Mad Max Beyond The Midway
There are wide swaths [sic] of Chicago that look like something out of Mad Max ~Shawn Macomber
There are large parts of south and west Chicago that suffer from a number of problems, but I have driven around the South Side and between Hyde Park and downtown on surface streets many times over the years and I have yet to see anything that would remind me of Mad Max. Naturally, this remark is being made as part of a complaint that the city won’t permit Wal-Mart to set up shop here, which prompts me to turn John’s question around: wouldn’t it be great if many on the Right could apply to Wal-Mart’s supposed ability to “create” jobs even half of the skepticism that they constantly (and sometimes rightly) apply to the federal government’s?* Pay no attention to the independent, small businesses that Wal-Mart’s arrival may adversely affect, but focus instead on how many low-wage service jobs it will provide–opposition to making your community heavily dependent on one company for its employment and needs must simply be irrational. Just keep the goods cheap and keep ‘em coming! I believe this is the approach to economics and politics that both Bacevich and Deneen find so ruinous.
*On a related note, is Michael Steele kidding when he says that government has never, as the saying goes, created a job? It seems to me that one of our long-standing complaints against all levels of government is that it has been only too good at creating them and preserving them, and one of the reasons that calls for abolishing various departments have become less and less common even on the right is that there are so many people with a vested interest in keeping these sources of employment from disappearing.
Let me play Devil’s Advocate for a bit. Many of the small businesses we’re talking about in urban areas are owned and run by tight-knit ethnic groups who are very unlikely to hire blacks. Say what you want about Wal-Mart, Home Depot and the other stores (and they have their problems), but they do hire a great number of people who wouldn’t be able to get a job with a mom-n-pop store.
Also, which Mad Max is Macomber referring to? The first one didn’t feature neighborhood that were that bad. The second one, however, spotlighted the issue of peak oil, and the third had a promising black leader dispensing an alternative fuel. Truly prescient stuff.
[...] And yes, Daniel, it would also be great if more conservatives would apply their concern for the side-effects of [...]
Mad Max? Where? I work in the stretch you talk about, between Hyde Park and downtown, and I used to live on the west side, and thus far I have seen nothing resembling any of the Mad Max movies (even looking past the fact that those movies are set in a barren desert wasteland for the most part).
Besides, Chicago is not anti-big box, per se, but rather has a problem with Wal-Mart, and with good reason. Wal-Mart not only drives small business out, but it drives down the wages and causes layoffs at other big box stores, such as Target, because they must deal with the new, anti-union, anti-benefits, “we only hire part-time workers” competitor.
Leaving aside “Mad Max,” I think Steele was saying that government jobs are not real jobs in that the salaries of said workers are paid by tax dollars extracted from the rest of us. In this sense government employment is not real because it does not create wealth but spends it. The terminology has been around for a long time. One may not agree with it, but that is I think, what he meant.
That is a fair point, and you are probably right that this is what he meant. If he meant that public sector employment often means that resources are being misallocated, that would make sense. Unfortunately, it is not what he said, and what he did say left him open to a lot of ridicule. It would be good if this distinction were emphasized more clearly in fiscal and role-of-government debates.
Indeed true. Every public pronouncement is an occasion to education and influence public opinion.
I might make another comment about WalMart in general and I don’t follow local Chicago politics super closely but IIRC the minority wards wanted WalMart but the lakefront liberals were against it, which is probably what you’d expect. If you have access to something like WalMart, just about any kind of job gets you pretty close to self-sufficiency in a hurry.
Perhaps I misunderstood, but I thought that Steele’s point was that the work created by the stimulus was short-term – i.e., when a given highway construction project (or whatever) is completed, the workers who had been hired for it on the taxpayers’ dime will be out of work again. So it’s not a “job” in the sense of stable/permanent employment. Or something like that.
(And I’ve never seen the South Side, but if it’s anything like my old hometown, Detroit, I can see the Mad Max analogy as being valid, if slightly exaggerated.)
Petellius is correct in that, when Steele elaborates on his statement about the government not creating jobs, he tends to talk about long-term private-sector employment vs short-term government employment. This is a bit strange for any number of reasons, such as the increasingly short-term nature of private-sector employment, the growth of government, etc.
It might be better for Steele to justify the “government has never created a job” rhetoric with the standard Bastiat-style broken window argument (i.e. the money taken by the government to create a job is money lost by the private sector which it would use to create a job, so there is no net job creation), such as is discussed here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
Oh please Daniel- it is quite clear what Steele meant. He clearly didn’t mean that government can’t create any public sector jobs. Look- it’s one thing for you to try to become the US version of Peter Hitchens- but it’s an entirely different sort of thing for you to entirely misappropriate words.
Look- you may think you’re quite clever and all, say where is the re-direct you promised so many years ago?- but really all you’ve become is “blah blah blah”
a former fan
Why do you care so much about the redirect? It was about one year ago that I changed over to this site. It’s true, I keep forgetting to get it fixed (I actually had quite a lot of other things to do this past year), but it’s not as if you don’t know the new site’s address by now.
Steele said, “You and I know that in the history of mankind and womankind, government—federal, state or local—has never created one job.” I am willing to grant that he meant something else, but he said what he said. In what way did I “misappropriate” his words? I assume that words have meaning, so when someone says that government has never created a single job I assume that is what he means to say. His statement was misleading at best, and simply wrong at worst. Besides, this was a comment I made in passing in one post out of thousands, and for that you’re going away mad? Suit yourself, but that seems to me to be an overreaction.