Sunday, January 04, 2004

 
Weasley Clark

Still waiting for someone to weigh in on Clark's piece linked by Jonah Goldberg. It's not as though the thing speaks for itself (Res ipsa Loquitor?- wish I'd taken Latin) like a sponge left in Teddy Kenedy's liver. He doesn't compare Bush to Hitler and so on. However, taken to reasonably logical conclusions(not unfair even for campaign rhetoric), his proposals and goals(click on Jonah's link for the latter)would lead to trade and investment policies that would make those of North Korea look like Tijuana's mechanisms to deny alchohol to underage tourists. Not the best analogy, and to conserve space, consider the reverse given for his Kali break the door policy on immigration. Yep, behind the "boob bait" served up to blue collar and tech workers is the assertion that full employment and domestic manufacture of all sorts of goodies will be the result of annihilating trade and the pitiful barriers to immigration that exist now. It will be tiring and tiresome to dissect the general's drivel, and it's doubtful that it will be worthwhile to do so.
Whatever.
Let's start with "We need to relook the H1-B visa. I'm all in favor of bringing people into this country, but only at fully competitive wage rates. Not bringing people in to take jobs from Americans." What the hell does that mean? -That he'll bring in people who won't work? Actually he will, given that even immigrants who work waste no time in working on chain migration to bring in their aged and disabled relatives. Even if you give Clark an underserved "unintended consequences" pass on that one, does a native born worker suffer much less if he loses his job to someone paid a "competitive wage" than by losing his job to someone paid less? If the creep had asserted that artificially elevating the wages that must be paid to H1B workers would slow their influx, he might have had a point(as in minimum wage laws pricing some people out of the job market), but this wouldn't jibe with his being in all in favor of bringing people into this country.
If Clark had proposed spending a buttload of money to come up with some broad index(updated yearly) of employment, wages, benefits and working conditions of techies, and stipulated that yearly H1-B numbers would exceed zero only when the index was overall "up," the bastard could arguably be accused of only or largely dashing hopes of upward mobility rather than ruining hundreds of thousands(or more)careers.
And aren't the regs for the H1-B program *already* supposed to guard against the loss of jobs and job prospects for domestic workers? (I'm unfamiliar with the actual regs(thousands of pages, one suspects)but I'd be mighty surprised if it ain't so. One could imagine one of the cretins who posted on the Jonah-provided link (or idiot savantes who can write programs but are incapable of thinking rationally about economics)retorting that their candidate will enforce or strengthen those regs. Right -like the way the government enforces its laws about immigration.(Now, I happen to believe, no, *know* that laws against illegal immigration *are* enforceable, given the will)Even if politically powerful Democrats had the will (which they don't, because they're genocidal fiends)to enforce regs designed to protect domestic tech workers against suffering because of the immigration of hundreds of thousands of foreign techies, a moments thought(and I suspect a lot of moments)suggests that those regs fall into a class of unenforceable or unworkable attempts to regulate a market economy. One can imagine a grandstanding politician or prosecutor citing or bringing to trial the executives of say, the ABC Company, who shutter their doors one day, and the very next day, under "new management" or owners or whathaveyou, with malice and aforethought, open the Acme Company, which then hires a buttload of foreigners. Flushed with political or judicial success, with appetites wheted, not sated, the Champions of The People then take great leaps forward into... what? A vast economy wherein companies, even in the absence of any immigration whatsoever, grow, shrink, go bankrupt, acquire, divest, merge, drop old product lines, market new ones, reinvent themselves and so on. But can't people of Good Will distinguish these activities from those of the ABC cum Acme? Nope. (At this point Yours Truly feels that he is touching the hemline of some Big Hairy Truth.) I can't. You can't. The politicians can't. Civil servants as well educated as any in France or as incorruptible as those of Denmark(the least corrupt country according to some index)can't. The judges can't. The juries can't. Even the managers and owner can't.
And serious attempts to make those distinctions will(have?) lead to massive amounts of paperwork, time energy, avoidance behaviors, totalitarian intrusions into private activities and prosecution and conviction of some of the innocent. I'll grant that I know next to nothing about how The Great Hairy Truth has or would be manifest in detail in the real or upcoming world, and that perhaps there might be some similarity to anti-trust or insider-trading law, where arguably even some random or arbitrary legal decisions do punish or deter some truly nasty and harmful behavior.
I suspect that it might be for the best if whatever tech workers were allowed to emigrate here were subject to no restrictions whatsoever on their employment-for the reasons cited above and who knows?(won't spend to much time on these speculations..)perhaps a programmer previously employed at 60k a year will find employment at the same or a different company at say, 40k a year at a company that has decided to employ *both* him and a foreign-born worker.
Now, I'm not a techie, nor have I have ever owned a business, nor have I read widely on the subject, but I suspect that those with actual experience with employment in tech and/or familiarity with actual regs may have something of tunnel vision with respect to the minutiae(sp?) of say their circumstances, limited by them and time-limited regs and jobs and salaries, may be blinded to my "familiar the aforesaid, Big Hairy Truth.
A Modest Proposal: Clark babbles on about a "100 billion dollar" jobs program. What say, we not corrupt the private sector with sweetheart contracts or those reached after spending loads of time and money on fufilling the requirements of government contracts? (My father was employed by the now defunct Bureau of Mines and was, by some accounts a creative and productive worker. -and not that he resembled much the father of VD Hansen-he was thee quarters Swede and one quarter Dane by ancestry and was rail-thin rather than massive and WWII ended before he could be shipped overseas) Why not add some 100,000 CyberWarriors to the Armed Services? Some, if not most would be slugs, but more than a few might be of invaluable service reviewing computer codes used for military and civilian purposes, tracing the paths of integrated circuits(hey, Joe, this targeting chip has the longitude and latitude for Peking locked out!), trying to stay ahead of Chinese hackers and Cyberguys and whatnot. This may stike one as having something of the crackpot about it, but is it really worse than the jobs program or that our vital sectors (financial etc.) will be made to function soley with US made parts 'n programs?
Time for noddy-blinkers. no proofreading at all.....won't sleep on it either...