could be called upon, on occasion, to serve in the lord's army. The meaning of life was to find yourself a powerful lord and be his loyal retainer, and cultivate his fields in return for his protection. But then the world changed.

In the industrial age all men were not needed to defend the borders or even to plow the fields. So what were they to do? Well, it turned out that there was plenty for them to do. They could work in mines and factories. They could work in offices clerking and managing. They could range the world trading and transporting goods and services. They could work out their aggressiveness in the new concept of sports. Women started out doing nearly all the work of child-bearing, -raising, and food preparation, but as time went by children could be dumped off in government schools, and food preparation became absorbed into the exchange economy so that food could be bought rather than laboriously processed and preserved at home. And women started to emerge from 24-7 work at home into the public sphere where they joined men in factory and office. But then the world changed.

In the new age that is aborning, we are told, we humans will not have to do the routine work of resource extraction and processing, and the routing clerking and supervising as of old. So what shall we do; where shall we go?

We don't know. But here is what I think. We will still be social animals, still cooperating with each other in the basic activity of wiving and thriving. We will still be doing things for each other, probably under the price system, or rather the emergent phenomenon of price-driven production and exchange and service. The best way to wive and thrive will be to pay attention to the signals that the price system and other people are giving us. So what do we do? I think the best way is to come up with a list of Don'ts.

Don't think you can hide in a big government or big corporation. These big organizations, like armies down the ages, make promises to you that they will not keep. Because when the going gets tough, the government or the corporation will dump you to preserve itself. So you should live and work out in the open, where you receive the signals of the price system and are obliged to respond to them, right now. The longer you put it off, the deeper you will be in the hole when the big unit dumps you by the side of the road.

Don't listen to the left, on work, on sex, on marginalization, on exploitation, on anything. The lesson of the last 150 years is that the left promised the workers a Promised Land, and then left them in the lurch circa 1965. Then the left promised women and minorities a Promised Land, and I'd say that the results are in. In the west, women are less happy than they used to be, and minorities don't seem to feel any better than they did back in 1965, if you listen to the lefty activists. Don't follow the lefty Moses. He doesn't care about you, he only cares about his power.

Don't worship the god of creativity. Go ahead, be creative, serve your fellow man; find a woman to love and marry her; create children; give back to your community. But don't imagine yourself a s world-conquering creative genius. If you do, you are worshiping a false god, and you will sow tares and misery among the wheat.

You can see that my view of the future has almost nothing to do with government. This is not surprising. There is a reason for this. In the old days, life was always subordinate to the village Big Man or the local lord of the land, or the absolute monarch and his courtiers. But the last two hundred years has seen an astonishing transformation. Now we are all subject to the prompting of the price system, and we have a choice: believe in the local lord, who is not interested in you, but in his power. Or believe in the price system, and do what it prompts.

The point is that the price system is a much better lord than the local political boss. For one thing, it doesn't lie to you. It tells you exactly where you stand, all the time.

Of course, that is why people try to escape from the price system into the neo-feudalism of government or the corporation. They don't want to deal with the truth; they want to live a fantasy.

But you and I are not like that. No Sirree.

Why in the World Would the Russians Want to Back the Fracking Party in 2016?

Obviously the whole Russian Collusion thing is a cover job to hide the fact that the Obama administration was bending the rules for snooping on electronic eavesdropping. As in breaking the law.

Their cunning plan was that the rules allow the Deep State to surveil US persons if they are in a conversation with a foreigner. Thus the Obama administration found an excuse to spy on the Trump campaign.

I'd say that people should be going to jail for that, but what do I know.

The thing that doesn't pass the smell test is the idea that the Russians would want to tip the election to Trump and the Republicans, also known as the Fracking Party.

Here's a little factoid. In 2013 Russia's GDP was $2.2 trillion. In 2016 it was $1.3 trillion.

I asked a convenient young head full of mush what he thought might be going on.

"Sanctions," he asked?

"How about fracking," I replied.

Yes, our brave and noble frackers, chaps like Harold Hamm, have brought the price of oil down from $100 per barrel in 2014 to $50 per barrel in 2017.

If you are a oil producer like Russia, with very little economy other than resource extraction, the fracking revolution has hit you in the solar plexus, taking your GDP down by over 40 percent.

Frame of reference: in the Great Depression the US GDP went from $104 billion in 1929 to $59 billion in 1933. About the same. But it made Republicans into eevil exploiters for half a century, because the Great Depression happened on their watch.

And of course, in oil-state Venezuela, the economy is totally ruined thanks to bus driver Maduro at the controls.

Next question.

Why in the world would Putin and the boys have any interest in interfering in the US election to help Donald Trump win? The one thing that Putin wants is to stop fracking and stop the disastrous collapse in oil prices on his watch. The obvious thing for Putin and the boys to do would be to back Hillary and the Democrats and pour money into green foundations that are shilling for the ruinous renewable energy and high energy price policies of the international left. Because global warming and the frying of the planet! In fact, the Russians do back green NGOs that advocate against fracking.

Fracking, of course, is short-hand for the technology used in the oil and gas world for horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing that makes it possible to exploit narrow, tight oil and gas bearing formations that would be uneconomical to exploit using "conventional" drilling techniques.

The fracking revolution, in case you missed it, has increased US oil production from 5 million barrels per day in 2008 to 9 million barrels per day in 2017. Natural gas has gone from 20 million Mcf to 25 million Mcf. Today, the US is in the middle of converting from an oil and gas importer to an oil and gas exporter.

Remember when Candidate Obama said in 2008 that energy prices would necessarily "skyrocket." Rule One to understand politics: they are idiots.

Back to  the Russian Collusion story. Who in the world  would think that Putin and the boys would back the party whose vice-presidential candidate in 2008 deplorably said, "drill, baby, drill."

I'll tell you.  Someone that thinks that Russian GDP has declined by 40 percent due to sanctions. And there must be millions of people like that.

But here is another factoid. Per-capita GDP in Russia in 2016 is $8,700, just a little ahead of China. US per-capita GDP? $57,500.

OK, So US per-capita GDP is merely 6.6 times the Russian per-capita GDP.  Hey, socialism will do that to you. Now you can see why there are so many Russians in the US.

By the way. Some wag once said that in oil states the people are a cost. You could run the whole country without the people, because all you need is an ATM at the oil export terminal to make sure that the ruling class gets the cream. But in a conventional post-industrial country, the people are a resource. It is their innovations and their production and their work that fills the coffers of the ruling class.

OK. Back to your regularly scheduled programming.

A Visit to the Museum of the American Revolution

Yesterday, on our way home from burying Marjorie's mother next to her husband and her son, we visited the new Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia.

First of all, you will be glad to know that the interior is done in a neo-18th century style that looks and feels appropriately staid and grand.

Secondly, the visitors there were overwhelmingly ciswhiteheteropatriarchal. All except the staff, who included a nice young Muslim in a hijab in the cafe. Imagine!

Third, the ritual bows to women, slaves, and native Americans were not too offensive.

But here are my real takeaways.

It seems to me that a serious revolution must start with a a bunch of rowdies that are all stirred up about nothing at all. Today there is a piece by Michael Barone about the Detroit riot of 50 years ago. It all started when the police arrested a bunch of blacks at an illegal "blind pig" bar. Imagine!

It also seems to me that you need a bunch of talented propagandists and phrasemakers, your Thomas Paines and whatnot. That is in addition to a real intellectual movement, the one that Jefferson & Co. belonged to. A revolution needs constant agitation and it sure helps if the propaganda is top-line material based on valuable thought about society and not stupid superficial stuff like today's intersectional left.

Now we get to the military side of things. There is an excellent video wall display in the middle of the museum; it's a map of the North Atlantic that shows the key events of each year from 1775 to the Treaty of Paris in 1783. It seems to me that the key events were the failure of the Brits to end the rebellion in 1776 when they sent a 500 ship invasion force (yay National Debt!) to New York. Second, was the contribution of the rebel ambassador to France, Benjamin Franklin, who got the French in on our side. Third was the Brits' attempt to push inland from Charleston, SC into the interior where they ran into trouble with frontiersmen skirmishers. Fourth was the Battle of Yorktown, which was won, I heard recently, by a crack team of rebel malarial mosquitoes that laid the British forces low. Fourth was the entry of Spain into the war.

The point is that when the Brits found that the French and the Spanish were against them, things started to look a bit dicey. Better let the rebels go and hold onto the rest of the British Empire.

Anyway, the whole thing turned out fine as the Brits and the Germans did for the French 30 years later at the end of the Napoleonic Wars and what I call the Second Hundred Years War.

The whole experience at the Museum made me think seriously about what we deplorables really want. We don't like the liberal hegemony, that's for sure. But the question is, what are we prepared to do about it, and do we have the chops, from alt-right crazies to deep political thinkers to a corps of activists that can take the battle to the liberals? And what about allies?

Of course, the other possibility is for the liberals to run out of other peoples' money. That certainly would put the US in a pre-revolutionary situation. I dare say that the US armed forces and police departments would not be as favorably disposed towards the liberals as the armed forces of, say, Venezuela.

But the bottom line is this: do we deplorables have the cojones to challenge our liberal slave-masters?

Is AI the Final Frontier for Human "Jobs"?

Ever since the industrial revolution everybody has been terrified about the End of the Job. And sometimes the terror extended to violence, as in the textile machine wreckers inspired by Ned Ludd.

And of course there was real hardship; there must be in any change, because change means that some people's plans and assumptions about the world will be dashed to pieces, and others will be pleasantly surprised.

Back before the industrial revolution something like 90 percent of people were working on farms. In the US the number is now something like 3 percent. That transition did not unwind in a small, X percent per year, fashion. It never does. It occurred in horrific farm crises, like the crisis in the late 19th century that spawned rural populism on the Great Plains. And of course there was the Dust Bowl that sent millions of farmers to California. Then there is Zola's La Terre all about  the French peasant getting zeroed out by grain from the Great Plains.

Today, everyone is talking about the AI and the robots that will take the jobs of retail workers and truck drivers. And so on. As in "The Mother of All Disruptions" by Kay S. Hymowitz.

Jobs are disappearing or will disappear not just in retail, but in legal services, oh yes, and journalism. And some people are worried about the US going Japan and giving up on sex and babies.

But I think it is best to admit that we just have no clue what is coming, and just get on with it. Let us stop worrying about just which jobs will disappear and why, and develop a culture that accepts change and flexibility in employment.

For instance, at the Hampton Inn in Willow Grove here in the NE Philly suburbs the free breakfast, what I call the bunfight, is run by a kindly black woman. This morning she was sitting at a computer in the lobby ordering food for tomorrow. She seems to have another, health-care related job.

Isn't that some kind of a clue? Here's a woman doing a wait-staff job and a supervisor job and an order-clerk job, and she is computer literate and she has another job where she cares for people in a health care facility.

In a large sense, we are just in another "de-skilling" era. When people were carpenters and skilled artisans and cooks they spent years developing manual skills. In the old days scribes spent years developing handwriting skills. But then came the machine and the printing press, and advanced manual skills were not longer required. The same is also true in many technology fields. Used to be that an engineer had to develop math skills and knowledge to do "calcs," computing stresses and beam sizes. No longer, I suspect, because all the calculating and the sizing gets done on finite-element analysis programs.

The best understanding of work, in my view, comes from longshoreman Eric Hoffer. As I wrote in "A Critique of Social Mechanice," for Hoffer the industrial revolution was an incomplete revolution, so

man had to use his fellow men as a stopgap for inventiveness. He had to yoke men, women and children with iron and steam... There was no escape for the mass of people from the ravenous maws of factories and mines.

Coal miners did not get released from the yoke until strip-mining with drag-line excavators started in the 1950s. But Hoffer is optimistic about the future. It is true, he writes, that factories used to be “agencies of dehumanization.”

But we of the present know that communion with machines does not blunt our sensibilities or stifle our individuality. We know that machines can be as temperamental and willful as any living thing. The proficient mechanic is an alert and intuitive human being. On the waterfront one can see how the ability to make a fork lift or a winch do one’s bidding with precision and finesse generates a peculiar exhilaration, so that the skilled lift driver and winch driver are as a rule of good cheer, and work as if at play.

Could that be the future? That work becomes more like play as we all learn how to operate the automation so that the hard work and the strength and the manual dexterity is done by machines and we humans get on with the social cooperation, rather than doing the grunt work?

Who knows. Nobody knows.

But I would argue that the most important thing is for people to be flexible and adjust themselves to the demands of the market.

Because resistance to the market only makes things worse.