We were warned that President Obama was going to “channel” the spirit of Teddy Roosevelt the “progressive” Republican President.
Today, Barack Obama doubled down on his anti-technology platform for 2012. His view apparently is that efficiency destroys wealth. This was the belief in India back in their Socialist days – that it is the government’s job to constrain business from using technology to improve productivity because that will put people out of work and create unemployment.
The Luddites (in the unlikely event you didn’t know) were industrial workers in the early 1800s who sabotaged (threw shoes into) textile machinery that looked like it was going to cost them their livelihoods. Those advances in textiles revolutionized clothing – cloth became high quality and cheap and no longer could be afforded only by the rich. The boom in British textiles increased the demand for supplies of cotton, bringing wealth to the cotton plantations of America and laying the foundation for the Civil war as the textile interests in New England who lacked this new technology tried to use the power of the Federal government to block imports and prevent the competition that was killing their own business.
So today, President Barack Luddite Obama started getting specific about the things he sees wrong with technology that are killing America (especially union jobs)
– ATMs put tellers out of work
– computer controlled systems put steel workers out of a job
– telephone automation has put operators out of work
– the internet has put travel agents out of work
The theme of today was Nationalism. What America needs right now is a leader who is proud to say he is a National Socialist.
Yes, that’s a winning platform – I can hear the glass breaking in the shop windows of the “rich people” as we speak.
I would like to do my part to help President MaoBama restore the middle class – a few of my ideas:
– outlaw self service gas stations
– convert all freeways into toll roads to employ toll booth operators
– restore passenger train service to every town in America
– require all commercial aircraft to have 4 people in the cockpit
– require trains to have a fireman to put coal into the boilers
– require all trains to have a caboose
– prohibit all imports of goods from China
– outlaw scanners in supermarkets and require the bill to be added up by hand on a piece of paper
– outlaw barcodes of every type
– restore delivery of postal mail two times a day
– return to long distance calling that required an operator to put the call through
– require radio stations to have only live people doing the shows
– require all restaurants to have table service and use cloth tablecloths
– outlaw refrigerators that consume electricity and return to using iceboxes with chunks of ice delivered by a horse drawn wagon
I’m sure you can think of a few more ways we can put America back to work.
Damn straight:
– I want the milkman to start regular deliveries again.
– And the breadman, too.
– I’ve not seen the old guy in dusty brown corduroys who called out early Saturday mornings, “Rags and old iron…” But that surely needs looked into.
– The iceman, yep. That guy with the sweaty tattoos and the scary tongs, toting ice blocks the size of a GM Volt for folks with REAL iceboxes. (No, not ‘thongs,’ fool!)
– Bring back coal furnaces and the coalman, shoveling oily bituminous into the bin.
– Come springtime, bring on the furnace vacuuming trucks with those gargantuan hoovers on the flatbed.
– Oh yes — we need road oilers back in the saddle, those guys who spread used motor oil on dusty dirt roads.
– Are there still cobblers around? I mean really.
– And my favorite on account of I wanted to be one when I grew up – the DPS street sweeper. He’s the guy with a trash can mounted on a pair of wheelchair wheels and a couple of push-brooms racked in front. He was a dashing sight to behold in action. He used to whistle “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” a lot.
Now, if you don’t mind, I need to get in the house in time to watch Captain Video on the Dumont Network.
Adieu!
Doctors must make house calls.
elevator operators.
pin setters.
scoreboard workers.
Does Congress still have elevator operators?
I’m old enough to remember going to a department stores in Downtown Pittsburgh where the operator had to stop the elevator to line up with the floor and then grab the handle to open the doors (there is one door in the elevator and the door that opens to the floor).
When Congress finally renovated their elevators, they still employed operators to push the buttons and say “Good morning Madame Pelosi”. Nominally they might have been a security defense, but now the Capitol building is secured with another layer of security.
There is a little subculture of geeky kids that make youtube videos taking old elevators for a joyride. If I was a teen, I might be tempted to be one of them 🙂
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHjoF31pOC0
That’s probably close to the type of elevator I remember, although the ones in department stores were faster and a bit cleaner 🙂
Yeah and Local radio stations must have a news staff, to cover local events. They should have a live person announcing songs and queueing up MP3’s to play. Read real local forcast and have a traffic helicopter.
They should have a receptionist, like WKRP in Cincinatti : )
School kids have to say the pledge of allegiance in the mornings. We had to, never hurt anyone.
There is probably a grant to pay for all this somewhere? Hell, the local jail got a grant to install solar panels. The local TV news crew liked saying at the end of the report, “the solar panels were paid for with a grant from the FED” and the drones watching think, oh, well its ok, I didn’t pay for the panels with my local taxes, so its ok. idiots.
And Molley Hatchet starts touring again !
‘Flirtin with disaster’
Parrott
Outlawing farm machinery could employ 80% of the population in farming like it did in 1870.
Requiring all government communications to be made using the telegraph would restore many thousands of telegraph operator jobs.
Outlawing photocopy machines would restore the jobs of many stenographers.
I saw a story recently about Milton Friedman as told by Stephen Moore:
At one of our dinners, Milton recalled traveling to an Asian country in the 1960s and visiting a worksite where a new canal was being built. He was shocked to see that, instead of modern tractors and earth movers, the workers had shovels. He asked why there were so few machines. The government bureaucrat explained: “You don’t understand. This is a jobs program.” To which Milton replied: “Oh, I thought you were trying to build a canal. If it’s jobs you want, then you should give these workers spoons, not shovels.” http://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/10/10/spoons-shovels/
I suspect our President would agree with the government bureaucrat.
Exactly!
We should kick all those young students out of the universitues and form an army of young people and send them out to Kansas to harvest wheat by hand and find out what real work is like! That would be a Great Leap Forward. Then those young people could form into groups – lets call them something like “the Freedom Guard” and turn them loose to find corruption in business and deliver justice using an expedited system of punishment!
We’ll also need a ‘Four Pests Campaign’ to ensure a good harvest.
>”“the Freedom Guard”
We have that now Art, they’re called Black Panthers /Acorn.
No stamp machines in Virginia either Foyle.
The problem with ‘shovel’ ready jobs, Mark, is their are some job people born here will not do. They can fall back on welfare unemployment and the big one, I see advertised a lot lately, disability.
so these jobs go unfilled because of these programs, or we allow illegal aliens into the country, that will work these jobs and be glad they have a job, cause that is all they know. Their children become the activist ‘La Raza’ and such.
I don’t know if this is nationwide or just a local phenomenon, but I noticed in the past couple of years that all of my local post offices have removed stamp vending machines. In light of the above discussion, I now wonder if this was done to ‘save jobs’ of overpaid postal union employees.
NPR did a story yesterday regarding the upcoming Dem Convention in Charlotte (2012) and the boon it represents for Unionized companies:
http://www.npr.org/2011/12/06/143140547/for-unions-democratic-convention-means-business
Shovel ready indeed…(just don’t ask what it is they are shoveling)
Yep, stamp machines were removed from the lobby a couple years ago at our local post offices in both Michigan and Arizona.
One change the USPS could implement is to end the ‘charity’ rate for so-called non-profits… I’m sick and tired of bi-weekly propaganda packets from SPLC, ACLU, AARP, etc which they send @ $0.09 We’re subsidizing Marxist mail.
Were it not for eBay sales & shipping, USPS would have collapsed years ago.
Caterers at FEMA extermination camps:
http://www.infowars.com/exclusive-government-activating-fema-camps-across-u-s/