Robert Reich – No More White Male Construction Workers
This is a blaring example of an Atlas Shrugged scenario coming true. Obama economic advisor Robert Reich is saying openly that infrastructure jobs should not go to skilled construction workers and white men. Instead they should go to the people who “need” them more. In other words, us middle class chumps should just settle for poorly constructed bridges built by incompetents, and risk our lives just for the “needs” of people with no experience in construction.
Ayn Rand covered all this in her Magnum Opus “Atlas Shrugged.” Here’s one very important passage, which addresses what Reich brought up in the video.
“…In the old days, nobody ever quit the Twentieth Century — and somehow, we couldn’t make ourselves believe that it was gone. AFter a while, we couldn’t quite, because no other employer would have us — for which I can’t blame him. Noboy would deal with us in any way, no respectable person or firm. All the small shops, where we traded, started moving out of Starnesville fast — till we had nothing left but saloons, gambling joints and crooks who sold us trash at gouging prices. The alms we got kept falling, but the cost of our living went up. The list of the factory’s needy kept stretching, but the list of its customers shrank. There was less and less income to divide among more and more poeple. In the old days, it used to be said that the Twentieth Century Motor trademark was a good as the karat mark on gold. I don’t know what is was that the Starnes heirs thought, if htey thought at all, but I suppose that like all social planners and like savages, they thought that this trademark was a magic stamp which did the trick by some sort of voodoo power and that it would keep them rich, as it had kept their father. Well, when our customers began to see that we never delivered an order on time and never put out a motor that didn’t have something wrong with it — the magic stamp began to work the other way around: people wouldn’t take a motor as a gift, it it was marked Twentieth Century. And it came to where our only customers were men who never paid and never meant to pay their bills. But Gerald Starnes, doped by his own publicity, got huffy and went around, with an air or moral superiority, demanding that businessmen place orders with us, not because our motors were good, but because we needed the orders so badly.”
“By that time, a village half-wit could see what generations of professors ahd pretended not to notice. What good our need do to a power plant when its generators stopped because of our defective engines? What good would it do to a man caught on an operating table when the electric light went out? What good would it do to the passenger of a plane when its motor failed in mid-air? And if they bought our product, not because of its merit, but because of our need, would that be the good, the right, the moral thing to do for the owner of that power plant, the surgeon in that hospital, the maker of that plane?
According to Allah at Hot Air, Reich’s response was merely to blame right wing pundits like Michelle Malkin, Sean Hannitty and Rush Limbaugh for taking things out of context.
