Tom Toles for June 11, 2015

it’s the political mindset that denies the S-T-E-M, not the employees of government - don’t do a disservice to the many capable and committed employees.

I have an engineering degree. It didn’t make me a republican.

Just kick the can down the road: The road that is crumbling because infrastructure repair was neglected.

WAY too many distractions for us to learn that stuff! We want to watch TV, movies (over & over) play video games, party, drink, load up on ammo, and gripe all about it on-line!

We need more people that understand those “stem” and work in Congress. Right now we have example of a Congress that is ignorant of science, technology, engineering, and math. They posture with belief.

Mr Toles doesn’t understand the acronym STEM. .I have a STEM degree. On my first day on my first job, my boss said, ‘We don’t need no stinkin’ S, T, or E. What we need is M, meaning Marketing. Now tell me where you plan to go to get them to give us $1 million for a research contract with no deliverable beyond a report saying “We did great research, research you couldn’t possibly live without and we made great progress! we’re 90% of the way there, but we need another $1 million to finish!”? You get 30% of whatever you bring in.’.I stood there with my mouth open, and my boss said, ‘Son, you’d better resign. As long as you’re here, you’re wasting your time and ours. We pay on commission, and you’re just a waste of desk space that could be used by a good worker, which you ain’t.’

The last time they were polled in 2009, only 6% of scientists identified as Republican. It can’t have improved, since Republicans have doubled down their vicious attacks on science both as a useful human endeavor and as a job worthy of paying for.

Superb cartoon!

The development of the market was progressive in its time, and certainly part of the history of liberal thought. But by the middle of the nineteenth century it was clear that capitalism exacted a huge human cost. Charles Dickens’ novel “Hard Times” states the problem vividly, but Dickens had no solution. Around the same time Mayhew produced an exhaustive study, “London Labour and the London Poor”, and of course one of the classic accounts is Engels “The Condition of the Working Class in England”. Some people argued that the abject poverty of the working class was just necessary. But others tried to think of ways to ameliorate the situation. One response was the various forms of socialism, including anarchist socialism, communism, and the Fabians in England. Others took a less extreme position and advocated reform rather than socialism. The progressives of the late nineteen and early twentieth centuries were among these reformers. They were unwilling to abandon the market, but they were also unwilling to let the working class starve. Today’s liberals are the descendants of those progressives. They want to keep the good parts of the market, but they believe it should be regulated in various ways, and they believe that working people should be allowed to organize unions to negotiate better wages and working conditions. I’m not a liberal myself, I’m further to the left, but I have a lot of respect for liberals, because of their humanity. Those who want to dismantle the liberal reforms and replace them with nothing but an unregulated market are either heartless or don’t know any history.

I have never come across anyone who actually argued in favor of equal outcomes. But the system we have now pretty much guarantees unequal outcomes. What about fair outcomes? What about an economic system which provides a decent job at fair pay for everyone?