Good-bye, America.

Editor,

When labor was scarce in the USA, after WWII for example, capital needed to pay workers competitive wages to attract them, and it needed to keep the "reserve army of the unemployed" educated and healthy in case it became necessary to put them to work.

Now there is a glut of labor in the global market. It is less expensive (by orders of magnitude) than American labor, cowed by authoritarian regimes, unorganized, and malleable. So the reserve army of the unemployed in the USA is a liability that capital is willing to pay zero to support.

Good-bye, America. If you are not a rich capitalist, your days are numbered.

Re: "The Ryan Plan for Medicaid" (5/1/2011)