Sixteen Volts

A few months ago when I read Barbara Ehrenreich's book "Bait and Switch", I noticed that something was badly missing. The main thesis of this book is that since the author, going undercover as a middle-aged academically educated woman, can't get a well-paid white-collar job in advertising public relations, this proves that America is bad. I don't remember the book at any point explaining why the character that the author pretended to be was entitled to such a job, so that her not getting one proves that something is wrong. After all, the vast majority of men and women are not in any way entitled to such dream jobs. Making this step a bit more explicit would have made the case of the whole book much stronger.

I also found it hilarious that the book jacket explained that this character "had done everything right" in her life. By implication, I guess those women depicted in "Nickel and Dimed" did not. Whoops! My favourite saying "Chasing the rabbit, the hunter is blind to mountains" once again applies: when a leftist is trying to make some bigger point, she sometimes forgets to follow the official party line in minor issues, accidentally revealing to all what she really thinks of them. In many other occasions, I have noticed leftists cheerfully admitting that they believe in e.g. the validity of IQ and standardized tests.

I remember encountering a similar omission once before. Around the time when complaining that too many students drop out of the high schools in Ontario was in vogue, one article in the Toronto Star introduced a high school dropout teenage boy and complained that he can only get the most menial minimum-wage jobs. I remember wondering that since somebody has to do those jobs, why not him? What precisely makes this guy so special that he deserves better? Because we now know him and his name? Looking at his picture (he looked like pretty much what you would have expected), I couldn't help but think that his white skin might have had something to do with this sympathy.

Steve Dutch put it well in his page "Top Ten No Sympathy Lines (Plus a Few Extra)":

The work force is full of people who do the minimum necessary to get by. Give me one reason why I, as a citizen or consumer, should help create more of them.

Call me elitist, but there are a lot more people who want good jobs than there are good jobs to go around. I think society has a perfect right to reserve those positions for people who demonstrate a commitment to excellence.

For people who want to get by on the minimum, there's a reward already established. It's called the minimum wage.

Professor Dutch's another web page "Spectacularly Stupid Commentaries on September 11, 2001" contains a section "Dropouts to the rescue!" that explains that yes, Virginia, the high school dropouts really are stupid.

Posted by Ilkka Kokkarinen on Tuesday, January 31, 2006 at 9:55 AM