LETTER: Conservatives behind useless thrashing

Editor:
Our attention to the major issues of the day is again, unsurprisingly, being blindsided by the Extreme Conservatives (ExtCons).

We are noisily thrashing around with health care, entitlements, taxes, energy, etc, etc, with little prospect of making any useful headway. The ExtCon approach is to encourage and facilitate this useless thrashing.  It is to DENY history and to insist on dividing up a fixed pie amongst the competing needs of society, generally in such a manner as to favor the moneyed establishment, Accumulated Wealth & Old Money, (AW & OM) to whom they curtsy.

There is absolutely no need for this to continue.

The appropriate solution is to increase the size of the pie, taking all or at least much of the pressure off society and thereby allow reasoned, non-panic-driven solutions to be implemented, acceptable to almost all interests.

HISTORICALLY, such societal adjustments have occurred several times (actually, they occur continually, but people like brackets around ideas) and have been given the designation "Industrial Revolution."

We are naturally in the midst of one right now.  It began in earnest in 1948 with a single event in New Jersey and has been accelerating ever since, with a big boost in the 1980s. It is so pervasive now, that we are used to ignoring it.

What has happened is that we now have available the means of increasing human productivity with almost no practical bound. This fundamentally alters the relationship between labor and capital.  It tends to first diminish and eventually destroy the power of AW & OM over us all. That is, it makes the pie very, VERY large.

It should then come as no surprise how vehemently moves in this area are being resisted by AW & OM and their henchmen, the ExtCons, via any and all means -- fair and foul, subtle and overt -- you name it. It is basically a dance to the death !

The most obvious tactic employed in recent years has been the implacable diversion of U.S. manufacturing activity to China and the Pacific Rim -- that instead of using available technology and making the necessary investments here at home to compete with cheap labor over there. Taking advantage of technology and making investments here would have been counterproductive to immediate 90-day profits and, more importantly, to the retention of the economic power of AW & OM over us -- so these investments were, of course, NOT MADE.

We the people have let it happen : We could have intervened . . .

We have allowed ourselves to be led astray, by the arguments of the agents of AW & OM, namely the ExtCons. Yet, in spite of this clear evidence just given, still far too many of us listen to their siren song -- Just exactly why is beyond me -- but it is perhaps explained by the innate human need to belong to something, to set oneself up as special, to be viewed as different from and above his fellows -- even at the cost of his own personal economic interests.

Allen N Wollscheidt
Payson, AZ