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This episode of America’s Most Trusted Podcast® is notable for both who shows up and who doesn’t. But James Lileks is our rock, welcoming our own Bethany Mandel into the co-host’s chair, and Dr. Samuel Gregg author of the upcoming book, Reason, Faith, and the Struggle for Western Civilization.
Then Bethany and James delve into the miniseries, Chernobyl, and explore their, er, generational differences.
Music from this week’s episode: “When I’m Sixty-Four” by the Beatles.
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Okay I’ve never heard this before.
I’m still skeptical that this will work. If you’re losing jobs all the time you have to make up for it with purchasing power.
I may not be right, but I think this is the right model to argue about. Having all the Ben Sasse types telling everybody to just suck it up, is not the ideal policy or political position.
I’m open to anything anyone says about this.
The other thing is overnment has to shrink under deflation. Our financial system is set up for inflation. This is a real mess.
LOL my kids would like to thank you for the unscheduled and surprise screen time mid-week :)
This assumes that car workers just shrivel and die without a car manufacturing job. The skills that were developed in making cars can be used to do other jobs and we get cheaper cars. Furthermore, because cars are cheaper, people have the money they saved from cheaper cars that they can invest in other goods and services.
This is a central tenet of Basic Economics. You can reject the premise all you want, it doesn’t make it less true.
What happens if you don’t figure out how to cooperate with this obvious truth?
What if the government can’t tax better living through purchasing power?
What if the financial system is premised on depreciating debt through inflation all of the time?
You’re going to make the argument that those skills, which cost so much to cause his employer to ship his job overseas, are transferable at a comparable wage? And that there are no reverberations to the economy outside of automotive industry?
And please back up your theory of the cheaper car. Exactly when have those savings been passed on to the consumer in a long term visible way?
Why should anything be going up in price, including shelter if globalized trade and robots are increasing purchasing power at the expense of jobs? The whole system is a scam.
As someone else has observed.
Manufacturing that isn’t high end tends to be very labor intensive so countries go to where labor is cheaper. This makes the products cheaper as well. The guy who was laid off from the factory might need to develop new skills or move to a new location to get another job. This is very hard to do and we should probably make it easier for the guy to move and get new skills or both. Even if we lived in an auturkic society (which would be incredibly bad for our farmers who sell their crops all over the world) advanced robotics would quickly replace low-skilled manufacturing jobs. The auto-manufacturer would lose his job in the next decade but he would still lose it.
@bethanymandel
Hammer and tongs.
Also explains “striking while the iron is hot.”
https://www.sltrib.com/opinion/commentary/2018/07/25/george-f-will/
USA Today estimates that the tariffs would add $4,000 to $5,000 (approximately the size of this year’s tax cut on $125,000 in income) to the price of a car (average price: about $32,000). U.S. auto manufacturers oppose the tariffs, which would also cover vehicle components, $147 billion of which ($100 billion more than steel and aluminum imports combined) were imported last year for cars made in America by Americans and sold mostly to Americans.
As someone who has spent his entire professional career using qualifiers to manipulate statistics into saying what you want them to say, color me unimpressed.
The Industrial Production Index also includes oil, gas and electricity production. And it also includes measurements of the efficiency of semiconductors and computers, which we do not manufacture but we do design. Throw out that last category and, according to the Upjohn Institute, real GDP growth in manufacturing between 1997 and 2007 actually falls by two-thirds and in 2011 real GDP in manufacturing was lower than it was in 2000.
And as I have observed before, and will continue to observe, those that have sold their souls to the Communist behemoth in Beijing for cheap trinkets at Walmart will reap the whirlwind. Unfortunately, you’re going to take the entire country with you.
But economically things are going great. Once Trump freed the economy from the constant regulation of our progressive ‘betters,’ we seem to be creating jobs while still trading with the world. What’s the whirlwind you are referring to?
When China decides they’re done playing with us.
How will China conduct this whirlwind? Especially given the fact that are more dependent on trade than we are.
“Hammer and tongs,” I believe, was one of Orwell’s examples of (stale) metaphors people (over)use yet have no frickin’ idea where the image comes from. Let us now turn to Longfellow and say something interesting about his metrical changes.
I was thinking the other day about the last time anyone had much of an opportunity to touch or slave over a hot stove. Probably more apt when stoves were commonly wood- or coal-fired and made of cast iron.
Don’t sell American Industry short. China does what it does through numbers, brute force, and theft. Americans have a double portion of Yankee Ingenuity. It’s done pretty well so far.
I flinched when I heard Be Tee Dub. Yeah it’s part of the online lexicon but I hadn’t heard anyone say it. What does it buy you: by – 1 / the – 2 / way – 3 versus be – 1 / tee – 2 / dub – 3? No syllable savings. BTW saved characters when texting.
BTW, I heard Hammer and Tongs on episode 26 of the Conservatarians.
May Peter Robinson have a speedy recovery!
I’ve just started listening to this podcast, so I don’t know whether he will indeed come down through the ceiling, but if he does, it won’t be a Lazarus imitation…James Lileks either slipped or was being facetious…Lazarus, Jesus’ friend, is raised from the dead; the man who is lowered from the roof is unnamed.
Scott Manley provides a really good and easy to follow technical explanation of what happened at Chernobyl. https://youtu.be/q3d3rzFTrLg
In the “Blue Cross” by G.K. Chesterton, Father Brown discusses theology with a thief posing as a priest. The thief, who later becomes Father Brown’s penitent and assistant, tries to wax pious: “Well, I think that other worlds may perhaps rise higher than our reason. The mystery of heaven is unfathomable, and I for one can only bow my head.” Father Brown, who knows perfectly well who the man is, tells him that he also knew him to be fraud because…”You attacked reason. That’s bad theology.”
I was in Germany when Pope Benedict XVI gave his Regensburg lecture, in which he defended reason. My lapsed Catholic friends were hysterical, screaming “Islamophobia!”
I must say, however, that I wince whenever Americans appear to dismiss Europe as somehow mindlessly post-Christian, with empty churches serving as nothing more than art museums…I live in Japan, another country that on the surface seems thoroughly “secular” but nonetheless has long cultural memories, and while “traditions” alone won’t inoculate against madness, they help. What frightens me about America is the unhinged utopian left, attacking Christian bakers, for example…And then there’s the constant barrage of crude propaganda from the “mainstream” US media…When I attend mass in Europe or Japan, I do not assume that there are many in the pews who are deep theological thinkers. But I do trust that they have a modicum of common sense. I’ve just left Italy, where “same-sex marriage” is still not quite there. And in Japan it’s only the usual intellectoids who are pushing for it…”Western” civilization may survive after all…
Wait – China is fascist? I thought China was a reformed, hybrid market-driven Communist nation, that merely requires all foreign trade agreements to include a joint venture with each foreign trading partner, where 51% of the joint venture is owned by a citizen of the reformed, hybrid market-driven Communist nation that demands all proprietary software, data, and materials be turned over to that reformed, hybrid market-driven Communist nation, and that the 51% owner is therefore subject to the laws of that reformed, hybrid market-driven Communist nation, including fines and jail time for any citizen who does not turn over requested proprietary software, data, and materials to that reformed, hybrid market-driven Communist.
Fascist, huh? Who knew?
</sarcasm>
More evidence we are doomed:
I watched several episodes of the new Father Brown TV series on Netflix.
In one episode, Father Brown immediately knows a young man is not guilty of a crime, because the young man is a Communist, and therefore not interested in money! (Somebody should tell that to Bernie Sanders.)
Throwing logic to the four winds, the episode ends with Father Brown officiating over the young man’s marriage to a nice girl. Even setting aside the absurd portrait of a Catholic priest in the 1950s, it doesn’t seem to occur to anyone that a Communist would have objections to a church wedding.
It’s like 50 mafia controlling everything. The rest is just show.
I thought the podcast was terrific, Bethany and James!! And will somebody tell Yeti that if he doesn’t lower the volume of the commercials on the 3 Martini Lunch, I’m going to sue you guys for making me deaf! Ahem. Now I feel better. BTW, I very much enjoyed Samuel Gregg–fascinating. As soon as I finish this comment, I’m going to order his book.
@blueyeti (Scott is not that far away in Internetland.)
@susanquinn Three Martini is a National Review production. You can’t blame Yeti for that.
Addendum: It has been passed to the proper authorities.
Hey blueyeti and I are on a last name basis. But it looks like EJHill has taken care of passing on the message.
I enjoyed the generational digs near the end, since I am a little older than @jameslileks and have a daughter the same age as @bethanymandel . I have embraced my geezerdom, so I have no problem annoying the kids with what they don’t know.
Yay, specialization and division of labor!
The Chinese assemble our ball caps and iPhones and we fly them where they are needed in our home-built Boeing 777 cargo planes.
I too watch the new Father Brown TV series. I can usually guess who did it since the guilty party is almost always the least woke. But in one murder, the lesbian did it; so they are not completely consistent.
Is a lesbian automatically woke? That doesn’t seem to necessarily follow.