‘Don’t go to college, please!’
2nd November 2012
Heather MacDonald presents some inconvenient truth.
But Sandy is also a reminder of the ongoing necessity of blue collar workers—all those hard hats trying to repair power lines and pump the water out of miles of homes, tunnels, and subway tracks. A universal population of college graduates, the desideratum of nearly all Democrats and far too many Republicans, composed as it inevitably would be of marketing and ethnic studies majors, would be of little use in rescuing the tri-state area from its catastrophic blow. Yes, more engineers are also needed–in the long run, to try to design more resistant infrastructure, and in the short run, to diagnose the current ruptures and plan a strategy of attack. But manual labor is a crucial component of the current recovery. To be sure, many of these hard hats belong to recalcitrant and budget-breaking public employee unions. But their power is slight compared to the teachers unions. And unlike teachers, who enjoy regular paeans of praise from politicians and advocates, utility workers rarely are the object of aspiration and admiration.
November 2nd, 2012 at 11:29
Yes, we need to maintain a large pool of manual laborers for the once-every-century crisis in which we need them.
And when they’re not busy rebuilding New York and New Jersey, they can sit around in little tin shacks waiting for their welfare check because the regular economy doesn’t really need them. We can label the shacks “For Emergency Use Only”.
Sounds perfectly reasonable to me.