Month: April 2014

Here is a cut and paste of a post I did a couple years ago:

When it comes to minimum wage laws, there are three possible outcomes: that the State mandated wage is less than those already paid; that it is equal to them; or that it is more than market conditions would normally allow.

In the first two cases, it is unnecessary.  The third condition, then, is the one which matters.

Labor, like any other commodity, is subject to supply and demand.  When there is a superabundance of work and not enough workers, wages rise.  When unemployment is high, and work is scarce, wages fall.  In all cases, business owners need workers to make money.  It is never in the interest of anyone who wants to grow a business not to grow a business by not hiring people.  Hiring always means more money for the business owner, IF there is money left over after he has paid his expenses, of which the largest is usually labor.

Let us say that a business owner collects $1,000 a week in revenues, and pays out $600 in costs.  If he can hire someone for $200 a week, he can still clear a profit, and free himself up for marketing.  If, however, he is forced by law to pay $400 a week, he will not hire anyone. He can’t afford it.

Let us say that someone desperately needs work, and would be willing to work for $200, but is forced by law to charge $400.  Both people lose.

Leftists do not ask themselves what the people who are competing for low wage jobs want.  They ASSUME they would rather either be paid more than they are perceived as being worth, or be unemployed.  This is almost certainly an error, though.

We have some 50% unemployment in black neighborhoods and poor rural areas, which is close to the high school drop out rate in both areas, and there is probably a lot of overlap between the two.

Kids who have not even graduated high school offer very little in terms of job and life skills.  If they are going to get hired by anyone to do anything, they will in most cases need to discount their labor.  Such a first job would amount to an apprenticeship.  By law, they can’t do this, and so in many cases they go years without getting that first job, never learn work skills, and never become optimally productive as citizens.  

Minimum wage is not intended for people who have careers, who put their time in over a period of years.  Even Burger King and the like pay more than minimum wage for virtually anyone who has worked there more than six months.

These laws do not raise up anyone.  On the contrary, they represent a barrier for entry to the job market for people who in many cases really, really need a job.

Useful framing exercise: I am grateful for this problem.

For confusion: I am grateful for this opportunity to make a decision and learn from it.

If you meet demons where they live, they will never have enough space to cause you trouble.  They need momentum.

The price of peace of mind is diligence–daily focused work–and the development of skill.

Becoming is not repetition.

It occurs to me that one of the outcomes of trauma is inconsolability. You are far beyond the point where a hug, or “talking” will help.  This very fact isolates you, and paradoxically the presence of others, even others who genuinely want to help you, can be antagonizing.

I want to say that the goal of abreaction is not “healing” per se, but facilitating the beginning of the possibility of healing, which is consolability, or the ability to receive comfort, either from yourself, or others.  I would supposed, actually, it would start with being able to comfort yourself, which in turn begins with a sense that you are worthy of comfort, that pursuing the goal of greater well being is acceptable.

So I’m in a parking garage downtown, in a medical complex, and the way this works is all the spots except on the very top are usually taken by 10am at the latest.  I get stuck behind this old lady that is going walking speed through the garage.  I don’t know if we can speak of a parking garage etiquette, but if we can, going as fast as you can without missing spots would be part of it.  She was also veering on every turn into oncoming traffic, I watched several vehicles on their way out roll their eyes.  She was doing it wrong, and was not learning.

Me, I am an impatient driver. I am trying to work on it, and believe I am making progress, but I’m not there yet.

Anyway, we go around about 5 times, and I decide to pass her.  Right as I pass her, a car pulls out at the end of the row, and I pull in.  She honks at me.  I cuss her out under my breath.  At the moment, I was feeling both anger and relief.

Now, this is textbook, dictionary definition asshole behavior.  I get that.  She was likely old, a little slow, and likely there because someone she knew was sick, or because she was sick.  My brain tells me this.

But I looked at my feelings, and I was happy, at least for a time.

Now, I have been processing some deep things.  There are other unpleasant things going on I don’t feel like talking about, but suffice it to say a lot of very deep GAPS–that is the word–in my development are coming out.

I looked at my happiness at besting some little old lady.  It was pathetic.  That is what my brain said. Now, my father bullied me, bested me, all the time, and I am likely repeating this behavior.  But what lies at the root?  Tracking it is quite different than understanding and disposing of it.  I want to be spontaneously good, but that is going to mean at times spontaneously bad.  My task, my responsibility, is to USE those times for self purification.  It starts with seeing honestly.

Now, as I have said, my upbringing left me with a feeling of self hatred.  Self hatred is the result when you do not get the love you need, and particularly when you are subjected to emotional or physical violence, as I was.  Self hatred is a means of resolving the tension between what was done, and normal social standards.  It is very difficult to view your care-giver as an awful person–you are after all fully dependent on them at least until your early teen years–so what you do is internalize a sense of unworthiness and self loathing.

But it is never fully justified, UNTIL you do bad things.  When you ACT like an asshole, well then the emotional dissonance, the split, is healed for a moment.  And it is hard for me to describe what a heavy burden all these feelings are.  Whatever you do, wherever you go, there is this voice telling you to fail, that you can’t do it, that you aren’t worthy.

Obviously, you can combat that voice, you can use positive self talk, but if I ask you to hold up a wet mattress, say, something heavy and unwieldy (and by the way incontinence was not an issue for me, so I don’t think there is a deeper meaning here, although there may be), who wins: you or gravity?  As long as that thing keeps driving you down, and you have no means of dropping it, it will win every time, without fail.

Being a bad person, I think, may in some ways help to make that load feel lighter.  This is just a guess, but it feels right.

Then I got to thinking of Dostoevsky’s Underground Man–or really any number of anti-heroes, or neurotic nuts, from that rough era of literature (latter 19th century through today)–and they seem to think that being honest about being mean and miserable is somehow profound.  It isn’t.  It never was.  These things, awareness of these states, is simply a waypoint.  You enter into awareness of evil in order to do something with it, to transcend it.

What stops this process is a rejection of morality.  At its root, Socialism is a rejection of individual morality.  It is a rejection of individual meaning.

I don’t like hospitals.  I have had one outpatient surgery in my life, and that was enough.  I don’t like watching all the fat, decrepit sick people wander through there.  This, probably, is an ugly sentiment too, with one perhaps redeeming feature: I don’t like people who do not value their health and well being enough to do even the BASICS as far as maintaining health.  We Americans age SO poorly, not least because we have this enormous complex built up around keeping people who have never given a shit about their health alive, with expensive pills and treatments.

Then I got to thinking how we treat old people.  Ponder this: how could an old person be valued for wisdom, when wisdom is rejected in principle?  Put another way: if morality is social and not personal, how could an old person have more of it?

If we value old people, what do we value them for?  Practical knowledge.  Some old men, like Warren Buffet, are exceptionally good at doing what most people actually care about, which is making large sums of money.  But would you trust the future of your soul, the future of your happiness in this present life, to a shark whose early fortunes were made in ways most of us would reject handily?

No, we put old people behind curtains, on the other side of the hill, over THERE, where we don’t think about them much.  It was a Socialist, and not a Japanese ethos being expressed when a Japanese Prime Minister said he wished all the old people would just die.  If they could not contribute to the economy, if they had no MATERIAL value, to him they had no value at all.  Their life experience meant nothing to him. (Note here too, as I have commented somewhere, the rush to put everyone on the public dole, then complain about the expense.  This is one more lunatic aspect of the whole thing.)

And if you think about it, what DOES an average person really learn in the course of a lifetime if their constant focus is material in nature?  If their lives revolve around promotions, new houses, weekends, and vacations?  They can talk about these things, but little else.

How much wisdom is there, really, in an average nursing home?  I don’t know, but I wonder.  Contrast that with, say, an old Tibetan, who has chanted and meditated and sung religious/spiritual works all his life.  To the extent we would find wisdom in nursing homes, I think it would be among the deeply and sincerely pious.

Returning to Good and Evil, I think it needs to be said that there is a vast moral difference between playing a role, and understanding a situation.  You can beat pacifism into people, and some cultures do.  You can beat courtesy, filial piety, a work ethic, and cleanliness into people.

But do they then own those virtues?  I would say no.

Goodness, to me, is expressed spontaneously.  It simply comes out. Love comes out; compassion; generosity; kindness; beauty; warmth.  That is why the Windhorse metaphor is so apt: you have the power and motion of a horse, and the brilliance of a jewel.

If you cannot express things spontaneously, you are an artifact, a remnant.  You are not you, but somebody else’s idea of who you needed to be.  Habits can be very strong and useful.  But until you reach bottom, until you know all of your self, all of who you are, all of what you are capable of, you are not free.

For my part, I am starting to try and focus on positive energies, but I’m sure I will have relapses.  These old habits run strong.  I watched them and was subjected to them for many, important, years.  That sounds like an excuse, and perhaps it is, but no plan based on wishful thinking is reliable.  My explanation may be wrong, but I am certainly describing my present reality.

Few thoughts, from my asshole moment.

I had an odd dream last night.  It was one of those–and I don’t how many people have these–where I was in a sleep paralysis, but felt like I was awake.  I wasn’t awake, obviously, because I felt I was on the couch, when I was actually in my bed, but in any event a demon came up to me, hissing, and stood about 6″ from my face, trying to scare me.  I felt fear, but some part of me was thinking “fuck this”, so I reached my arm out and said “bite it off”.  It retreated.  Then I reached my other arm.  Same reaction.  Then I said “BOO” while opening my eyes, and there was nothing there.

Here is a phrase which sounds meaningful, and which may actually be meaningful: Fear fears us.

I think some deep part of us hides our innermost fears, because it feels like confronting them directly will kill us; we won’t survive.  But I feel, increasingly strongly, that no negative emotion you give yourself up to openly and willingly can but retreat.  Your power lies precisely in your acceptance, in your openness to experience.

And how beneficial, to develop the habit of opening to ALL experience, because that will let in the good ones too.   This is getting close, I think, to what the Buddha taught.  The negatives pass away, but what is good remains, and we call this the nature of true reality.