Author Archives: eehines

Private Enterprises as Government Jobs Welfare Programs

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That’s the position of the Pennsylvania Progressive-Democratic Party’s Representative G Roni Green. She’s proposing, with an absolutely straight face, a State law that would require businesses with 500 or more employees to cut their employees’ 5-day, 40-hour work week to 4-day, 32-hour work weeks—with no change in pay. That’s a government-mandated 25% pay raise.

Jobs welfare doesn’t get much better than that.

Green’s rationalization centers on two premises. One is that society looks and operates differently than it once did in 1938 (when the government-mandated 40-hour work week was enacted). That’s true enough. Society has grown more complex, more technologically capable, and consumers’ needs (consumers being, after all, at the core of society) have grown quite a bit.

All of that, though, requires continued and increasing employee productivity to enable us Americans to continue, and continue to improve, our standard of living. That growing productivity isn’t possible with the proposed 25% reduction in hours of productivity Green is proposing.

That last brings us to Green’s second rationalization.

Technological advancement alone have [sic] significantly increased the productivity of workers allowing more work to be accomplished in less time.

That’s also true. Indeed, technological advancements have advanced to the point that entire worker jobs have been replaced. Technology does a lot of things that employees currently do at least in part. One result of Green’s move, were it to become law, likely would be a further reduction in employee hours, this time on business’ initiative: to substantially less than 32 hours, converting full-time employees to part-time, with commensurate reduction in pay and in most cases reduction or outright elimination of benefits. The eliminated hours of work would be done by robots…technology.

Green further claims (as cited by Fox Business) research [that] has shown that companies have been able to adopt a shorter workweek without compromising productivity. What isn’t looked at in such “research” is the degree to which such a shorter work week caps productivity growth so that there is no longer any improvement, merely maintenance. So much for keeping up with “society’s” increasing complexity and consumer needs.

Technological advancements—spurred by this government interference—will accelerate this trend in reducing human employment and reducing human income.

Divisive Tolerance

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Jim Webb, Navy Secretary Virginia Senator (R, then D), wrote of a monument in Arlington National Cemetery that the Left wants to tear down. It’s unpardonable sin is honoring Confederate soldiers who fell in our Civil War. It was commissioned by President William McKinley, who had fought \four years in that war as a Union soldier, and it was designed by Moses Jacob Ezekiel, a Confederate veteran and the first Jewish graduate of the Virginia Military Institute.

One face of the monument’s pedestal bears an inscription:

Not for fame or reward, not for place or for rank; not lured by ambition or goaded by necessity; but in simple obedience to duty as they understood it; these men suffered all, sacrificed all, dared all, and died.

The opposite face bears this inscription, in part:

Victorix Causa Diis Placuit Sed Victis Catoni [The victorious cause pleased the gods, but vanquished Cato]

But no, down it must come, as the Left demands to erase important traces of our history, most especially those things we did in reconciliation of grievous divide.

Webb closed his piece with this:

If it is taken apart and removed, leaving behind a concrete slab, the burial marker of its creator, and a small circle of graves, it would send a different message, one of a deteriorating society willing to erase the generosity of its past, in favor of bitterness and misunderstanding conjured up by those who do not understand the history they seem bent on destroying.

It doesn’t matter to those oh-so-tolerant Leftists. They’d rather destroy than recover. To Hell with reconciliation and unity.

Harvard Admissions and Racism

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David Phillips, Johns Hopkins University Vice Provost, wrote a letter to the editors of The Wall Street Journal, published in the outlet’s Friday Letters section. In it he responded to a WSJ week-prior op-ed opining on Harvard’s still-racially oriented admissions technique, now transferred to Harvard’s applicant essay.

In furtherance of his defense, he made this astonishing claim:

In crafting a question that invites students to discuss their background and life experiences, including the effect of a host of different factors such as race, religion, or community, we explicitly tell prospective students in our online application and checklist section that Hopkins will consider applicants only based on their experiences as individuals, not based on information about their race. This is in strict compliance with the Supreme Court’s decision on affirmative action, to which we explicitly refer.

No, Phillips’ question is in strict disobedience of the Court’s decision. If Harvard were considering applicants not based on information about their race, Harvard’s application essay question would not ask prospects about their racial experience. This is just another cynical attempt to consider race by hiding it inside a host of different factors, just as Harvard did with the admission policies which the Court struck.

If Phillips truly believes his claim, it would be a demonstration of just how deeply steeped he is in his racism, given a deep-seated obliviousness. If he does not, his claim demonstrates breathtaking dishonesty.

I Asked a Question

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I asked the following question of Republican Presidential candidate and current North Carolina Senator Tim Scott last Thursday (17 Aug). I’ll follow up with Senator Scott’s answer, or lack, as the case may be.

Senator Scott,

Stipulate that there is a deep state swamp in the executive branch. There are bureaucrats between mid-level and appointed/nominated-senate-confirmed levels who refuse to go along with presidential directives. How would you, as President, go about removing those intransigent ones from federal government employ?

Thank you.

Eric Hines

Do your own Work

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As the US begins, however tentatively, to start severing scientific ties with the People’s Republic of China, some American scientists are manufacturing an alarm and sounding off about it.

China has built itself into a powerful engine of scientific discovery in recent decades, partly with American help, and many in Washington fear that China could gain a security and military advantage unless the US takes decisive steps to cut off cooperation in scientific research.
Many scientists warn, however, that Washington would be severing ties as China is making its greatest contributions to scientific advancements, and cutting it off risks slowing American progress in critical areas such as biotechnology, clean energy, and telecommunications.

Never mind that those scientific achievements have been done with an American help that includes a very large fraction via intellectual property theft, IP gained through economic extortion (give it over, or you can’t do business in the PRC), and outright espionage.

Never mind, either, that other nation’s scientists—those of Canada, Israel, Germany, Great Britain, France, Ukraine(!), and on and on—are every bit as good as the PRC’s, if not better, from the greater freedom of those nations’ economic, political, and research environments. A disruption while the collaborations transition would only be transient.

There’s this aspect of the US-PRC science relationship, too:

The US depends more heavily on China than China does on the US in some strategic areas, according to an analysis by Clarivate [a specialist in science analytics] of studies in respected journals shared exclusively with The Wall Street Journal. Between 2017 and 2021, US-China collaborations accounted for 27% of US-based scientists’ high-quality research in nanoscience, for example, but only 13% of China-based scientists’. The gap in telecommunications was even wider, with collaborations accounting for 10% of China’s output but more than 33% of the US’s.

The science complainers do not see this threat? I’m not sanguine about degree of their…naivete. Regardless, it’s time to end that dependence.

Some of the plaints are just petty, though.

[Tian] Xia, the professor of medicine at UCLA, said he has stopped his research on birth defects because he doesn’t know how to work with embryonic stem cells. That was the expertise of his Chinese collaborators.

A grown man sulking like a toddler. It’s a pity. It’s not that difficult to find experts in embryonic stem cells; that general technology has been around for decades, and there are experts with birth defect-related skills outside of the PRC. Xia just seems upset because he doesn’t get to work with his buds in the PRC as easily as he wants.

Our scientists need to do their own work or collaborate with other scientists in the US and in our friends’ and allies’ nations, and stop sharing our secrets with our enemies.

It’s almost as if these complaining scientists consider their personal careers and researches more important than the security of the nation that encourages and fosters their researches and whose economic, political, and research environment facilitates the flourishing of their research programs, and of their careers.