Cranky About Unemployment

So I’m sitting at the Laundromat while my laundry goes round and round and round. It’s early Saturday morning – relatively- and I’ve not had any coffee so bear with me while this post takes shape.
I’ve been percolating on the state of the nation and how we are ever going to begin to rebuild an economy that’s based on anything resembling what got us here, industrial.
The problem is that so many of our jobs these days are simply there to provide services to people with money. So now that nobody has much money left, there’s not much to pay for services, so people with a Mercedes are here at the Laundromat doing their own laundry rather than pay for it to be done while they run off somewhere to eat in a restaurant or shop.
The trickle down effect of that is interesting because we’ve managed to automate industries that used to employ people but which we still need, like agriculture. I think I blogged about this before, but it’s worth describing again. An acquaintance of mine who is a farmer told me how fertilizer is spread on tomato fields. It seems that there is a machine that uses GPS to calculate the topography of the field and the way that the water flow will affect the eventual spread of the fertilizes as the land is irrigated and how this will move the fertilizer around. So the machine spreads the fertilizer to maximize its effectiveness and then when it’s done, it automatically charges the farmer’s account upon leaving the field for the fertilizer it has spread around. Smart, brilliant, all of that, but there’s practically no labor involved. It’s amazing but what about the people who need to make money to buy the food to feed themselves and their families? The only people making money are the fertilizer company, the software people, and the computer hardware people, and the farmer. No farm hands are needed for that part. And one only has to watch the rest of the farming industry to see how few people are needed these days to grow the food.
Of course I am telling you something you already know, that low level hard labor jobs are and have been disappearing. Labor is expensive, people are frail, lawyers and unions dominate the field of labor making it appealing to eliminate them both.
So, then what can we do to make it more appealing for industry to offer employment to people rather than to machines? I think the answer is tort reform. We need to limit how much people can sue for, what they can sue for, and what lawyers can earn from lawsuits. We need it before the lawyers sink the country under endless laws, regulations, restrictions, and the like all coming out of their endless lawsuits, people are at risk of becoming unnecessary to most industries and industries are being driven to find ways to save the money that people cost them. We need a solution and tort reform is one piece of the puzzle.