From the beginning of the Industrial Revolution to modern day, there has been a resistance to automation and mechanization that replaces human labor by Luddites and their intellectual decedents, or or innovations such as the the assembly line that Henry Ford used to make the automobile increasingly affordable to more and more Americans.
Today, many pine away for a past utopia where highly skilled blue collar Unionized workers arise as a purported ruling class. They seek to create this, at your expense by eliminating the alternatives. One such example is the wishing to abolish such assembly line jobs at meatpacking plants by starving companies of lower pages workers, including illegal aliens with the presumption that automation and/or robotics will not take their place. In effect, we must all pay the price of economic inefficiency and cost to subsidize the market for highly trained artisan experts.
Meatpacking used to be a stable, middle-class union job, with multiple generations of families working at the same plant. In 1960, the industry was 95% unionized, paying wages that were comparable to those in the auto and steel industries. Meatpacking was skilled labor. A… pic.twitter.com/dioF8Pc7It
— Jay Fivekiller (@JayFivekiller) February 2, 2025
And yes, the complaint, ironically enough, is about jobs that Americans purportedly won’t do. Specifically the specialization where a less trained persons specializing in certain cuts could replace a more expensive expert in the entire process. All this in the name of eliminating “a job that destroys the human body and spirit” as if massively hiking prices for regular people is a noble sacrifice for the not-so-common good of the few. Indeed, these sentiments are often under the assumption that we’d become a rich nation of highly trained proletariat laborers who reclaim the wealth that the bourgeoisie has been stealing via illegal aliens or automation.
The underlying assumption, as it is with claims of foreign warmongering and non-domestically made narcotics, is that some blue collar utopia is the default and that nefarious forces are to blame for why we don’t have the fantasy workers paradise of mid-20th century America when such laborers didn’t have to face any real global competition, again ironically enough, from a world devastated a the Second World War.
There is a certain elitism that dovetails with derision for more formally educated white collar specialist and experts. And for whatever truth there is of the perceived elitism of the white collar class, this is an example of the pot calling the kettle Black.
Perhaps nothing better explains this elitism than the following sentiment:
“Yes, prices of meat will certainly rise, but you already shouldn’t be eating factory-farmed meat and you shouldn’t be patronizing corporations that are actively wrecking America.”
So much for the “Common Good”. At least they aren’t claiming that business owners are swimming in three cubic acre money vaults.
This is the equivalent to demanding that automobile assembly lines be abolished and cars be made more expensive in order to revitalize the master mechanic who could build a car completely by hand. It is the assumption that, protected from competition, a new ruling class will be the bulk of the population and the costs only born by those “elitists” who benefited from their Capitalist system of oppression.
Rather than the Rule of Law and the free market, we see calls for a command and control economy where some benefit at the expense of the rest.*
A little mood music:
* Nomenklatura excepted, of course.
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