Bad Word

Last month, Rhode Island’s Legislature approved a proposal to allow a ballot referendum in 2010 to change the state’s official name from “State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations” to simply “State of Rhode Island.” According to The Providence Journal, “Proponents of the name change say the word ‘plantations’ is offensive to the African-American community because it conjures up images of slavery.”
Sarah Vowel. A Plantation to Be Proud Of

Of all of the things that people find offensive, I must admit that I think it strange that being considered “thin skinned to the point of absurdity” is not among them.

But I have a bigger question. If the very word “plantation” is offensive, because of a connotation of slavery, what does one call a plantation? If you come up with a word that is still specific to what was once called a plantation, you might have a useful euphemism, but the new word will simply acquire all of the baggage that plantation has, and you’re back at square one. On the other hand, if you simply call them “farms” or something, to avoid conjuring up images of slavery, don’t you run the risk of effectively whitewashing a part of American history?

And should white people be offended by the negative connotations of the term “whitewashing,” and its association with coverups and disingenuousness? Just asking.

Second Best

We tend to use the term "second-best" as a pejorative, describing something not worth having or someone not worth being. But after watching Andy Roddick spend more than four hours vainly trying to put away Roger Federer, I think that we'd do well to remember that sometimes second-best means "kicked every ass but one."

And that's nothing to sneer at.

Gunshot, Poison or Hanging?

Okay... I have a follow-on question to my last post.

If we stipulate that Nueno is correct, and that the willingness of people in poverty to work long hours for minimal wages creates an effectively insurmountable competitive advantage, you still have the problem of implementation. Most industrialized Western nations are republics (or at least somewhat credible facsimiles thereof), and it really seems that saying: "Hey, everybody! We're going to slash the minimum wage and lengthen the working day to 12 hours. Oh, and kiss unemployment benefits buh-bye," is pretty much the very definition of "political suicide." Torch and pitchfork retailers would be forever in your debt.

So... how on Earth does one make such an idea fly? How do you get people to support importing poverty, rather than simply ratcheting up protectionist policies? You could lie to people, but once the policy goes into effect, you'd still have an uproar on your hands, and unless you disenfranchised everyone that loses out, someone would come along and make unseating you the main plank of their platform. So you'd have to convince workers that beating the third world's poor at their own game (and by their rules), while living in wealthy nations along side the richest people on the planet, is to their direct benefit.

I've been wracking my brain trying to figure this out, and I'm fast coming to the solution that economists would make terrible politicians.

Importing Poverty

This is the sort of thing that gives Conservatives reason to sneer at Liberal societies. When Spanish police raided textile sweatshops in Mataró, Spain, near Barcelona, and freed hundreds of Chinese workers, the immigrant workers, many of them in Spain illegally, hit the streets. They picketed not the poor conditions that they were working under, but the authorities for intervening. The Chinese are upset that they aren't being allowed to work illegally for long hours and low pay, because those pesky Euro-zone labor laws are keeping them from jobs that would horrify Spaniards, but are better than they could get in China. Of course, its those same European laws that allow them to protest in the street without them being simply rounded up and unceremoniously shipped back to China, but that doesn't count.

As ludicrous as the situation seems, there support for the idea that the willingness of Chinese laborers to be virtually locked into their workplaces and work seven days a week should be emulated worldwide. Pedro Nueno (I don't know that I've spelled that properly), a Spanish economist, says that European labor laws must be changed to allow for workers in developed nations to work under the same conditions that third world workers labor under. Twelve-hour days and low salaries should be the norm, he says. Otherwise, more and more jobs will depart for the Far East. The solution, it seems, to the exportation of jobs is the importation of poverty.

I understand the logic, but the idea that setting worldwide workplace policies around the idea that the poorest nations in the world must remain uncompetitive in a global labor marketplace seems like a recipe for a true new feudalism, where you have an aristocracy that owns all that they survey, and a peasantry that owns little, other than their bodies. If 60 plus hour workweeks and minimum wage salaries become the norm in the developed world, that might remove some of the incentive to shift jobs overseas, but that would require a catastrophic crash in the cost of living to be workable. What do we do when jobs start moving to Africa, where many poor people scrape by on a dollar or two a day? Granted, it likely won't come to that soon. Western consumer economies operate on having a respectable proportion of the population making enough money to buy consumer goods. If the working class of the society finds itself making $20,000 (or less) annually, there won't be many people able to buy the new cars or the big-screen televisions. But there was a point in time when the economy didn't need a large or sustainable middle class, and it's a fool's idea to think that the movers and shakers won't adapt their business models to work within that structure, if we go back to a system where subsistence wages are the widespread norm. While it's fashionable to complain about being oppressed by "the man" here in the developed West, a return to company towns, scrip and wages so low that the longer you work, the greater the debt you amass to your employer would REALLY give people something to complain about.

Money People Don't Have

So I was listening to Marketplace the other day. They reported that the FDIC estimates that banks pull in around $17 billion dollars worth of overdraft charges annually. (And this might be set to go up as banks look to replace falling revenues from credit cards, now that new rules have taken effect.) In the same story, we also learn that the average overdraft fee is $35. To get to $17 billion at $35 a pop, you need more than four hundred eighty-five million transactions. That's in the area of one and a half times the entire population of the United States.

Given that not everyone in the United States has a bank account, and not everyone in the United States with a bank account overdraws their checking account at least once a year, there are some people who are bleeding themselves dry with multiple charges annually. While Nessa Feddis at the American Bankers Association claims that people are willing to pay for having transactions go through, I suspect that Jean Ann Fox at the Consumer Federation of America is also on the right track when she effectively contends that the banks have made covering overdrafts into a product - one that's profitable enough that there's no reason for them to discourage even accidental purchases.