We can measure intelligence, wealth, and physical capabilities. It is much harder to measure reality testing, which is to say how accurately someone’s worldview describes the way the world actually works, which is to say both a generally accurate philosophy–where accurate is defined as supporting on-going productive physical emotional and cognitive activity–and the capacity to understand the details of the concrete environment within which one is operating. The details of course will vary for everyone.
One would be tempted to suppose that in conditions of freedom success would imply this ability, but the fact is that you can be smart and unmotivated, you can be lucky, and you can be confined.
Self evidently, even beginning such a project involves a normative worldview, a baseline. Such things are implied in attempts to measure media “bias”, which is t say deviation from the way things “really work”. It is of course unsurprising that leftists view ABC and the like as impartial.
Several basic ideas that it seems to me should be present in any tolerably accurate version of the “real world” is that “there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch”, and that “what works for a little, will work more for a lot”. I can mix baking soda and vinegar together and get a reaction. I infer, accuratly, from this that if I mixed a ton of the one and the other together, a similar but much larger reaction would emerge.
We have only had one Great Depression. Not coincidentally, it is the only economic problem which we attempted to solve with Keynesian economics. The simple reality is that those ideas don’t work. If they worked, a small “stimulus” would cause a small effect, and a large one a large effect. As it happens, a small “stimulus” makes things worse, and an even larger one would cause a threat to our national existence, which is of course the whole idea. Keynes wanted a world without money, which of course could only work if people like him were telling us what we could have, and how much.
But I had mainly in mind here the African American communities in our large cities. Some 90% of them voted for Obama. Surely if a little doesn’t work, a lot works even less well? For 30-40 years they have voted for Democrats religiously around the country. What good has it done them? Surely at some point they will realize that if they keep doing what they have been doing, they will get more of what they have been getting?
Nancy Pelosi has done well for herself. Jesse Jzckaon and Jerry Wright have both made small fortunes pretending to help them. The benefits to them are concrete and “spendable”. The benefits to those in areas with 30-40% unemployment among younger people are invisible. How much worse could things get? 100% unemployment? That is the direction they are going.
I will add that one aspect of illegal Latino labor that is overlooked is that they represent a way around the minimum wage. Employers who do not pay Minimum Wage are already breaking the law. But it makes economic sense for both parties to enter into these labor agreements. The employer pays less, and the Mexicans are making what is for them good money. Again, these contracts are entered into voluntarily.
Nobody is asking young African Americans if they would prefer working for $4/hour to their current unemployment. The deal presented is that they “deserve” at least $7.25 (I think it is), and that this basic pricing floor protects them. Who is making this claim? People making $80,000/year or more–some millionaires–on the govermnent payroll, who live nowhere near the ghettoes.
Who is choosing for them? They sure aren’t. They just never see the jobs that are never created.
To be clear, basic economics tells us that if you pay someone X amount per hour, but they only produce X-y in output, you will go bankrupt. Then the job is gone. Kids who dropped out of high school after the 9th grade, and who have been in unstable, unnurturing homes their entire lives do not, initially, do good work. This is common sense. But if they want to try, they are worth something, and that first job is how they learn the skills they need to get a better second job, and so on. They can live with their parents-their mother, statisically, in the vast majority of cases–and help buy groceries, and move out when their skills become such that they can command much better wages.
My first job, back in the 80’s, paid $2.85/hour. I couldn’t live on that, but I didn’t try. I lived with my parents.
Kids that never enter the labor pool generally enter the prison system. As Reagan said “Some of the scariest words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government, and here to help you”.