What's Wrong With The Economy, In Brief

The always-fascinating Mickey Kaus reviewed Hillary's coronation speech for Breitbart recently. I'm not going to recommend that you click on a Breitbart link --- I don't want to make this a partisan-politics website. However, Mr. Kaus offers a uniquely perceptive pair of paragraphs about the economy that I think make sense when viewed from either side of the aisle.

Quoth Mr. Kaus,

Also, the economy isn’t not working because our government isn’t working. The economy isn’t working the way it should because large tectonic forces within the economy itself are conspiring to lower the economic return to labor, especially unskilled labor. Those forces are technology, trade, and (yes) immigration.

Basically, trade outsources the jobs of the less skilled; technology automates them out of existence — and then we import millions of eager, cheap immigrants to perform the unskilled (and skilled) jobs that remain, as kind of a coup de grace to American workers. It’s not at all clear that politics — ungridlocked or not — can produce solutions powerful enough to significantly neutralize these forces (except maybe on immigration, where Hillary’s on the wrong side).

I can't say I'd have written the first sentence that way --- I'd probably have said "The economy isn't working, and it's not because of our government not working" --- but the rest of it is simple and easy to understand. The future belongs to capital, not labor. If you don't have a lot of capital, prepare for your children to be poor. The only way to reverse that is if all the poor people pick up rifles and decide to change the situation by force. And maybe that explains why gun control is such a priority for the government despite Mrs. Clinton's assurances that we've never been safer in America.