NOBODY WORKS ALONE

Just as it takes a nation to keep a well-equipped soldier in the field, there is a whole industrial army behind every guy who swings a hammer, supplying him with all he needs, from lumber and nails, to blueprints and boots. 


The quality of his work is the sole purpose, and the whole point, so far, of a complex network of logistics trains, all working towards the same ultimate end. All the parts have to be right. Not just his hammer, not just his lumber. 


I offer three apparently unrelated examples: footwear, raw materials and engineering.

Boots uncomfortable? Slow job. 
Bad nails? Bad job. 
Inaccurate blueprints? Expensive job.

Despite the initial bookkeeping, the cost for any of these failures is spread out amongst the players, and then slowly across the entire economy. Not immediately or evenly, perhaps, but ultimately all these costs are distributed.

The bad boots costs him sore feet, they cost his wife a grumpy husband, and they cost his kids a hike with Dad. They cost his boss overtime and profits. They cost the manufacturer future sales and your sister has her hours cut at the boot factory. Her friend is laid off, she doesn't buy that new car. 

The bad nails cost him aggravation (and maybe a sore thumb) and his boss overtime and profits, or if they pass undetected, they cost his customer, and his tenants, and their customers, and their families, when the structure fails prematurely. Not only does the cost spread, it increases. This is the multiplier effect at its hairiest.

The blueprint error costs everyone who relied upon it except the guy with the hammer (who, entrusted with finding and fixing it, is paid to rework it at least once), and is therefor disputed by the various insurers and litigated for years.

Whoever loses, the cost of any problem (along with the legal overhead required to argue it) is ultimately added not just to the cost of the particular job, it is also added to the price of future transactions, in the form of higher wage and benefit costs, capital costs, insurance rates, bond requirements, fees raised, rents charged and price tag jumps. 


These new price levels instantly become the new price floors, so over time, mistakes drive up the cost of just doing business in general. Prices must rise merely to maintain existing margins. Mistakes are therefor inflationary by their very nature.

 So you see it is critically important that every seemingly unrelated task is sufficiently incentivized to ensure quality work-product, for some may be working by themselves, but nobody really works alone.

THE CLASS-WARFARE CARD

In the run-up to the last election, I heard Fox  cable "news" anchor Larry Kudlow accuse a guest (who was being slightly critical of the Republican's "hands-off business-no-matter-what" policies) of "playing the class-warfare card". 
It got me thinking, just how many rich men are there who have no rational economic opportunity after High School but to enlist in the Armed forces? Just how many poor people control editorial boards? How many poor people set corporate policies? Investment strategies? Just how many rich men died digging the gold and copper out of other mens's mines? How many rich men died building the mighty railroads that criss-cross America's mountains and deserts?

 Do I hear you right, Larry? Two plus two isn't four because my shoes need a shine? That's no defense at all, it's a simple logical fallacy, Dr. Aristotle.  This old ad hominem defense,  accusing your critics of "playing the class-warfare card" just isn't gonna work, Larry. When what you are trying to defend are self-serving deceptions, byzantine frauds, massive greed, selfish motives, predatory reflexes, evasive accounting and PAC behavior that smells exactly like plain old-fashioned bribery. the jury is gonna want to hear a whole lot more than that. http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/ad-hominem.html

It doesn't take an economist to tell a dairyman from his cow. The one ending up with all the milk is... not the cow. Even more revealing, your remark marginalizes the glaring fact that there truly is a class war furiously raging, but it's been pretty one-sided so far, with one side doing all the warring, and the other? All the dying.

The "Class-Warfare Card" has been on the table for a long, long time, fruit of "the root of all evil..."

From Teddy Roosevelt: ”...the most dangerous members of the criminal class, the malefactors of great wealth...”. Asked how a meeting went, “It tires me to talk to rich men. You expect a man of millions to be worth hearing, but as a rule, they don't know anything outside their own business.” 

E. H. Harriman,
Skull and Bones

Of railroad magnate E. H. Harriman Roosevelt said, “...he said he could buy a sufficient number of Senators and Congressman to protect his interests, and when necessary, could buy the Judiciary.”

House Tyrant "Uncle Joe" Gurney

Senator Weldon Heyburn of Idaho: In opposition to the eight-hour workday: “People should toil from sunrise to sundown and to hell with the clock.” On calls to regulate lumber and mining interests in the West, “It is revolutionary to insist that the rights of the public to the national resources outweigh private rights.” 

Idaho Senator Fred Dubois

Idaho's Fred Dubois, Heyburn's Democratic colleague in the Senate from 1903-07, wrote to mine owner Harry Day,  of Weyburn, "You and I both know his faults, but at the same time he has virtues. One of these is that he will be outspoken and fearless in protecting all the industries of Idaho"".

Through the clear eye of history, the real "class-warfare card" looks just like a funeral invitation.