Gary North is an economist - but a masterful prose stylist, too. This one is pretty brilliant.
What to do about job (in)security? North offers several options:
- Riot for more security, as the French do
- Stick your head in the sand, as employees of GM or Ford do (North calls them "Enron Motors" - destined for implosion)
- Dig yourself a "technical skills" hole and crawl into it, and pray that progess won't render those skills irrelevant or cheaper in China (variation on #2)
- Try to anticipate the future market landscape, improve your skills based on that, be adjustable, repeat as needed
No surprise he recommends #4. What will be surprising to those not used to thinking of a free labor market as a good thing is the conclusion: free competition, whether for jobs or anything else, is the engine of civilizational progress. Conversely, things that restrict the freedom to compete (unions, labor regulation, antitrust, etc) are anti-civilization. Radical, yes, but the logic is irrefutable.
These insights are especially important for those of us who are contemplating whether to someday break from employeeship into entrepreneurship.
Oh, one more thing: if I read another essay with the phrase "build up to the war in Iraq", I'm gonna puke. I think the mind of a writer who doesn't recognize the staleness and overuse of such a phrase, no matter how good the finished product, is deserving of some ridicule.
