Three years before Marcos fell I was sitting in the San Francisco living room of Gaston Ortigas, who had been the dean of a business school in Manila, but was then on the run from the regime. He had fled to the United States by sneaking over the sea border to Malaysia. Since we were waiting for one of those conspiratorial meetings to start, he with his cigarette and I with Worm Ouroborous from the Green Apple bookstore by the bridge with in nothing particular to talk about before the meeting, I asked him about his reputed disinterest in finance. He answered, “I’ve always thought it was a little odd to have high-rise buildings full of grown men handing little pieces of paper to each other and calling it work.” Today Mark Steyn has a post in the National Review which returns to that very subject: how far can a virtual economic activity be disconnected from bricks, mortar and people? He observes that ultimately, things come from people doing stuff. If you run out of people or they no longer do stuff, sooner or later the music stops — even for the people shuffling the bits of paper.
In the current crisis, Japan, Germany, and Italy (plus Russia) are in net population decline that’s only going to accelerate in the years ahead. So, unlike the U.S., they can’t run up the national debt and stick it to their kids and grandkids, because they don’t have any kids and grandkids to stick it to. If New York is running out of rich people, Germany is running out of people, period. The Chinese and other buyers of Western debt know that. If you’re an investor and you’re not tracking GDP versus median age in the world’s major economies, you’re going to lose a lot of money. …
But Steyn argues that we pretend this connection doesn’t exist. We continue to act like we can ignore the fact that somewhere along the line there is a goose that lays the Golden Egg. In the past we simply assumed the fact of the Egg and concentrated on ways to make increasingly fancier omelets. And the fanciest omelet makers of all were in the financial sector. Steyn continues:
Let it be said that in recent years in America, the United Kingdom, and certain other countries the “financial sector” grew too big. In The Atlantic, Simon Johnson points out that, between 1973 and 1985, it was responsible for about 16 percent of U.S. corporate profits. By this decade, it was up to 41 percent. That’s higher than healthy, but it wouldn’t have gotten anywhere near that high if government didn’t annex so much of your wealth — through everything from income tax to small-business regulation — that it’s become increasingly difficult to improve your lot by working hard, making stuff, and selling it. Instead, in order to fund a more comfortable retirement and much else, large numbers of people became “investors” — albeit not as the term is traditionally understood: Instead, you work for some company and they put some money on your behalf in some sort of account that somebody on the 12th floor pools together with all the others and gives to somebody else in New York to disperse among various corporations hither and yon. You’ve no idea what you’re “investing” in, but it keeps going up, so why do you care?
When I read Steyn’s piece, Gasty Ortigas’ remark about skyscrapers full of men handing each other “little pieces of paper” returned to memory. I would have disagreed with Gasty at the time, arguing (from behind the Worm Ouroborous) that the financial sector — the men with little pieces of paper — added value to ‘people doing stuff’. But I would have had to admit, had he pressed me (and he was one of the smartest men I ever met) that at at the limit once everything became all people shuffling paper without anyone doing stuff, then it would all become sterile and eventually collapse. It didn’t seem worth saying, because it was glaringly self-evident, that there had to be an optimal proportion between the two parts of the economy, dynamic perhaps in extent, but extant all the same. I think Mark Steyn is onto something when he argues that it is the collapse of this balance that is partly to blame for the meltdown. But bureaucrats act, or pretend to act, as if more rules and systems can fix things. Like every other form of life, bureaucracy acts like it wants its tribe to fill the earth, until there’s nothing left but forms, forms and forms.
A serious G20 summit would have seen France commit to the liberalization of its economy; Germany to serious natalist incentives; Britain to a reduction of the near-Soviet size of state spending in Scotland and Northern Ireland; and the United States to allowing its citizens to keep more of their hard-earned money and thus reduce both the dependency on ludicrous asset inflation as the only route to socio-economic improvement, and the risk of a Euro-style decline in birthrate caused by the unaffordability of kids. Instead, the great powers are erecting a global regulatory regime to export their worst mistakes to the entire planet.
But it can’t; and sooner or later the dream of bureaucrats will fall over of its own weight. Most of us will be buried beneath the gigatons of paper when it happens. But some will survive to pick it all up. Whether we will individually live to see it, no one can say. But the fact gives us hope; and whether in this crisis or in life in general, we don’t really need to live to see the dawn to know it will come.
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63 Comments
1. Willie G:There are so many lessons yet to be learned.
The first being: “Those who forget history….”
Unfortunately, the key to learning is to realize your ignorance. Without that, it’s simply a case smacking your face into the floor.
The phrase “Stuck on stupid” comes to mind, also.
Apr 4, 2009 - 1:42 pm 2. trangbang68:I have been thinking for some time that a nation that manufactures nothing is heading for the scrapheap. The economic whizkids pooh-poohed that idea while trumpeting the endless summer of the “service economy”. I wondered, what the heck is a service economy? Is it everybody working at McDonald’s providing crappy service? Is it a bunch of Geitners shuffling the deck of derivatives until the music stops and there aren’t any chairs left?
Apr 4, 2009 - 1:55 pm 3. Walt:Fortunately for me when some vato loco here in Tucson kicks in somebody’s door they still need a carpenter to fix it. I think we’re in deep trouble.
Making stuff is all the rage
Apr 4, 2009 - 1:57 pm 4. blert:In countries far away
They work for a subsistence wage
A couple bucks a day
While here at home the folks pretend
They’re working hard but they’re
Just stacking paper end to end
To climb that corporate stair
No need to dirty up one’s hands
By working with the soil
No, building things on shifting sands
Is what we now call toil
We’ve built a nice society
Where everyone’s a king
But soon will come sobriety
‘Cause we don’t build a thing
That ordinary people want
That people really need
Who wants to work, that’s just a stunt
What’s real is wholesome greed
What’s that you say, it’s coming down?
Just watch it all collapse?
Oh well, we’ve had our time in town
The kids will pay, perhaps
Plainly the insane are running the asylum.
It’s the group think that pervades the top circles in all of these nations which filters out disconcordant truth.
An awful lot of the profits noted above were in fact functional embezzlements.
AIG is a poster boy for such: writing bucket-shop psuedo-insurance without ANY capital or surplus to back up the contract — and in grand style!
We have now completely eclipsed the Crédit Mobilier of America scandal. The same mechanism of social burden and private profit. Yes, as ever, the politicians were in on the graft from the start. ( Ringing Frank, Dodd, et. al.)
What we are seeing is the end game of the biggest embezzlement/ counterfeiting operation of all time.
The terminal condition must be the complete destruction of public trust and the collapse of fiat currencies — probably all of them!
Never forget that as international money the US Dollar is the backing for an endless stream of other currencies. If faith in the Dollar collapses the only viable international money would be silver and gold bullion.
I hope that we don’t overcharge the Russians for the reset.
Apr 4, 2009 - 2:05 pm 5. RWE:As H.G. Wells might put it, it is a society comprised of the Eloi, playing in the sun with their meaningless pieces of paper and the Morlocks, toiling in the caverns with their grim machines.
Only, we don’t got any Morlocks…
Apr 4, 2009 - 2:07 pm 6. Habu:As I read the comments of the contributors to our hosts thread I rekindle the tiny flickering flame of hope I have for this country.
So many good minds and comments. So many who are actively thinking of the challenges before us. That is rewarding and uplifting.
People who simple read this site know what I am saying for it is on display daily, and though our Sisyphean challenge is great, we’ve got what it takes ..Burma Shave
Apr 4, 2009 - 2:24 pm 7. programmer:Wretchard preaches:
If you run out of people or they no longer do stuff, sooner or later the music stops — even for the people shuffling the bits of paper.
programmer expands:
1000 calories a day or less is considered a starvation diet. You will last a while, especially if you start out at 250 pounds or so, but eventually you will die. Food, water, and oxygen. Three things no human can survive without. Gold? Can’t eat it, drink it, or breath it. Same with Iphones and the ilk. The real wealth of a country is how much food it can produce. How much food does Iran produce? How much water is available for the citizens of Baghdad to drink? Shut off the food and water to any country that does not produce enough and eventually it dies. Who needs nukes? Kill the bees!
Apr 4, 2009 - 2:28 pm 8. Walt:Blert @4
I do believe the standard gold
Apr 4, 2009 - 2:32 pm 9. Uncle Jefe:Is quite the way to go
Though bear in mind that we’ve been told
Economies will slow
‘Cause gold is rare and small supplies
Can’t back the cash we need
So what else can we monetize?
How ‘bout the stuff we bleed?
A corpuscle’s a handy thing
Just like a credit card
A little nick, a little sting
That shouldn’t be too hard
What’s that you say, that’s what they do
We’re paying now in blood?
The gold is for the wealthy few
And we’re left with the crud
Yes, it’s been some years since kids coming out of high school have gone to work in a trade. The schools like to brag about the 95% (for example) of their graduating class going on to college, but what about real work, hard work experience? For those of us looking to hire workers who will learn a trade and eventually move up in succession, it’s been difficult. All these kids want a job with a computer, or a job with a tie. No one willing to get their hands dirty and go home sweaty and tired. (Even if, for the most part those jobs too now require computer skills, and a lot less dirt and sweat!!) Who will be around to actually make things, to produce? I’ve been trying to figure out an answer to this problem for some time…
Apr 4, 2009 - 2:32 pm 10. RAH:Not true Uncle Jefe, many want to learn the trade and work hard while young and run the business or design the machines after college. My son wants to be an engineer but has done temp work as electrician helper and he does the real wiring most of the time. He did not coordinate the activities that were the boss or design the plan.
But he has tried to get into construction trade and all want experience or trade schooling. He has learned at home and knows that stuff just need on the job training.
Most real business work is marketing or getting the contracts and planning the work. Like a general contractor does. The contract is obtained and the specialist writes and enforces the contract.
The management work is planning and arranging so all the parts come together like the crane to come on this day and do this and the construction crew to do this and then the wiring crew will wiring and do the boxes and wire in generator after the concrete crew pours the pad.
The government has it specialist that enforces the contract and reviews the time sheets and vendors costs, so no embezzlement is done and then an inspector checks the work.
Then the payroll companies issue the workers checks and pay the SS and Workmen comp pmt to the state and the bank process the payment and the worker pays his bills.
The worker did real work and created a product but that payment must be processed and if any left over invested by the bank so they have money to loan to a new business or house loan.
So there is a lot of deskwork involved in small business and creating a service or product. If you know someone willing to hire a green young man tell me. Right now there are a lot of skilled workers available with the construction trade dropping and auto business slowing that most other trades are having hard time to find paying clients.
Apr 4, 2009 - 2:59 pm 11. Chiral:If you are foolish enough to treasure gold, then government paper will always suffice. The dollar is safe either way.
Wise investors grow crops and guard them diligently, while others quarrel over contracts. But people want more than to farm and die. They want to own paper, be cool, and live forever. A world without heart stints and plastic bottles might suck. We can’t risk that.
Apr 4, 2009 - 3:00 pm 12. Karen Yvonne:…how far can a virtual economic activity be disconnected from bricks, mortar and people? He observes that ultimately, things come from people doing stuff.
And one of the things people do (or should do) is save. Credit is extended based on savings, but you never hear ideas or plans to encourage and increase savings, you only hear about how vital it is to enact plans to unfreeze credit. It seems obvious, yet still the huge disconnect marches on. It’s hard to see how a complete financial collapse can be avoided as long as the powers-that-be cling to their fantasy mind-set. The G20 summit meeting was so depressing.
Apr 4, 2009 - 3:05 pm 13. RAH:Plus the trades have gypped workers a lot. The deal was that they would be trained to do a job and then they would have a job until retirement. Machinists have been made uproductive unless they use CNC machines and become engineers Autoworker have been replaced by robots. Most trade workers have had to be constantly reeducated to handle new skills so why is that so different from going to college?
Is furniture made by hand or by machines and the workers check the machines. The real money is designing those machines cheap enough that the machines can be built and used and pay for themselves.
Fabrication is a new trade. Takes a lot of education and real world experince that is hard to come by. Plus the management constantly has to find new clients in order to keep the designers and fabricators working.
The textile industry were shafted by cheap textile from China. The consumers were delighted but the workers lost their jobs and the towns died.
Apr 4, 2009 - 3:10 pm 14. Carbon:Government and the lawyers kill the pharma industry. Now housing has died and the auto indutry has collapsed that is about 40% of our economy. Everyone else is pulling back and refusing to put out money they may not have in the future,
Condidence is shot and the gloom and doom from Obama has not helped.
What makes an economy is the production of goods and services that people need or want. Currency is simply a means to smooth the exchange between the producers and consumers and make it a more fluid, seamless process. No matter how much money you have, it is worthless if there is nothing to be bought with it.
Most governments as well as the “financial industry” cannot grasp this fact. They assume that the symbol, the currency, somehow has intrinsic value, which the US dollar hasn’t had since we went off the gold standard. They seem to be incapable of understanding that the mere act of generating more money, either by sleight of hand or the printing press, doesn’t actually produce any goods or services. And paper and electronic money only have value so long as a certain critical mass of people believe it does. We may be approaching a tipping point.
When enough people are willing to admit, in public, that the Emperor has no clothes, there might come the day when he will be arrested and convicted of indecent exposure.
Apr 4, 2009 - 3:12 pm 15. weSwinger:We may discover that currency has another valuable property if times get really tough: thermal convection!
“I burn my dollars at both ends
Apr 4, 2009 - 3:13 pm 16. Josh:they won’t last through the night.
But ah, my friends, and oh, my foes,
they give a lovely light!”
Well, I dunno. The meme that we have to actually build things, is popular right now on the left. Well, yes, someone has to build them, but a little thought experiment: what if a giant machine covering say half of Iowa, produces all the material goods that anybody in the USA could want. It conveniently runs on solar power and the cheapest of raw materials, it is magically efficient. Now, the question becomes – how do we allocate the goods fairly to the population? It would be inconvenient if the machine produced 300,000,000 forks, and they all ended up in Joe’s back yard. And there might be some minor scarcities of, say, 90 foot yachts. Should we have a panel that decides what is fair, or a lottery, or some kind of game, almost like “making a living” used to be, that decides your priority for scarce (if not critical) goods?
Which is to say that yes, I share everyone’s suspicions about “the service economy”, but it’s possibly not as prima facie unworkable, as it might seem.
Apr 4, 2009 - 3:15 pm 17. RAH:Most of the consumers savings is going to pay off debt and not to any new investments. People are saving but they overpent their income for 10 years and will take decades.
Apr 4, 2009 - 3:16 pm 18. DB:It is sometimes forgotten that the manufacturing sector of the US economy is larger than the entire GDP of Japan, the second largest economy in the world.
If you go here
http://www.census.gov/indicator/www/m3/hist/naicshist.htm
and click on Shipments, you will find that the US mined, manufactured and shipped $5.2 trillion last year.
Apr 4, 2009 - 3:20 pm 19. The Old Guy:One needs to keep in mind that “making things” doesn’t require as many people / widget as it used to.
The template for manufacturing employment is farming. Today, about 2% of the us population are farmers, yet we produce more food than ever before. Few people really complain that farming jobs are going away.
The US is still the worlds largest manufacturing economy, with about 20% of world output, with a share that has been more or less flat for the last 25 years. Manufacturing employment as a percentage of the workforce, however, is about 10% (down from about 15% in 1990). One might expect it to continue to decline – the curve looks pretty linear over the last few decades.
This suggests there is not a very bright future for those people without the ability or willingness to perform above semi-skilled labor levels, or for their unions. Think farmers again – most of the below average farmers who couldn’t raise their game aren’t on the farm anymore.
Some of these folks (the ones on the right hand side of the bell curve) will become software engineers, auto mechanics, or A/C technicians, and earn a good living. I’m not sure what the others ones (the ones on the left hand side of the bell curve)are going to do.
Apr 4, 2009 - 3:21 pm 20. truepeers:My grandfather liked to complain about the patriotic uncle who, after my great grandfather died in WWI, invested all the family’s money in Austro-Hungarian war bonds, which soon became worthless. But I think it was a hard lesson that influenced my grandfather’s later business success after fleeing the Nazis. In the meantime, new countries and new hopes arose in the wake of the empire.
This is just to raise the question of whether Steyn, while being patriotically proper and well-meaning like the uncle, really knows what Europe needs in order to survive. Maybe it really needs to speed up the bankruptcy of the current regimes and the creation of a new political and economic order. Maybe only that will revive sufficient interest in children and building a future from the ground up.
On the other hand, if the empire had survived the war, then it would have been indebted to the men who trade paper. And what would the survival of the old regime’s wealth have then meant for future creativity? It could have been the seed of new growth, or decadence. In general, the destruction of wealth is an evil, in growing government at the expense of freedom; but can we make of even this a universal rule if we consider the free market’s possible reliance on creative destruction? In other words, how will we respond to the possibility that the destruction of wealth is an inevitable thing once a free society has become sufficiently decadent and can only hope to renew itself by getting back to basics?
Apr 4, 2009 - 3:22 pm 21. Barnabus:I’m not an economist and from reading many of the comments it’s obvious most here are not economists either. Taken to the extreme of course Wrethcard has a point; i.e. as far as we know we will always need some people to actually farm the land, work in factories, etc. However, you ignore the effects of automation and the increase in productivity that it provides. The number of farm workers has steadily declined and food production has steadily increased. The same holds true for factories; less workers does not equal less goods produced. What the optimal ratio is, I have no idea…and it would always be changing. As for a gold standard, the idea is absurd. Why tie your economic policy to a relativley useless metal and at the same time empower countries like Russia that happen to have alot of it? If, and it’s a big if, you want to restrict government spending by tying the dollar to a hard asset then at least tie it to some basket of goods that the U.S. has an abundance of; perhaps coal, wheat, oranges, airaplanes, automobiles, etc.
Apr 4, 2009 - 3:25 pm 22. Herb:If you get out of the cities, there are plenty of folks who still know how to do. And some still in the cities.
But the issue is well taken. Even outside the financial industry there are huge numbers of people ‘handing each other “little pieces of paper”’ Somebody told me 25 years ago that the demise of American business began when ‘Personnel’ was renamed to Human Resources.
Apr 4, 2009 - 3:25 pm 23. KimW:I remember during an economics class, the lecturer told a joke, “Three merchants were shipwrecked on a desert island. They were rescued 10 years later. All three had got immensely rich by trading with each other.”
The point is that unless items of value to others are produced, notions of profit are all illusions. Anyone got any Pan Am or Enron stock ?.
Apr 4, 2009 - 3:26 pm 24. bob:Back in the thirties–so I’m told by those that were here–the depression never really hit in this area as most everyone was on the farm, and nearly self-sufficient. Not so today.
You can Protest this coming Tax Day. You have no excuse, the list will show a site near you.
Apr 4, 2009 - 3:27 pm 25. RWE:I have put saving as a priority for my whole life. And as result for the last two years I have had a total of over $100K of “income” from mutal funds that I had to pay taxes on while the funds in fact went down by over $300K in real, actual payable value.
I have no debt other than my house, which I have only 5 years more to pay on.
Sooner or later I figure that my commitment to savings will pay off with all those people in debt wanting to borrow my money at usurous rates. But it sure has not yet. And with Ali Babble and his gang of thieves in DC, I don’t expect it will soon.
So put your money into guns and ammo instead.
What’s in your wallop?
Apr 4, 2009 - 3:34 pm 26. Herb:Jim Manzi, writing at National Review made a similar observation about the demise of manufacturing in the US. Link here (subscription may be required):
http://nrd.nationalreview.com/print/?q=ODk2MWY1ZWM2NWViZmEwMzA3NjdmMDEyMmVlNTI2ZGY=
He says that America evolved from agriculture thru manufacturing thru services by each of the sectors becoming more efficient (less people per widget) and requiring more abstract skills.
What comes next? I donno. I suspect that No.1 Son has made a good bet on the entertainment business.
Apr 4, 2009 - 3:41 pm 27. buddy larsen:Dammit, Walt –you are just frankly amazing. In fact that’d be a good nom de plume if you needed one –Frank Lee Amazen
Apr 4, 2009 - 3:47 pm 28. Brock:Yup; it’s psychological. Sometimes they want to be seen helping, and other times they genuinely want to help – but either way they feel like they need to “do something” rather than do “nothing.” Of course, “nothing” is often what we need from government so that the private sector can step in a “do something.” This is why I’m in favor of a Constitutional preference against the addition of new rules, and a Constitutional preference for “no rules” in the rule-making process. I call it “The 80/20 Rule”. Passing a law requires 80% of the legislature to vote in favor while revoking a law requires only 20%.
There are a number of other structural reforms of government that would encourage healthy systems of governance, but I think this is one that needs for attention. Currently the 50/50 rules for lawmaking that we have produce an eternally increasing number of rules because making old rules go away is just as hard as making new rules (but you only get credit for the latter).
I also think laws should automatically expire after some period of time (20 years?).
Apr 4, 2009 - 3:50 pm 29. buddy larsen:RWE, that’s why mutual funds are losing out to ETFs. Course, no mutual fund manager puts you in for a good deal of Chinee water torture.
Apr 4, 2009 - 3:58 pm 30. weSwinger:KimW – the Enron and PanAm stories couldn’t be more different: the former were truly a bunch of crooks, PanAm got caught in the death spiral brought on by too highly paid and pensioned pilots. Same as the auto companies: legacy pension and health and welfare costs are going to sink any company over 25 or so years old. Either the govt. takes pensions and health care over (bad bad choice), or workers are paid enough to finance their own benefits (thats the ticket).
Apr 4, 2009 - 4:03 pm 31. trangbang68:The loss of manufacturing by nature leads to the demoralization of the middle class. In postwar America particularly in the northeast and midwest, the Rust Belt industries opened up home ownership to middle class families. My dad was one of those guys, working in a chemical plant in Western New York. In 1958 or so, Niagara Falls ,NY was booming with max employment in the factories and the Niagara Power Project under way. 50 years later, the factories are shuttered , the population is halved, the economy is moribund, the housing stock is decaying and largely worthless.
Apr 4, 2009 - 4:44 pm 32. Brock:This pattern is repeated throughout the Midwest (heavy industry) and the rural Southeast (textiles). I don’t see enough paper to shuffle to bring those regions back from the grave.
Say what? The lose of meaningful work and income leads to demoralization. There’s nothing special about manufacturing. The Rust Belt’s problem is a regulatory is legacy cost burden that prevents it from transitioning away from a low-skill, low-value manufacturing economy to … well, anything else that pays money.
Apr 4, 2009 - 4:58 pm 33. Walt:Buddy
I kinda like Rich Lee Deserven
Cheers, Walt
Apr 4, 2009 - 5:02 pm 34. Lifeofthemind:The linkage of benefits to wages, particularly health care benefits, is an outcome of WW-II wage and price controls. Like rent control in NYC it was a bad idea to begin with that has metastasized and is now bringing down every organ in the economy.
The Luddite contempt for financial services is a hallmark of socialist and anti-Semitic politics. That is even true among the many Democratic party big money backers who come from that industry. They show a bad salesman’s gift for disparaging their customers. This is even more so a mark of the people who have prospered in the most entrepreneurial, and most quintessentially American segment of our economy, the film industry.
Apr 4, 2009 - 5:04 pm 35. DB:trangbang mention textiles. It’s not what it was, but a quick Google search found this document for 2006 US production:
http://www.nationaltextile.org/library/cir/mq313a065.pdf
Yarn: 7.1 billion pounds
Apr 4, 2009 - 5:24 pm 36. buddy larsen:Knit fabrics: 828 million pounds
Towels: 16 million dozen
Broadwoven fabrics: 6.2 billion square yards
et cetera
The entertainment industry as a whole –the talent is as entrepreneurial as the word can get –YOU’D THINK the success stories would be a little less statist, considerin’.
Apr 4, 2009 - 5:48 pm 37. Uncle Jefe:Yes true, RAH.
Apr 4, 2009 - 5:50 pm 38. trangbang68:I didn’t say all don’t want to learn a trade, but it is damn difficult to hire young folks who a) want to work hard b) know how to work hard and c) are available to work hard. I can’t find em’. I don’t know where you’re at, but not where I’m at.
And it’s been going on for a long time.
Brock, Granted, that over regulation and taxation drove industry first south and then overseas. Union overreaching no doubt also has been instrumental in the death of American manufacturing. You say there is nothing special about manufacturing .I wonder if you will say that if forced to arm for large scale mobilization and we have no machine tool capacity or a trained work force. Maybe the pierced cat at the call center will be useful then or maybe he won’t.
Apr 4, 2009 - 5:51 pm 39. Mike Sylwester:Maybe I’m a dope, but I don’t get how everyone can work in financial services and call centers and tech services . Many of those jobs are shipped to India anyways.
Industrial and tradesman jobs are not all “low skill, low value” Tell that to a tool and die maker or a precision machinist or a skilled cabinet maker. I think it’s an elitist view that de-values the beauty and joy of working with one’s hands to produce things that endure and not just buying up shipping containers of massed produced Chinese junk.
I work in the administration of a business that employs home health aides, who go into the homes of elderly or disabled people and help them with their housekeeping, laundry, shopping, cooking and personal hygiene. It’s a glorified maid service.
We employ about 2,000 aides, the overwhelming majority of whom are (all are legal) immigrant women with children. You don’t have to speak much English. In fact, most of our clients too are immigrants too. For most of the aides, it’s a part-time job, about 20 hours a week, that they can arrange to do while their kids are in school.
Our service helps elderly, disabled people stay in their homes a few more years. The longer they stay in their own homes, the longer they don’t have to move into their adult childrens’ homes or into assisted-care homes or nursing homes.
This is a business that does not exist in most countries. We employ women from Russia, from India, from Korea, from the Dominican Republic — none of those women could work in such a job in their own countries, because there is no such business in their own countries.
Also, this job provides a step up for many immigrants. Some of the women are employed for the first time in their lives. Some go on to become nursing assistants or even nurses.
This job provides professional employment for me too. I write the company’s business correspondence, investigate accidents, respond to unemployment claims, etc. I’m the American bureaucrat for this company, because I am the only staff member who was born in the USA and writes English well.
Our company does not make anything. We pay low wages to provide a service to people who are mostly poor. But we are a growing business. The company president, a Russian immigrant, created the company in 1997 from nothing, and now she employs 2,000 people.
As I said, I handle the unemployment claims for our company. Our number of unemployment claims was the lowest in 2008 since it had been in 2002. We just finished the first quarter of 2009, and our unemployment claims remain very low, compared to quarters for the past seven years.
Apr 4, 2009 - 5:55 pm 40. Karen Yvonne:Even if the U.S is still the world’s largest manufacturing economy, it won’t matter. No matter how large any, or all, production is, it won’t matter if the output is dwarfed by the spending. And spending is what we continue to do and plan to continue doing. This can’t work no matter how productive we are.
Savings are a monetary representation of “people doing stuff” too. There hasn’t been enough of that kind of doing to maintain prosperity. Isn’t this what happened with the housing market? Too much credit with a dearth of real substance (savings, real capital, that is.) to back it up. Recall the insane leverage ratios (insane ratios brought about by government policy and derivatives “insurance”). Same thing’s happening with the auto industry – too much credited to retirees without enough substance to back it all up and so on. And now government, the most talented spender of all, is stepping in to “fix” things. And they’d like it to be on a global scale now too. This is what’s so scary.
Apr 4, 2009 - 5:57 pm 41. trangbang68:DB, I base my textiles comment on what I witnessed in north Alabama in the 90’s and past the turn of the century. Routinely, clothing manufacturers ( lower middle class wages) shut down operations and shifted to Mexico and Asia.
Apr 4, 2009 - 5:58 pm 42. buddy larsen:Your own data shows a fairly significant downward shift from 2004-2005.
walt, he was in that Eastwood movie “Unforgiven” –Clint had shot the bad guy who was dyin on the floor and croaks out “But I’m not Deserven!”
Apr 4, 2009 - 6:03 pm 43. whiskey:What Steyn won’t say, or Theodore Dalrymple, either, for example, because of sheer PC, but I will is that the demographic collapse of the West has NOTHING TO DO WITH EXPENSIVE KIDS.
Nothing!
Consider: Mexican immigrants to the US have far higher birthrates, their TFR is significantly over 3.0, as are Blacks, and both are responsible for the US TFR being over 2.1 slightly. White women in the US have a TFR of 1.7! That’s European levels.
Steyn’s point about Demographics is that Muslim immigrants to the EU have kids in abundance, for Muslim Women in Britain it is around 3.5, for France I think nearly 4.0.
Same economic system, same opportunities or lack of them, but one group has far more kids and the other far less. This holds true for all immigrants to all Western nations from third world countries that have … restrictive social mores on women’s freedom and opportunities.
The very thing that founded the West, it’s freedom for women, it’s open-ness to their doing different things, the ability of women to live more independently than anywhere else, is destroying it.
Bernard Lewis in his writings makes the point over and over again: Western women have ALWAY had far greater freedom than Muslim women, to the point where hardened Crusaders, ugly thugs in chain mail, were shocked and appalled at the Muslim treatment of women, or Turkish Ambassadors to the Court of Vienna shocked at the ordinary courtesy the Emperor himself gave to women on the street.
Let’s be clear: the ability of most men to “win” a woman who would be theirs alone, through romantic love, with the woman being free to choose yes or no to any man, and having her own independence, to a greater degree than elsewhere anyway, even if imperfect, is the source of all Western Wealth and power.
Yes, Romantic Love founded the West as we know it, instead of a barbarian squabbling kingdoms, or Viking Raiders, or whatnot. Requiring Christian monogamy, and a system that allowed most men to at most times win the heart of a single woman, and not be focused entirely of keeping her out of the harem or whatnot of the Big Man.
Now the Sex and the City lifestyle, may produce a lot of “fabulous” shoes, shopping, and gay friends for women to hang out with. But it does not produce many if any kids.
Wretchard you mentioned San Francisco. I don’t think I recall seeing a single White kid there in my visits 1988-2003, despite it being a center of White people, being far too expensive for Latino/Mexican Immigrants.
It’s a biological fact: to have more than one designer Eugenic Yuppie Baby by IVF and sperm donors, women need to have them in their mid twenties and earlier. All the medical intervention in the world won’t change that. A few miracle exceptions through fertility drugs notwithstanding (like an retirement plan betting on the lottery).
Cultures that DEMAND women get married young and have kids tend to reproduce and survive. Those that don’t, won’t.
The only people having kids are Islamic peoples, and Mexican immigrants, in the West, a few Evangelicals and Mormons aside.
It’s not money, expense, or socialism that causes women not to have kids. It’s nothing mysterious.
Give women the ability NOT to have kids, socially, and they won’t. This was the experience of the Romans and the Greeks.
If the West is to be preserved (it likely won’t be without massive changes) then having kids by Westerners is ESSENTIAL.
A world filled with mostly the children of Mexican and Islamist emigres to the West and a few scattered, persecuted children of Mormons and Evangelicals will resemble a cross between Tijuana and Islamabad. Or perhaps Kabul under the Taliban.
China is not immune either. They face the same forces: anonymous urban living, rising incomes/status of women, cheap and reliable contraception that erase the Nuclear Family and put in it’s place the Sex and the City lifestyle. Which eventually ends.
Steyn’s point Wretchard, is that without children, of Westerners, THERE IS NO HOPE. NONE AT ALL.
What he won’t say, is that without social structures to force women to have kids and a family instead of fabulous shoes and shopping, they will choose the latter over the former every time, and lack of creating that social structure has doomed the West.
Apr 4, 2009 - 6:11 pm 44. Mike Sylwester:For a long time, I have thought that our country’s health-care businesses are ripe for “industrialization.” People who work in medicine make lots of money. The doctors make huge amounts of money. At the other end of the business, even the lowly receptionists earn relatively high wages (compared to receptionists other kinds of businesses).
We need a lot of Henry Fords to come into our health-care world and to turn much of it from craftwork into assembly-line piecework. Break much of the medical work down into simpler tasks that can be done by people with only a couple years of post-high-school education. For example, a small group of semi-skilled workers can specialize in doing only one type of blood test. Drive down educational requirements and certification and wages throughout the health-care world.
In other words, rather than moan about the disappearance of manufacturing of hard goods here in the USA, we should see our opportunities to use our manufacturing organizations and experience in order to make medical services (and many other expensive services) significantly cheaper.
Apr 4, 2009 - 6:13 pm 45. outa my league:Apropos of the often-cited farming productivity example:
On the other hand, the quantity of organically raised veggies has increased, and so has the occurence of salmonella outbreaks, requiring periodic spikes of folks actively taking measures to counteract the health threat.
Not to mention the non-threat of global warming causing an increase in both bureacratic churning and in the mass production of widgets that inefficiently whirl and bake, instead of the targeted production of mere scores of vessels that slice and dice atomic nuclei.
Apr 4, 2009 - 6:27 pm 46. Brock:That’s changing the topic. You said that the loss of manufacturing “inherently demoralizes the middle class”, and I said (more of less) that you’re wrong. You are. As for demoralization there is nothing special about manufacturing. Any meaningful, interesting career will do – including non-manufacturing ones.
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Hey whiskey, before you opine any further on demographics you might want to read up on the social mores and programs in Iceland and France. Iceland has a growing population and France is in the middle of turning its demographic problem around among whites. Really. Check it out.
Apr 4, 2009 - 6:30 pm 47. Unsk:The plain fact is that too many Americans including many, many Republicans have created a business environment that is openly hostile to business and particularly manufacturing. America’s loss of manufacturing capability is a direct result of that hostile environment.
Manufacturer’s here in America too often are treated more like criminals than heroes.
The tax code, the legal system, the nanny state, and the regulatory system at the local, state and Federal level try at almost every turn to ensnare business people with criminal culpability and ruin their lives. Obama’s full court press of destructive chaos is just amplifying the problem. And you wonder why we are losing manufacturing capability.
America is still the world’s greatest manufacturing center. What that stat does not reveal is that much of our manufacturing prowess is a result of creative efforts of years ago. A bad recession like we suffering now could wipe out much of our manufacturing base, and that base may not come back like before. The problem is that we have lost the dynamic resiliency to bounce back. In too many locales, the process to start anew takes too long , is too expensive, and is too daunting. And we have destroyed our capital markets to boot, so it will difficult to even get the money to start.
i’ve worked in design, construction and manufacturing for over thirty years. I’ve seen good business environments and bad business environments. The difference is staggering, and cannot be underestimated.
With America’s innate creative and entrepreneurial abilities, and our new computer and internet capabilities, if government would just get out of the way, our manufacturing sector could explode with new products and unmatched prosperity. The problem though is that government’s suffocating tentacles are just digging deeper under our Dear Leader, trying to snuff out our capitalist system and our freedoms.
Apr 4, 2009 - 7:00 pm 48. JMH:Finance, or Management, or Administration, or any other group of men handing pieces of paper to one another, is valuable to the extent it increases the ability of everyone else to create things of value. And only to that extent. There’s great value in making accurate decisions about where excess capital would be best used. There’s very little value in simply sloshing money around and skimming a bit off for yourself. Statistics tell us most mutual fund managers can’t beat the average – so what exactly are they contributing to earn their salary?
Or take insurance. An insurance company that can effectively pool low-probability/high-impact risk for a large group of people is doing something useful. An insurance company that just acts as a (horribly incompetent) additional billing agency for my family doctor is not.
Wretchard’s 41% figure is astonishing. If you are looking over the prospectus for a company you are considering investing in, one prudent number to look for is the “G&A Expense.” General and Administrative. That’s the management overhead of the company. It should be pretty small – ideally less than 6 or 8%. Small G&A means an efficiently run company. Large G&A means a company with lots of incompetent managers who need hordes of assistants to get anything done. Or else execs who are plundering the company. You can bet that a compnay with a 41% G&A will sooner or later be eaten for lunch by more efficient competitors. To avoid that, the company needs to lay off large segments of it’s bureacracy and fire several execs and middle managers.
The profits of our financial sector (plus the government sector) are our national “G&A” and it indicates we are way, way overstaffed in that area.
Apr 4, 2009 - 7:00 pm 49. trangbang68:Brock, interesting post on your blog about the old guy hunting raccoons in Detroit. I guess that is more meaningful and interesting than working at the Fisher Body Plant.
Apr 4, 2009 - 7:13 pm 50. McBRIDE:Brock,you sound like an elitist who’s above getting his hands dirty.Service based economies do not create wealth,period.That is what makes manufacturing special.TB68 has a very valid point about the lack of the manufacturing base in this country.If it wasn’t for machinist’s you would be living like the Amish.I seriously doubt you could hack it.
Apr 4, 2009 - 7:18 pm 51. sgi:Financial services could not have grown so massively if people were earning and keeping more of their own money. People invest to (hopefully) make more money for retirement and their kid’s education. Financial services takes the money, blows it up, and then government bails out…financial services.
All in an effort to rescue globalization and internationalism.
In Canada, one in five is employed in government: municipal, provincial and federal. In British Columbia, where I live, the provincial government is the largest corporate employer. They are so out of touch, they actually brag about this on their website.
We need to start over. We need to get back to the basics. I just don’t know how it can begin without a revolution of sorts. But it just can’t go on…can it?
Apr 4, 2009 - 9:42 pm 52. Derek:Steyn is right to a point. It does come down to proportions. Financial services like insurance and banking are necessary parts of the economy. Reminds me though of a story of a potential investor being shown around New York in the late 20’s. He was shown the bankers marina, full of big boats. Then the trader’s marina, again. He asked where was the client’s marina.
What exactly were these financial services servicing?
I don’t think they could give you an answer, and that industry won’t come back until they figure it out.
I work in a service industry, and it is in my interest that my clients make money with what we do. I get nervous dealing with people who want things done that won’t make money for them; where will my money come from.
What is revealing about the almost panicked responses from governments to this situation is how dependent they are on these financial services and the bubbles that they produce. New York City and state, London and possibly the UK, Germany, Austria and others are facing possible collapse due to the failure of these systems. From their standpoint the revival of these systems is imperative. But the question that is never asked is whether the government structures are equally unnecessary.
Derek
Apr 4, 2009 - 10:36 pm 53. Tamquam:Whiskey 43: “A world filled with mostly the children of Mexican and Islamist emigres to the West and a few scattered, persecuted children of Mormons and Evangelicals will resemble a cross between Tijuana and Islamabad.”
I can’t speak to ‘Islamist emigres’, but I can speak to Hispanic immigrants as I live and work in Los Angeles. Hispanic immigrants tend to assimilate well over time. Two or three generations on they are culturally indistinguishable from White Americans. The second generation tends to have problems mostly caused by multi culti ideals that deprive them of their Western and Christian roots resulting in a disproportionate involvement in violent gangs. There have always been gangs, but Hispanic gangs are a larger problem than might be anticipated based on historical trends. It is a growing problem despite the
attempts to remediate it, mostly, in my opinion, because those attempts are limited and based on PC principles. I used to teach a parenting program in Altadena that was very successful at helping primarily Hispanic parents move their kids away from gangs, drugs, etc. Tiny scope of action, underfunded and hampered by the PC restrictions imposed by the program directors. Don’t worry about Hispanic reproduction making the US look like Tijuana, look to the Obama fiscal policy for that.
. . .
“What he won’t say, is that without social structures to force women to have kids and a family instead of fabulous shoes and shopping, they will choose the latter over the former every time, and lack of creating that social structure has doomed the West.”
Probably don’t want to say ‘forced’. Better to say ’strongly encouraged’. In previous generations the ideal every child aspired to was to marry and become a parent. Right from the cradle family was a very high ideal. One of the reasons Hispanics tend to out reproduce ‘Whites’ is that the Hispanic culture assigns a supremely high value to marriage and family. ‘Whites’ and Asians have elevated affluence to a supreme value. Two things must happen: 1. Americans must place a greater value on our relationship to persons rather than to things; 2. Americans must see our culture as great and worthy of transmitting to the next generation.
Apr 5, 2009 - 4:20 am 54. steveaz:Another great thread at BC!
Remember, guys, that you can’t discuss what ails America’s manufacturing sector without keeping the layers and layers of environmental regulations piled on the energy and manufacturing industries since the early seventies firmly in mind.
Even service sectors like transportation which utilize energy were subject to legislated perversions. In short, no matter how effective your manufacturing, construction or transportation business plan was in, say, 1978, the unpredictable artificial price-increases that wet-lands preservation, Coastal Commissions, CAFE standards and drilling moratoriums that emit from increasingly abstract legislation are sure to have obsoleted it by now.
Study rent-seeking by uncompetitive firms in Europe, and you may begin to wonder whether impacting a competitor’s biz plan isn’t the legislators’ desired outcome.
Which leads me to one critique of Steyn’s observation vis the financial sector: the rent-seeking that overloaded the system was mediated by government regulators motivated by similarly abstract welfarism. Otherwise, his points are right on.
Environmentalism and welfarism are the wheels on the Left’s market-busting bike. Let’s make sure that, as we delve into the whys, wheres and whos of the economic melt-down, we shove a stick into the spokes of the Left’s wheels.
Apr 5, 2009 - 7:39 am 55. RAH:Whiskey Comment #43 was absolutely correct. The best biological time for woman to have children is the teens and young 20’s. However society has done its best to discourage this among white yuppie families. Christianity did force women to get married and have children since it blocked off any other avenue. Women were consider the property of the father and then a part of the husband and could not own property in their own name unless they were a widow. Check the legal status of women in the colonies. It was worse that most European nation which had protected the upper class of women to some extant.
So unless we want to accept the evangelical idea that women should be subservient to men, women are going to refuse to have children unless compensated with societal value or money. After all they sacrifice 9 –12 month being pregnant and initial time with the child and then 20 years bringing up the child with all those costs. Men have not picked up the costs either monetary or labor since there are a large number of fatherless children. Many of that deliberately by the mother’s choice.
Most of the numbers of white children produced are done by teenage white girls of working class parents. Same culture as the Hispanics who work hard and have children young. Bristol Palin is an example of a working class family culture and she could not wait to have sex and get pregnant. She probably thought the pregnancy would guarantee the fidelity of her boyfriend, which is often the reason that girls choose to get pregnant. Funny thing is that the male rarely stay around anyway since they are way too immature to be steady fathers and their taste in girls change, as they grow older.
After the first teenage pregnancy and the rapid maturity of having to provide; those girls wait until they find a good father and husband before they get pregnant again. Marriage as an institution was supposed to solve that, but most teenagers will have children but refuse marriage.
So a less material world may increase the value of men as providers and strong enough to protect their women and children. Maybe this recession will push it that direction, but I doubt it.
As long as women do not have to depend on men there will be less children. If society had provided the mothers with the monetary value of the true cost of having and caring for a child then women may have more kids indiscriminately. But we have long argued against welfare for non-working moms and the requirement for work for moms reduce the childbearing capability.
If we want more children born increase the stigma for illegitimacy and more children will be born and make divorce harder. But also require better protection for wives and children in marriage laws.
The dissolution of marriage that gays are pushing by broadening the definition of marriage is not helpful. But many gays are anti children and disparage women as “breeders” So pro gay attitudes also reduce children born. Are the libertarians going to go for these ideas? I do not think so. All these proscriptions are anti freedom. That is why they work under Muslim and authoritarian ideologies.
Apr 5, 2009 - 8:33 am 56. RAH:I diagree about services. They fo provide revenue. People ant their hair cut and style and that service is provided. Plumbers provide a servicn as so do HVAC techs.
Any homeowner has a pipe break will call a plumber or try it themmselves. Failure of the AC in the summer and a call is made and that service is valuable to the homeowner or business. Same with failure of heat in the winter.
You car breaks doen so you take it to the mechanic a service tech.
But services are dependent on the wealth of the client base. When clients are poorer then they call less on services. If client lose their jobs they do not buy extra services.
Those small business lay off extra employees and reduce their own spending and the squeeze is on. That is the situation today.
Manufacturers reduce inventories and production if no one can buy the products. Ao the big layoffs at Caterpillar and GM and all the other big manufaturers.
Managers that are excessive are laid off. Paper pushers are reduced and those thatare left do more with same pay. Because they are afraid of the next lay off.
Apr 5, 2009 - 8:45 am 57. steveaz:Rah @55,
For some reason I am tweaked by this dichotomy, RAH. It could be its first “subservient” peg that irks. Slave=Women, Master=Man: this restates my Feminist professor’s thesis perfectly, and I vehemently reject it. Or is it the second one presuming society’s financial compensation must be copulation’s only alternate catalyst? This posits that women, consequentially, must be paid currency to conceive.
Since neither seems particularly primal, it could be both that bother.
I think that Nature’s got a bigger say in things than your limiting binary allows. Just like capitalism, DNA always burrows under social barricades in the end, no matter what the specs on our social-engineers’ plans may say.
Account for Nature’s inexorable drives, and tally the labor-saving and psychic gains (like social security, responsibility, campus) that come with procreation, and I think it’ll fill out your bipartite conjecture a bit.
Apr 5, 2009 - 10:10 am 58. RAH:Most primitive societies the power is with the males. Biology plays its part. Males are stronger than women in general. Soldiers are primarily made up of males. Women have been seen for thousands of years as the spoils of war.
Western civilization has empowered women but unless it continues to be strong western civilization will fail. All civilizations are fragile.
Part of our strength in America is the freedom that allowed ingenuity, will and drive to reap wealth. No taxes in colonial times helped a lot. Colonists were considered very wealthy by the common British soldier term. Food and comfort in plenty. Of course that took a lot of work but also no impediment except by Indians and nature.
The ability of someone to take an idea like Carrier did to develop AC was done and now AC is common everywhere. The combustion engine and the automobile made common through Ford so now anyone can have an auto. Standard Oil was able to create gas stations across the US in little time until anti monopolist government intervention stopped them. Bell took hi ideas, patented them and created a company that everyone uses his inventions. He got wealthy and so did his descendants. Railroads that crossed the country by the railroad barons. The great wealth unleashed by small governmrnt and ambition of smart men. Of course these men tried to consolidate and prevent new competition. Big business and big government go hand in hand to prevent competition.
We have ideals of freedom of opportunity so women have been allowed since the 1960’s to get degrees and work in industries not common back then and laws have changed so women are not restricted to get credit and loans. This is still very recent and these changes can be revoked. They have in Afghanistan, Iran and Indonesia, Pakistan and most Muslim countries. Women were freer in Saudi Arabia in the 1950’s then in the 21st century.
I am not advocating the restriction of freedom for women or more emancipation. Just that women’s freedom and contraceptives have allowed women the choice to have children or not. Unless the woman is compelled or supported she often will refuse to have children. The cost to have children alone are very high and most women who want children can not afford the cost until they are out of reproductive age unless they get married at younger ages and have the support of a husband. The destruction of marriage has led to a decline in children among the yuppie class.
Our Social Security depends on the creation of offspring to support us in our old age. Yet those boomers failed to have enough children to do that. We like Europeans have been dependant on immigration to provide that extra population.
Obama’s assumption goes out the window without future generations to pay off the debt he is incurring. So this is a serious issue and thinking how to resolve it is a good idea. Unless we can think off a way to make efficiency like in farming were 2% could pay for all our debt. Maybe these paper pushers were trying just that and they failed.
Apr 5, 2009 - 11:39 am 59. RAH:SteveAZ # 57 If you are referring to th esex drive, I believe our sucessful aeparation of sex and procreation has a lot to do with it.
Women have more sex but control the result. No kids.
Read your Bible and it states that women are supposed to under control of their husband. So subservience is implied. Any long term husband may know the reality is otherwise if he wants a harmonious marriage.
Apr 5, 2009 - 11:54 am 60. Brett:Let’s not forget government micro-management of the workplace, which has made them hostile environments for many–owners, management, and workforce alike. That’s demoralizing.
Apr 5, 2009 - 1:40 pm 61. steveaz:Rah,
My real objection to the dichotomy (now that I’ve given it more thought) is that the choice, as you offer it, is one sure to drive any woman disagreeing with you to embrace statism.
If the choice is “Evangelists” and “subservience” versus getting “compensated” to bear children, well, show one flash of a Tammy Faye Baker photo or play two minutes of a Jimmy Swaggart sermon and you’ll have every voting women of child-bearing age herded into the arms of tax-payer funded pre/post natal care – this, in addition to the paid daycare, medicare and primary and secondary education that taxpayers already provide.
If you were a single-mom with two kids – and another one on the way – which’d you choose?
So, similar to my response to Whiskey’s earnest feminization theory, I’d argue that you, too, are bending your thesis around urban media caricatures of women and womens’ “feelings” (I call this “dumbing feminine down”), and, insofar as you broadcast your thesis in such a stark, binary form, you risk exhibiting exactly the chauvinism that the academic left just as simplistically accuses “Men” of.
Why think in stark social categories, anyway? Aren’t there any Evangelist single mom’s on welfare? I say, let the academic wing of the anti-intellectual Left play that silly categories-game. While us regular humans get back to building America.
Apr 5, 2009 - 2:23 pm 62. RAH:I agree that the model to adress could be goverment or social payments that pay women to have children. I believe Russia tried it but could not pay anywhere the true cost and it failed.
Child bearing and child care has been a free cost borne by families and the cost was shifted forward with the social contract was that those children helped the parents in their old age. The cost was shifted forward. Invest in children and you children will forward invest in grandkids. Evolutionary sucess.
To get that I believe a social attitude of stigmatizing pre marital sex and bastardy and making incentives for marriage. Tax breaks for children much larger and for the spouse. Tax deductions for private schooling of children that type of incentives. Less government and more money left in American hands.
WE made smoking a social pariah so this could be easy if men were agreeable and women enforced on other women. Women are generally the enforcers of social rules.
But the libertarians hate the stigmatizing of sex except for procreation and they have a lot of support. So I do not see that social attitude changing for a while.
Apr 5, 2009 - 4:24 pm 63. steveaz:You defend your thesis well, RAH.
It is a pleasure interacting with you.
Apr 6, 2009 - 6:43 am-Steve