The really serious issue

By Jim Thompson
HCP columnist

The presidential election is less than two weeks away. All of the pundits, including this one, have had their bombastic moments. It is time to lay out the real economic problem and a possible solution.

In the 1700s, our founding fathers developed a system that addressed the needs of the time. The sources of energy at that time were human and animal, i.e., working class people, slaves, draft animals, water wheels and windmills.

The founding fathers almost addressed the human needs of the day (they couldn't figure out what to do with the slavery issue, so they kicked the can down the road to the 1860s).

By the way, by the 1860s, despite the war's outcome, the slave owners of the South, in order to be able to live with themselves, had had to stereotype and denigrate the slave population to a false status of sub-humanness in order to live with their own consciences, a problem we are still trying to overcome today.

At the time of the founding fathers, electricity was a kite, a string and a key. They could no more see the impact of electricity on society than President Eisenhower could have foreseen the Internet. Coal was something with which you heated your house. It was brought to you in a horse drawn wagon.

The impact of scientific discoveries and cheap energy, all occurring since the founding of the United States, has been profound.

No one has successfully addressed what this has done to society. I am convinced labor- saving devices and cheap energy are the root of many, many problems in modern society. We can't put the horse back in the barn, because the horse is gone.

Early in the current economic crisis, a pundit (not me) said we could solve the unemployment problem in a week: Ban farm machinery. This is so true, but so unworkable.

Likewise, I am not sure more emphasis on education, at least the way we are looking at it, is the solution, either. Even if everyone had the natural disposition to learn calculus and theoretical physics, does Apple need more engineers to design iPhones? I doubt it.

Early in the industrial revolution, we absorbed the excess labor created by industrial efficiency by extending public education. It literally went from non-existent to eighth grade to mandatory high school from 1840 to 1940.

Prohibition on child labor also helped shrink the workforce to meet the actual need. In a time when the average person lived to age 55, this had a profound and positive effect on reducing the available workforce to compensate for the efficiencies of the industrial revolution.

Now, however, we have extended public education to young adults – nominally 18 year olds. It can't be extended any further – these people rightfully want to get away from a nanny-like condition. Heck, they are three to five years older than the marrying age of the mid-1800s.

So, what to do?

Everyone is not going to be a scientist or an engineer and further extension of classroom style babysitting is impossible.

Make the Peace Corps mandatory. Upon high school graduation, or if over 16 and dropping out of high school, you do two years, no matter your condition (rich, poor, pregnant, druggie, married, single, whatever).

This immediately pulls 5 percent of the workforce out of the market. More importantly, it lets the young people of today, many whom live in a synthetic world in cities, a chance to see where food comes from, how people struggle, and how rewarding being generous themselves can be.

After two years of mandatory service, options are available, but they are voluntary. Stay another five years, and we'll give you a tuition free education in a public university. Stay until you are 30 and you get free healthcare for life.

We have one root problem in the developed world – idle hands and minds created by an extraordinarily efficient manufacturing system. (China is not the problem. That is a false target.)

This extraordinarily efficient manufacturing system causes a sense of worthlessness and listlessness leading to societal problems.

Democrats, Republicans, somebody, has to address this if we are going to mitigate the harm caused by the miraculous industrial revolution.

We need to stop giving away money (which we don't have) and start giving young people a sense of self worth and purpose for life (which many of them don't have).

The course we are on is going to end badly. We will be lucky if the country merely goes bankrupt. It is time to find a solution that can work.

Two Democrats – FDR with his CCC camps, and JFK with his Peace Corps – may have provided the clues to permanently solving our society's obvious ills.

Jim Thompson, formerly of Marshall, is a graduate of Hillsboro High School and the University of Cincinnati. He resides in Duluth, Ga., following decades of wandering the world, and is a columnist for The Highland County Press.