Today’s Must Reads

Krugman, “The Gullible Center.” All hail Krugman.

Motoko Rich, “Federal Funds to Train the Jobless Are Drying Up.” It begins:

With the economy slowly reviving, an executive from Atlas Van Lines recently visited Louisville, Ky., with good news: the company wanted to hire more than 100 truck drivers ahead of the summer moving season.

But a usually reliable source of workers, the local government-financed job center, could offer little help, because the federal money that local officials had designated to help train drivers was already exhausted. Without the government assistance, many of the people who would be interested in applying for the driving jobs could not afford the $4,000 classes to obtain commercial driver’s licenses. Now Atlas is struggling to find eligible drivers.

I want some libertarian to tell me why the glorious Free Market (blessings upon It) isn’t finding a way to train workers. However, I’m sure we’ll be told that as soon as government is “out of the way” with its dependency-creating job training programs, the free markets will take over and everything will be fine. Sigh. See also Zandar.

Alex Pareene, “The Coming War on Mormon Jokes.” Now that Mittens is almost certainly the nominee, righties are closing ranks in support of Mormonism and accusing lefties of anti-Mormon bigotry. Next headline news: “Sun to Set in the West.”

13 thoughts on “Today’s Must Reads

  1. Well, of course the snake-handlers will join with the people who eat and drink of the body and blood of Christ in defending the “magic underpants’ crowd!
    He’s becoming one of “theirs” now.
    They hate gays and black, but will defend to the death whatever Ron Christie or Allen West have to say. By virtue of agreeing with them instead of Liberals, “they’re” now part of the greater “us” of Conservatism.

    And every damn negative thing they’re ever believed or said about Mormons, will now on be projected onto Liberals.

    And heaven forbid, if, on some college campus, some student asks Romney what kind of underwear he has on, “Boxer? Briefs? Or, magic?”
    Since colleges are where young people go to be indoctrinated in Liberalism, and about to learn to abandon “God and Country,” and since most young adults lean towards Democrats, this will be seen as all the fault of Liberals, and their Liberal Lame-stream Media.
    ‘N u ken take dat 2 da bank!!!

  2. Oh, and as far as Atlas doing its own training – well, you see, training costs money!

    You need trained Trainers (I was one for TW Cable) – and they cost money, as far as training them, and paying them.
    You need training facilities.
    You need vehicles.
    You need insurance – just in case someone in the class can’t back-up correctly and damages the truck they’re training in, or clips a car or pedestrian.

    Why pay for that, when you can have government train people FOR you?
    Or, if government can’t afford to anymore, let students pay a couple, three, four, five, six, thousand dollars to learn how to drive a truck from some private company – with NO guarantee of employment full, or part, time, after “graduation!”
    And so, Atlas shrugs and says, “We’re in the moving business, not training-drivers business.”

  3. I wonder how long it will take Atlas (for example) to realize that they are losing market share. See, it’s a choice between allowing the government to take on this problem (with funding) and making the companies affected realize they ARE in the Training Drivers Business. And that’s just the beginning. For some reason, everyone thought everything would just go on as usual?

  4. Sorry to go OT, but I don’t know whether to file this under “OMG” or “But of course.” From HuffPo’s story on the two suspects in the Tulsa shooting spree:

    “If anybody is trying to say this is a racial situation, they’ve got things confused,” said Sevenstar, who described [suspect] England as Cherokee Indian. “He didn’t care what your color was. It wasn’t a racist thing.”

    They drive around the African American part of town asking strangers for directions, and then blowing them away. England also ranted on his Facebook page about how a “f***ing n*****” was responsible for his father’s death. “It wasn’t a racist thing,” says his apologist.

    Right, because in America today, nobody is racist, ever.

  5. PurpleGirl…I’m just asking the question..It’s up to the reader to figure out the common bonds. But off hand I’d say they both are males,they both are American Citizens, they both share the same religious faith and beliefs… they both fathered a lot of children. And they’ve both expressed a distaste for government intrusion on their religious freedoms. I’m sure there’s countless commonalities..but I’m sure you get my point of asking the question..

    It’s similar to viewing an old photograph of SS troops receiving Communion in the field and not being able to understand the obvious disconnect.

  6. Romney can tell more lies before 6 am then most pathological liars can tell all day.

  7. I understand the Free Market perfectly. When a large bank is in trouble, the Free Market (tax payers) give it (Citigroup) $20 billion to bail it out. That was enough to buy the entire corporation, but according to Free Market rules we tax payers got 7.8% of the equity instead.

    Another miracle of the Free Market – we (tax payers) gave AIG $180 billion to bail it out. At the same time the federal government gave all the states combined $160 billion. The $20 billion less to the states was because only a corporation such as AIG

  8. (to continue) knows how to manage money well. State governments, on the other hand, any government for that matter, are profligate and invest badly. AIG, on the other hand, was not profligate, invested wisely which is why it only needed $180 billion to bail out. The Free Market is indeed a miraculous invention.

  9. Technically, the free market is working well. For a great many people, truck driving is an awful job. You’re unlikely to be an employee – they’ll find some way to snooker you into being a contractor, so you have to lease a truck and pay for insurance. You’ll find yourself squeezed as hard as they can, sure that there’s *some* other poor schmuck they can hire instead of you. You’ll have boatloads of records to keep, and get blamed if the records aren’t right, or if you drive a little too long, because you had to log loading time as driving time.

    Under those circumstances, we’d reasonably expect there to be a poor supply of truck drivers. And then, we’d reasonably expect people who hire truck drivers to keep sweetening the incentives to drive a truck until a balance is found.

    But what we do instead is we cut government aid to the working class, so that there are always people desperate enough to take any chance to find work, so they’ll take a gamble on a truck driving job.

  10. But the Conservative’s intentions are purely-pure as purely-pure can purely-pure purely be! Did I mention that they’re intentions are pure? Purely pure. They’re pure – GET IT?!?!

    You see, by cutting Welfare and other social safety net programs, they’re saving all of us who are poor, or nearly poor, folks from the slavery of government dependency, and giving us… wait for it…. now, wait some more… here it comes – HOPE!
    And, isn’t that what President Lenin/Hitler/Stalin/Mao/Castro/Che Obama, that Kenyan Socialist/Fascist/Communist community agitator ran on? HOPE!?!?!

  11. Tell it, Felicity! I had not seen it in exactly those terms, but the second I read it, I knew it was the truth!

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