Smart Companies? What About Smart Electorates? Smart Countries? Smart Governments?

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

How Investing in Good Jobs Lowers Costs and Boosts Profits

The Good Jobs Strategy ... shows that even in low-cost settings, leaving employees behind with low wages and bad jobs is a choice, not a necessity. On April 4, we’ll discuss how smart companies are turning the Walmart business model on its head by investing in good jobs while earning strong investment returns. Sponsored by UFCW and the AFL-CIO.

These are merely politically correct ways of discussing loyalty in teamwork. 

For Pete's sake! Common sense is no longer allowed to be declared sensible until a photogenic university professor declares to be? And then only for "smart companies" with "strong investment returns."

Unfortunately, the good prof & the AFL-CIO don't define the terms of what constitutes a "strong investment returns." How long will it take until they realize that they don't really agree on the terms of that definition? Yet another generation of stalled labor-capital reforms? Is this the AFL-CIO's way of admitting defeat?

Something subtle is missing here, and it's not clearly apparent until you analyze what they're actually saying. This whole "Good Jobs" approach reminds me of Deficit Doves. They're trying to agree with their masters while also agreeing with the serfs ... at the same time? Doesn't that always turn into groveling?

Smart professors don't miss the point? 

Only clever ones trying to tout the uber-capitalist party line, masquerading as aggregate common sense? Usually in order to get tenure, and maybe a fellowship or endowed chair from an institute set up by some billionaire (non-labor) capitalist.

Can we just skip all the capitalist mumbo jumbo, and get straight to the point? 

Wouldn't a "Resilient Electorate Strategy" represent adaptive reality, and therefore common sense? Can't we just come right out and say that? Apparently not, because ~1% of people hoarding vast amounts of static assets feel that they have too much to lose personally, if they relieve constraints on and control over the rest of the electorate.

Bad move. Always suicidal. It's only a matter of time.

How did supposed capitalists forget that labor-capital is also one of the equal, arbitrary classifications of "capital?" Biasing a system to persistently make some forms of capital more equal in all contexts than other forms of capital is - by definition - constraining aggregate options, draining resiliency and reducing aggregate agility.

Yet that is obvious only if one stops to actually think.

Maybe we need to forget capitalism? And just go back to consistency across biology, anthropology, sociology, democracy and statistical process control? Let the capitalist mysticism go the way of the pythagorean mysticism?