The job situation and the real road to serfdom.

A reporter friend of mine recently got laid off, as the economic downturn and advancements in information technology have taken a great toll on jobs in the newspaper industry. He was a bureau reporter for a newspaper in a relatively small market, and he knew it was coming and wasn't surprised when it did finally come, it was like what took them so long? It was a family owned newspaper, therefore the publisher had a little bit of a heart, I guess.

What kills me is that he replaced a reporter who held the position for almost thirty years, and who retired on his own terms. It took him several weeks to get out of the office and retire completely. I am just angry that the previous generation had this kind of job security, one that Generation X or our children will never have.

And you get people like Thomas L. Friedman, author of the books "The World is Flat" and "That Used to Be Us," who say that it is good thing. That we all have to reinvent ourselves and work our butts off to provide a unique service or product just in order to have the right to survive. All the while knowing that the previous generations just had to fall off a log in order to get a life long job or career. This is ridiculous we are heading backwards instead of forwards. In fact, I think we are heading all the way back to the dark ages, but more on that later.

I am encountering all sorts of people in every age group and every level of education who are either recently laid-off and struggling to find a new job, or entering the job market for the first time and unable to find work. With the recent poor jobs report and companies like HP announcing as many as 25,000 layoffs, I cannot imagine things getting better anytime soon.

But this is the dream of the wealthy, those that own the means of production. They have and will continue to off-shore as many jobs as possible. They will make sure that labor markets worldwide are like the labor markets in China. They will make sure that our working future is a lot like Foxconn in mainland China. Foxconn manufactures electronic components for companies like Apple, and runs what basically sounds like a labor camp where the workers live miserable lives making only two dollars an hour. Their only means of outlet appears to be suicide as they protest their poor working conditions. This is our future, but it sounds like the past.

There is a famous book that conservatives use as their economic manifesto. It is called the "The Road to Serfdom" by an Austrian economist,  Friedrich August Hayek.  It basically warns of the evils of socialism and how if government is allowed to grow out of control we will all become "serfs" of an oppressive overlord government.  Ah, but that wasn't feudalism.  Feudalism was where there was no government at all.  There was just a feudal lord who was the landowner, the knights who were like his sword-for-hire security detail, a type of police or enforcers, and the serfs who worked his land and produced crops for the feudal lord.  The wealthy people of the United States and probably the rest of the West want desperately to go back to this system.  A system where only their word is law and workers have absolutely no rights.   You can see this as the rich so desperately want to downsize federal and state governments, but always have a hand in their local government to make sure that they have more than their fair share of power in the area where they live, they desperately want and need to micromanage their own backyard. 

But why would Hayek call his book "The Road to Serfdom"?  Because the wealthy are notorious for saying something is white when it is actually black.  Look at the accounting firm Arthur Anderson who tricked shareholders into thinking everything was OK by calling Enron's losses profits.

United States is moving to real serfdom, much more quickly than I have expected, as President Obama has refused to take any helpful action for getting Americans back to work.  What scares me is now I am hearing a lot of Democrats say well maybe we should vote for Romney, just to shake things up a bit and see what he does.  The most shocking place I have encountered this suggestion is Paul Krugman's new book "End This Depression Now,"  where he basically states that Romney has some moderate economic advisers that might advise him to do the right thing and move away from the supply-side self-correcting market model we are following now, to a more Keynesian approach.  This is not bloody likely.

I am certain that if re-elected Obama will continue to do nothing about the unemployment situation, but I am also certain that whatever action Romney will take, it will only make things worse.

Just a note about the picture above.  It was a dispenser of an employment advertisement magazine called "Top Jobs" and it now used for garbage.  A perfect statement for what's going on in this country.