This year the differences run deeper, and passions run higher.
Many readers of this essay are probably unfamiliar with the McCarthy era in the 1950s. Ancient though I am, I was just a baby at the time. However, I studied that period of American history more than most people do because it was such a powerful assault on the foundational principles of American society: personal liberty, personal accountability, toleration of diverse beliefs and cultures, more power to individuals, less power for collectives, all these virtues that made America special, were in grave peril. I was interested in both how such an assault could achieve prominence in America, and at least as important, how it was finally beaten down. Senator Joe McCarthy's successful usage of the levers of government to censor critics, blackball and ruin opponents, and ruthlessly punish people accused of the non-crime of being friends with people accused of the non-crime of being Communist sympathisers, was a wake-up call to how perilously thin the veil of civilization is even here. For the modern age of people who watch media rather than read books, I recommend the movie Good Night and Good Luck, about Edward Murrow, whom is given credit by many for bringing McCarthy down. There is a lighter-weight view of the time in the Woody Allen comedy The Front.
This year both candidates are committed to harming the principles upon which America is founded. But one of them is the closest thing to Joe McCarthy any of us have ever witnessed. So, this year's comparison is not just about stands on issues, but is about the very personalities of the contestants, and about the very soul of the nation.
I have created a decision analysis table comparing Hillary and Donald on issues and character, at the DecideRight2.com web site. In the table I have included two additional candidates for President for your consideration. The third candidate is the Jeffersonian Computer, a computer program that would simply veto every bill sent to it by Congress. A two thirds majority would be required to pass any new law, whether the law be good or bad. And the fourth candidate is Gary Johnson, the 2-time New Mexico governor who is running for President on the Libertarian ticket. You cannot vote for the computer, of course. But Johnson is a real alternative, particularly for life-long Republicans who cannot stand Trump but who cannot imagine voting for a Democrat. Regardless, you may find the comparison illuminating.
Let me also introduce a person to whom I will refer repeatedly during this analysis. That person is Paul Krugman, a left liberal economist much beloved by the media. He is not only the winner of a Nobel Prize, but he is also a brilliant intellectual gymnast eager to justify and rationalize each and every far left proposal. The fact that he and I agree on a number of matters in this election is a shocking demonstration of just how messed up the political discourse within our nation has become. Most of the time, I can confidently say that if Krugman believes one thing, I will believe another, as demonstrated in my writeup about KrugmanLand. But not this year.
Hillary, like her husband, specializes in triangulation. She finds the position somewhere in the middle of the opinions of the voting populace that minimizes opposition. As such, she is not a leader. Rather, she is a follower of the average of the distribution of the people.
Donald likes to claim to be a strong leader. Perhaps as a corporate mogul he qualifies. But we need to look a little more closely at what it means to be a leader in the context of a nation. In both corporate and national contexts, a leader is someone who shares a vision that inspires people to work together, no matter how strongly their personalities and preferences clash. Such disparate yet inspired people can then achieve goals together that they could never achieve apart.
Now, in the corporate context, this means getting the people inside your company to unite to deal with the competitors and bureaucrats outside the company (people who have never run a company probably think this is easy; trust me, this is ridiculously hard, people inside a company yearn to fight with one another, just as Shiite Muslim jihadists fight with Sunni Muslim jihadists).
But the USA is not a corporation, it is a nation. And in a nation, unifying clashing people means getting all the people in the country -- not just the middle age white Christian guys, but all the Muslims and blacks and Latinos and women and young people, and Greens and socialists and libertarians, onto the same page.
On March 7 I read my first report on Donald Trump's leadership quality. It was a report on a basketball game in Indiana between a mostly-white high school and a mostly-Latino high school. The white kids were shouting "Build the Wall!" and "Get 'Em Out!" at the Latino students. Trump's leadership on a national scale amounts to creating a country in which bigotted white teenagers will come together to jeer at Latino teenagers whose non-citizen parents are being deported.
Of course, you might say that this is not what Trump meant, and he is being misinterpreted by these children. Sorry, Donald is smart enough to know that this was the inevitable outcome of his rhetoric. A real leader -- think Ronald Reagan or Franklin Roosevelt -- is also a real communicator. A real leader would craft a message that was not so easily translated into malice.
So, when all is said and done, Hillary with her negligible leadership qualities is still the better national leader.
My biggest disappointment with Hillary is that she did not end poverty when she had the chance. As many of you may not know, while her husband was a governor, Hillary invested in cattle futures -- a field about which she was perfectly ignorant before entering the governor's house. She made a great deal of money while risking very little of her own. Some would conclude that she got insider trading information in exchange for favorable decisions on her husband's part. But I prefer to believe that she devised -- despite her lack of mathematical genius -- a simple algorithm for predicting cattle futures reliably. Had she simply published her algorithm, and gotten it into the hands of all the poor people in the USA, the poor would now all be 1-percenters, and poverty would be a solved problem.
Or perhaps not.
Is Donald any better? Donald made a commitment on March 3 to supply legal defense for supporters who assault protesters. So of course one of his supporters assaulted a protester, and was arrested. Donald has said he is "investigating" fulfilling his commitment. From here it looks like he is going to stall till the election is over. I suppose even Donald thinks it might be bad politics to publicly defend a mugger. Ooops. But his commitment to fulfill his commitments is demonstrated herewith to be ... worthless.
One can argue over whether Hillary or Donald is less honest. It is truly a competition for the bottom. But we can at least look at a moderately unbiased fact-checking organization for a comparison on how often they lie. According to Politifact's Trump Analysis, Donald Trump's statements are True, Mostly True, or Half True 23% of the time (only 2% simply True), so he is categorically lying about 77% of the time. A comparable assessment of Politifact's Clinton Analysis tells us that Hillary lies about 29% of the time. Even granting substantial bias among the Politifact people, Trump is setting a new standard for dishonesty and lying in 21st Century politics.
So, if you think Russia and Venezuela have something to teach us about censorship and freedom, go with Trump. Otherwise, pick Clinton.
In the Dark Ages, a wave of devout faith drove many people to engage in self-flagellation, believing it would make them better off. Question: in what way is the $15 min wage like self-flagellation? Answer: there is virtually no data to tell you one way or the other whether self-flagellation or a $15 min wage is a good idea. There are only 2 data points I have found, both of questionable value.
In all the world only France has a min wage that (like $15 for the USA) is 60% of the median wage. France is not an encouraging example. In France the unemployment rate never fell below 7% even at the peak of the boom. And unemployment has never been below 9% since the end of the boom. This is 70% higher than our unemployment rate as I write this. This is equivalent to millions of jobs that never even came into existence.
The $15 min wage law was passed only a year ago in Seattle. Now, the law was designed to phase in over 5 years, on the assumption that business owners are too stupid to see what is going to happen in the future even though everyone else sees it. One would predict that sensible business folk, seeing what is coming down the pike, would not start new businesses in Seattle. Indeed, they would start avoiding Seattle early, probably beginning on the day when it looked likely that a $15 min wage might be enacted, before the law was even passed (a type of loss of jobs that no statistical analysis I have ever seen even tried to account for).
Be that as it may, since the law has had very little actual impact yet, you would expect the statistics to unambiguously show that the law has not had a noticeable effect on employment. Alas. The data is already ambiguous. While you can turn the available stats sideways, squint, and conclude the law has not yet done any harm, one of the statistics rarely mentioned in the liberal press is this: while employment throughout the whole state of Washington has boomed in the past year, employment in Seattle has fallen.
Of course, it really is too early to tell what the real consequences will be. Do not trust the statistic I just quoted. But do not trust the others, either. Regardless, this does not support the idea that we should rush to bring the same benefits to the whole country.
So, if you look only for evidence telling you what will happen with a $15 min wage, the skimpy hints I have been able to identify suggest a frighteningly negative outcome is really possible.
Just for the record, I would love it if you could double the minimum wage without job losses. But I personally have both worked for minimum wages and been unemployed with neither clue nor hope for finding another job. I can tell you, comparing these two experiences, that no work at all is more than ten times more terrible than working for nearly nothing. So if you're gonna raise the wages of 1000 people, you better be darn sure -- I mean absolutely positive here -- that you are not going to cause 100 jobs never to be created, jobs that could have alleviated the deep sense of despair suffered by currently unemployed people. Otherwise you have done more harm than good. And any sincere liberal would demand just as much certainty as I that they were doing more good than harm, especially the ones who have embraced the Far Left Green Precautionary Principle.
To guess at the consequences of a $15 minimum wage, you have to look either at statistics (which are lies, as I point out in another context elsewhere), or at the laws of economics. The Law of Supply and Demand states that, if you artificially increase the cost of a good (human labor in this case), then demand will fall (causing unemployment, in this case). So if you think the laws of economics are more powerful than the trickery, bumper stickers, and spin jobs of politicians, you gotta worry about this min wage hike. As a point of philosophy, history is littered with the corpses of extinct nations where the politicians thought they could outsmart the Law, going back to the Anasazi Indians who disappeared from the earth while following Keynesian economic policies (unknowingly of course, since they went extinct thousands of years before Keynes came along).
So if you want to believe the min wage hike is a good idea, you have no choice but to believe the statistics even though they are lies. We do have statistics (lies) about modest minimum wage hikes. Many of them conclude that modest min wages do not cause loss of jobs (though not all, the CBO estimates a raise to $10.10 would cost 500,000 jobs. And another analysis concludes the $15 min wage would cost 13 million jobs). Anyway, if you want to believe that the law of supply and demand has been suspended for human labor, and if you have never personally operated a small business with thin margins, you will find plenty of statistics to support your belief in modest mins. But let's consider a handful of items vaguely similar to facts in the neighborhood of this belief system before we rush back to the comfort of our faith-based opinions:
Anyway, many businesses (like restaurants, again) cannot raise their prices to cover their significantly increased costs. They have to automate jobs away, or quietly go bust.
There is some self-fulfilling prophecy here. I recently read about a woman who had 2 jobs, one min wage and one her own business. She was delighted that the new min wage would allow her to abandon her entrepreneurial efforts. Is this really the transition we seek? Would it be good news, a positive outcome of the increased min wage, if she loses her job and has only her own business to support her? Will her struggling business also go bust because she has low wage people working for her?
Perhaps it makes more sense to think about how to rework the regulatory environment and thereby encourage economic mobility and entreneurship, rather than to make it impossible for people to do low-skill jobs for low-rate wages.
So, how do Hillary and Donald stack up? Hillary has endorsed the $15 min wage. Donald rejects it. So, if despite my rant here, you are darn sure that you can impose in every industry in every corner of the country a $15 min wage without harm, you would choose Hillary. Otherwise, Trump is the better choice.
In earlier remarks, I gave examples that the far left and the far right have more in common with each other than with anyone close to the center. Trump has made another example clear with his stand on foreign trade, which is quite sympatico with Bernie Sanders. Both Sanders and Trump oppose foreign trade, as do all left liberals enamored of the unions. Hillary is more ambivalent. Hillary does not really favor trade -- unions again -- but when Hillary triangulates she winds up only mildly opposed to foreign trade.
Many people think of Trump as a Big Businessman. But what he really is, is a Big Real Estate Mogul. Real estate moguls do not export or import anything. He is clueless about this stuff. And Trump is no more likely to listen to an economist than is a labor union leader.
International trade is a complex weave, and almost all economists believe it is a winning proposition for overall employment for all the nations involved. Consider the Toshiba laptop upon which I am writing this. Odds are, the device was designed in Japan, the RAM chips were manufactured in South Korea, the shell was manufactured in Malaysia, the whole thing was assembled in Taiwan, and the core computer chips -- the most valuable, non-commodity, profitable part of the whole device -- were fabricated in Phoenix Arizona. Those South Koreans, Taiwanese, and Malaysians who help build the laptop then have enough money to buy additional goods -- many of them having parts designed and/or manufactured in the the USA, creating a win-win-win interaction.
While no one should trust economic models any more than they trust statistics, the one attempt to model the consequences of shutting off trade just with Mexico (to force them to pay for the Trump Wall) suggested that even that much harm to trade would cause the USA to dip back into recession. Read just about any analysis of the Smoot-Hawley Act, a protectionist tariff passed by FDR to protect American workers from international competition during the Great Depression, and you will find that there is pretty unanimous agreement that this law hurt us; the only disagreement is over whether it was a major driver of the enduring misery of the Depression, or merely a minor driver given all the other ghastly mistakes made. Perhaps we should be a little careful about killing the ability of our companies to buy and sell products over the border.
And finally, if you really believe international trade is a bad idea because those foreigners will work for low wages, the first thing you need to do is build a Trump Wall around Tennessee. As the coal companies fall into bankruptcy like dominos, folks in Tennesse will be looking for any kind of job, even low wage ones. You'll need to lock them out first thing.
Enough. If you believe that international trade is a good thing, you should support Hillary. If you think recreating Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Smoot-Hawley protectionism would be a good thing, go with Trump.
Ridiculous? Oh yes. Yet this is the same logic being used to say that no Muslims or Latinos should be allowed into the country. Ridiculous? Oh yes.
The typical Muslim trying to get into our nation has a lot more in common with my ancestors than they have in common with McVeigh. One ancestor came here to escape a potato famine. The Muslims coming here are similarly trying to escape the whackos who drop barrel bombs on them and the even crazier whackos who behead people on camera.
For generations, my ancestors' descendants have earned more than they have spent, and strengthened America a little bit every day. Which is the same as the descendants of a friend of mine who immigrated here from Palestine. His daughter is a Major in the Air Force. She flew fighter jets against Saddam Hussein. If you ever get in a fight, trust me, you want her on your side.
The random Muslim escaping to the USA is unlikely to be a jihadist. She is more likely to be an entrepreneur like Anousheh Ansari, an Iranian woman who came here, founded a telecom company, and made millions of dollars while creating hundreds of well-paid jobs; many of those jobs are no doubt filled by white Republicans. An Iranian woman in Iran would never succeed at starting a business and creating hundreds of jobs. But here, she can make us flourish simply because we allow her to flourish too. And furthermore, she is a national hero to all the women under the control of Iran's tyranny. In our quiet but critical battle to see the Iranian tyrants and their support of terrorism crushed, Anousheh Ansari has been more valuable to our cause than the 3rd Armored Division, the 354th Fighter Wing, and Carrier Strike Group 3 combined.
So let the FBI track the whackos. The FBI is really quite good at it even without breaking into all our iPhones. But for Heaven's sake, let the next Anousheh Ansari into the country. People like her, and like my Palestinian friend, and like my ancestor, are the heart and soul and strength of the nation.
So how do Hillary and Donald compare? I think we all know. Trump would never allow Anousheh Ansari to strengthen our nation. Hillary would welcome her.
Left liberals like to blame the big banks for the Great Recession. Now, the Great Recession had many parents, there is plenty of blame to go around, and the big banks deserve their big fat fair share of that blame. But as Paul Krugman points out, the problem was not really the big banks, it was the financial traders in all the banks both large and small. Those traders used ever larger scoops of leverage to suction up ever bigger paydays. Neither Trump nor Clinton endorses the Sanders idea of breaking up the big banks, which is just as well since it would make a negligible difference to financial stability while doing uncertain amounts of harm to all the industries that depend upon flexible financial instruments to achieve growth and stability.
Besides, the big leverage financial traders were only half the problem. The traders only elaborated and amplified the core screwup. The core screwup was a collusion between the government and all the millions of voting homeowners to drive a decades-long bubble in real estate. Most notorious was the 1983 law that made the interest on a person's house the biggest deductible cost in his life. That law converted houses into tax shelters. Millions of people bought ever bigger houses to acquire ever bigger tax shelters, with the cool side benefit that they could live in them luxuriously. This real estate bubble was the "sure thing" that the financial traders started leveraging on. It was a financial nuclear holocaust waiting to happen, as Warren Buffett pointed out.
A serious person would do 3 things to prevent disasters like this. To deal with Wall Street, they would implement a progressive tax on leverage for all financial institutions. For those readers who just want to punish the banks, fear not, they would hate this even more than being broken up. But a tax on leverage only addresses half the problem. To fix the other half of the problem, a serious government would phase out the deduction on mortgage interest. Then they would kill absolutely dead Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which were the government holes into which vast amounts of the risk got dumped.
How do Clinton and Trump stack up? Clinton supported the Dodd-Frank bill for regulating the financial industry. That bill is only moderately awful. It does not actually address the key problems, but it addresses enough problems in the neighborhood of the big problems so we probably have a good 10 years or so before the very smart folk on Wall Street figure out how to dodge around the regulations. So Clinton is about as good as we could hope for from a politician on this matter.
Trump, of course, is a real estate mogul. He has only done one thing well, and he has done that one thing very well indeed. What did he do? He used leverage in the real estate market. He was making billions off every little boomlet in real estate, and being driven into bankruptcy in every little bust, long before Wall Street figured out how to do it on the grand scale. Leverage is Trump's game. He plans to repeal the Dodd-Frank bill, resetting the regulatory environment to exactly where it was that enabled and empowered the Great Recession. This would be great for Donald personally, since Dodd-Frank might cramp his style. There may not be a person on this planet more eager to encourage another Great Recession than Donald Trump. That would be true even if he didn't support Smoot-Hawley protectionism, which we discussed earlier.
For the sake of sanity, prefer Hillary for a faint semblance of economic stability.
The best visceral evidence I have identified so far is the Northwest Passage. Hopefully everyone remembers from elementary school history the repeated effort centuries ago to find a northern route around the Americas, so European traders could get to China more quickly. Hudson Bay is named for a guy who sought the passage and got his ship wrecked and his crew killed because the ice on the ocean was impassable. Never in human history has there ever been a Northwest Passage.
That was true until the year 2013. Beginning in 2013, every summer the ice has melted away and the Passage has opened up. Over 150 ships have passed through it. Hmmm... perhaps we should be careful about concluding that global warming is merely a giant left wing conspiracy. Just because there's a giant left wing conspiracy doesn't mean there isn't an actual problem.
Let us consider this a little more. One reason for objecting to global warming is that the Green left can't say "Global Warming" without adding, "And We need to force You to spend a trillion dollars on things We shall specify". But the Greens would rather punish us for our extravagant ways than solve the problem. We could postpone the major risks of global warming until the next century (when future tech solves the problem as a side effect of building better power plants) by spending 1% of the US defense budget on geo-engineering. This is chump change compared to the amount of money the government wastes on less important goals. Perhaps, at such a low price, we should consider taking a little action. Sensible action would be far cheaper than losing Florida, much less losing all those nice beach houses in Malibu.
Four years ago, matching up Obama and Romney, I observed that Romney would protect us more effectively from global warming than Obama, because even though Romney claimed to reject the idea of global warming, he understood and embraced technological progress in ways that Obama never would. And since unplanned unexpected tech progress is a key element in fighting global warming, Romney was the better choice.
Trump the real estate mogul has no more clue than Clinton about what it means to encourage innovation and new industries. Clinton seems to think it would be a good idea to build more nuclear reactors as part of the answer, but she would never go so far as to propose the critical action needed to enable a nuclear renaissance. The reason we cannot develop an inherently safe cheap nuclear reactor is the Nuclear Regulatory Commission refuses to specify an algorithmic, low cost path to certification, not even for self-evidently safer reactors. Currently, the cost of radically safer reactor certification is unbound, likely greater than the full manufacturing costs of the first thousand cheap safe reactors off the assembly line.
A serious person would demand that the NRC publish a 2-page spec, requiring no more than a 4 page response, to certify reactor designs when those designs are guaranteed by the laws of physics and chemistry to never melt down or explode. If there is no one at the NRC competent to write the 2 page spec, I can do it for them. It would not be difficult. Several inherently safe reactor designs already exist, only bureaucratic regulators prevent reactor tech from booming.
Understand that you cannot supply all the power with solar panels and wind turbines. Why? Midnight. Midnight. Midnight. And do the math before making the silly claim you could use storage batteries to have power at midnight. We'd be looking at electricity bills that cost 10x as much if you tried to use current tech for energy storage. You need nuclear power and geo-engineering (both taboo subjects among Greens, this is the real conspiracy) to beat global warming unless there are some radical breakthroughs in storage tech. Such breakthroughs could occur this year ... but a sensible person would not count on them until 2050.
Anyway Clinton at least thinks there is a problem, and Trump is no more likely to encourage innovation than she is. So Clinton is a slightly better horrible choice.
But 2 years ago I saw a video, Humans Need Not Apply, that forced me to reconsider my beliefs about just how far away that future is. The video presents a strong case that this future will start having serious impact in 2025 or 2030. So it turns out, we don't have much time at all.
The Luddites, starting in 1811, were convinced that automation would destroy all their jobs and that most people would end up destitute. They were wrong. While automation destroyed ever more jobs, the real result was that it freed up human workers to do more valuable jobs for which they could get paid more. The Luddites have been consistently wrong for 200 years.
But the full-fledged robotic elimination of work is much like the 1970s concept of the "paperless office". We still don't have paperless offices, but at this point no one doubts that paper will soon be history. We never achieved the paperless office until long after people stopped talking about it. But the concept's fruition was always inevitable. So it is with automation replacing all the jobs.
The video predicts that the process will start with the advent of the self-driving car. It turns out that driving vehicles supplies jobs for millions and millions of people just in the USA. The self-driving vehicle can replace all those jobs much faster than we can identify new job opportunities for the freed-up employees. From there, the process of replacing human labor will simply accelerate, causing the elimination of jobs at ever higher rates.
Computers and robots will eventually replace programmers, plumbers, and Wall Street financiers: whether the robotic financiers generate worse boom and bust cycles or better stability will depend on how they are programmed (programming ethics and morality is going to be an important branch of software engineering). High-skilled robotic labor will shatter the basic principles of Keynesian economics: Keynes's "circular flow" model said that the government could fix the boom/bust cycle by massive spending during the bust, which would cause more workers to be hired. But in a robotic economy, spending more money to buy more goods doesn't get more workers hired. It just gets more robots programmed by other robots.
Now, an interesting question is, at what point could the politicians be replaced by computers? I am pretty sure I could program a computer to be better than Clinton or Trump. So one is inclined to believe we could replace them even before we have the driverless car. But in practice, I predict the politicians will protect themselves so successfully that they will be the last workers standing. Of course, the bureaucrats the politicians use to write regulations, and the police the politicians use to enforce those regulations, will all be robotic, so there will be no employment there.
Regardless, the end of all work will leave humankind with some stark choices, as both utopia and dystopia stare into our faces. Let us consider people as belonging in one of 3 categories: the workers, the investors, and the supplicants. Workers work for a living, investors own enough stocks and bonds to live off their interest and dividends, and supplicants depend upon government handouts. Today, over 80% of the people are workers.
When the work all goes away, the worker category will disappear. Those workers -- virtually all of us -- will wind up becoming either supplicants or investors. Without massive levels of restructuring in our economy, the path of thoughtless drifting will send most of the workers into supplication. Following that path, it is easy enough to imagine outcomes in which there will be riots and rages on a scale unlike anything in human history as the unemployment rate rises past 50% and goes toward 99%. It is easy to imagine scenarios in which the socialists revert to communism, and empower the government to seize all the factories, reducing the investors to supplicants along with everyone else, locking down the society as a place where everyone is a supplicant except a handful of politicians who dole out extra helpings to their favorite cronies. Such a society would resemble nothing so much as ancient Egypt, where the pharaoh owned everything.
The irony, of course, is that the end of work ought to create a paradise. It should be a world in which everyone can pursue whatever leisurely goal their heart desires, a world in which so much power has been distributed to each individual that only historians care about socialism, capitalism, keynesianism, libertarianism, or Democrats and Republicans. The cost of all goods and services should fall rapidly toward zero. Consider triple bypass heart surgery. Once the surgeon's skill has been immortalized as a piece of software, you'll be able to walk into any QuickCare corner store for it. The onsite surgical robot just downloads the procedure and performs it. No human labor is involved. The marginal cost of the surgery is roughly the cost of materials, figure $100 for the anesthetics and sutures. And before you say it is crazy to think that heart surgery could cost only $100, remember that just a couple centuries ago salt was an expensive, treasured commodity; the Washington Monument is capped with aluminum because aluminum was more valuable than gold, and the aluminum cap was was a boastful statement of our nation's wealth. Humans have been making expensive things cheap for centuries.
Even a small nest egg would make a person independently wealthy in such a world. Imagine putting 10% down on a batch of 100 robots, a batch that costs about as much as a house. You send your robots off to the asteroids to mine rare minerals, or to Mercury to build solar power collectors, and let the robots pay off the loan; in 15 years you own them outright. Now, a person who owns a fleet of robots just isn't interested in obsolete questions about immigration and minimum wage. "Work?" they ask, "How quaint."
There is just one big problem. We have hardwired our society so that our means of living, even our very identities and concepts of self-worth, depend upon work.
What steps could we take to smooth out the transition to a workless society?
I don't know about you, but I myself would rather be a rich investor than a poor supplicant. Most people dream of wealth; few people think wistfully of government handouts. If you agree that it is better to have wealth than welfare, clearly, one wants to shift the society so that more people are able to become wealthier more easily.
So, once you grasp the size and inevitability of the problem, you find yourself wishing that society would encourage more people to save more money, so they can become more independent of work. The more people there are who have more money in the bank as the End of All Work draws near, the less cataclysmic the upheaval will be.
There are lots of ways of fixing the laws and regulations of America to encourage more people to save more money and become wealthier. For example, consider corporate taxes. America has the highest corporate profit taxes in the world, which is why so many corporations are moving their headquarters to other countries as a tax dodge. High corporate taxes are anti-progressive, i.e., left liberals, if they understood the consequences, would favor eliminating them. Why? Because those taxes do not only snatch money out of the pockets of rich people, they also snatch money out of the pockets of poor people who try to save and invest a little money (do you think there are no poor people who try to save money for a rainy day? Think again). Reducing corporate taxes makes it more attractive for people with more modest incomes to invest and save more.
Replacing some or all of the income taxes with (progressive) value added taxes would make saving money more attractive than buying stuff: instead of paying a whopping VAT tax on top of the whopping cost of that Mercedes, buy a Chevy with a small VAT and plunk the rest down in an exchange-traded-fund.
My favorite idea for improving our end-of-all-work situation is to shift the Social Security system so that the social security taxes go into our individual private saving accounts rather than into the Maw of Government. This would leave millions of people with nest eggs when the end of all work arises. And it would also fix one of the silly metrics currently used to create panic with shocking stories of terrible inequality, as explained in a separate rant.
Anyway, as a general rule, politicians are eager to turn voters into supplicants with promises of good swag if they are elected. You will not find a politician who encourages people to become wealthy enough to not care about politicians any more. But some are more eager to make us into supplicants than others. Politicians who promise to make us into ever more eager supplicants are not what we need as the end of all work draws nigh.
Since neither Clinton nor Trump will acknowledge there is a problem, both are again horrible choices. But Clinton's whole career has been devoted to encouraging supplication. A perfect example was her proposed government takeover of the healthcare industry during her husband's presidency. Most of us have mercifully forgotten her plan, but I have not. It was designed to turn the nation into a land of supplicants totally dependent on government from cradle to grave. She was quite proud of it.
So Trump is the slightly less horrible choice. He might even lower the corporate taxes -- not for the poor, of course. But a good deed is still good even if done for the wrong reasons.
In the Obama versus Romney bake off, there were interesting pros and cons on both sides. In the end, I did not even make a recommendation of one over the other, just laying out the strengths and weaknesses and letting the reader decide based on which topics were most important to them. This time there is less sense all around. There are a couple of issues upon which Trump is a slightly better choice. But there is only one issue -- the min wage -- upon which Trump is a dramatically better choice. And the Republicans will filibuster a min wage law out of existence in the Senate if at all possible, so Hillary cannot harm us this way ... as long as enough Republicans remain in Congress to ensure she cannot smack us down.
Meanwhile there are several issues (Leadership, Honesty, Foreign Trade, Censorship, Immigration, Economic Stability) upon which Trump is a dramatically worse choice. And on a number of these issues he can achieve grievous harm just with speeches, executive appointments, and executive orders.
In the intro, I pointed out that the decision analysis table comparing Trump and Clinton also included Gary Johnson, the Libertarian nominee. In a normal election, I would not even mention him because "we all know he cannot win". But if you detest Trump yet cannot imagine voting for Clinton, Gary Johnson should be considered a serious alternative. Consider that the Socialist party in the early 1900s never got more than 2% of the national vote, yet today both parties fiercely defend almost the entire Socialist platform (things like Social Security) from that time. Perhaps the moment has come when the Libertarians can influence the policies of the 21st Century as effectively as the Socialists did at the beginning of the 20th.
But let us assume you can imagine voting for a Democrat more easily than you can imagine voting for a Libertarian who cannot win. In that case, for the sake of minimizing harm to the country for the next 4 years, I recommend voting for Hillary for President. And much more importantly, vote for Republicans for Congress. Deadlock is our best outcome in this woeful race.