George Rebane
[This is the 17dec10 transcript of my regular bi-weekly commentary on KVMR-FM 89.5. I have provided links to the Compton school and Governor Pawlenty’s public service union references.]
Remember the story of John Henry, the steel drivin’ man, celebrated in legend and song. He was extremely strong and fast at chiseling holes into rock and driving spikes to hold down rails. He chose to go head-to-head with the newly invented steam steel driver in order to save his job; it didn’t work out for John Henry.
Ever since the early 1800s new technology has been trumping human labor to deliver more, better, faster, and cheaper. Those who chose to compete with technology were swept away like John Henry. But in the olden days new technology was still dumb, and workers had an alternative – do something else or retrain and learn to work at a higher skill level with the new machines that were flooding work places. But as the machines became more complicated and capable, working with them also required more from people – skills that everyone could not master.
In the last fifty years technology added a new page to its game book – intelligence. Not only could machines handle work with brute force and high speed, they were now adding smarts to the mix that would let them make fast and reliable decisions, decisions that only people used to make. And today we have machines that can out-think humans in more and more areas such as medicine, finance, distribution, transportation, and war. Furthermore, the cost, capability, and reliability of these machines are all racing in the right directions – or the wrong directions if you consider that more and more of us are becoming John Henrys.
In the world highly paid workers – aka Americans – can only compete if they acquire new skills in which machines are not yet dominant. But in the United States our government has made that path extremely difficult through its near monopoly of the public schools. Too many of these schools are now operated by so-called professionals, an alarming number of whom are not qualified to provide the education our youth needs, and instead, featherbed their jobs through government service unions. The result is that our schools’ output consists overwhelmingly of young workers who cannot even class themselves with the legendary John Henry, a man who at least had a competitive skill set.
Parents know this and have started protesting the treatment that their children receive in government mandated schools. Recently in Compton, California parents ‘pulled the trigger’ on a public school, demanding its conversion to a charter school that would better educate their kids. This type of parental activism may start a revolution that could help put an end to our suicidal educational system. The teachers’ unions remain vehemently opposed to anything that would get rid of their cadres of ignorant and stupid yet understandably compliant members.
On the larger scale, leading politicians like Governor Pawlenty of Minnesota are beginning to make a public noise against the growing cancer of government service employee unions. If we don’t cure this systemic disease, we can see our future in the riots of Greece, Great Britain, France, Italy, and soon other European countries with equally failed socialist expectations.
Unless our educational system is rapidly reformed into a professional meritocracy, our new unemployment norm will climb above the 10% where it is now. And from there it will keep rising as our students and unemployed take to the streets demanding an unrealizable redistribution of wealth – a solution put in their heads by dysfunctional teachers, political demagogues, and reinforced daily by agenda driven journalism.
Today the promise of green jobs to solve our structural unemployment problems is an intentionally distracting placebo. India and China are making huge investments in supplying the latest energy efficient products with their burgeoning workforce. It is they who will sell the world ‘cleantech’ products at an economical price. The only way we will buy any green technology manufactured here is when the government sticks a gun to our head and says ‘… or else.’
My name is Rebane and I also expand on these and other themes in my Union columns, on NCTV, and on georgerebane.com where this transcript appears. These opinions are not necessarily shared by KVMR. Thank you for listening.
rebanesruminations.com 
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