Letter From the Boss January 14, 2009
Posted by danielmorgan17 in Economy.Tags: Economy, government
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The following is an e-mail written by a friend of mine, Jonathan Felts (felts2@uiuc.edu), copied with his permission here. I promise, one day soon, I will get back to posting original material. 
This post below is a great look into the viewpoint of your boss.
In general, there are producers, customers, and consumers. The producers, obviously, produce. They’re the ones generating the wealth, and this link above is a good reminder that it takes sacrifice and hard work. You can’t wake up one day and just conjure up a large house and fancy car on a whim (unless, of course, you do so fraudulently or deceptively with an unsustainable model, see: lenders and investors). Read the link above. Success takes effort!
An engineering PhD alone is enough to make most people cringe. Hell, most of the people I knew at GA Tech couldn’t wait to get out after 4 grueling years of work to get their undergrad degree. For those of us that made the haphazard decision to continue on to a PhD, well, we were less than halfway done when we walked across the stage and grabbed our BS degrees. It takes roughly a decade to get to the end. By then, that’s a 3rd of your life. After that? work work work. The result? New discoveries, inventions, patents, and products. These products make the standard of living cheaper, and make people safer and healthier. Look at most houses today. Even broke people have televisions, cellular phones, central heating and air, running water on command, light on command, etc. To make these things ubiquitous in society took untold amounts of research and collaboration. Honestly, it’s hard to grasp the magnitude of how much work went into even just the ability for people to go to a store anywhere in America and purchase a light bulb for a couple dollars.
Next we have customers. Usually a customer is a distributor, but they are also producers who include outside products in their final product assembly. The most important thing to remember is that you and I are NOT customers. An example of a customer is Lowe’s or Home Depot. They purchase products from Whirlpool, LG, etc. to sell to people. They do not use most of the products that they buy.
Finally we have the consumer. The consumer consumes. That is its only function. It does not create new products. It is a leech. It requires substantially less work to consume something than it does to make the product being consumed. It takes at least all morning to make a thanksgiving feast, some of it being started at least a day before. 20 minutes after it’s on the table, the consumers of that feast have already finished consuming it and are on the couch watching football. True, the dinner wouldn’t have been prepared if no one wanted to consume it, making the consumer a vital part of the chain, but they didn’t supply the work to make the dinner.
So where do you fit into this? You guessed it, you consume. Yes, you do play the role of the producer when you are at work. Some people make the choice to not produce anything, but only consume. Some people that do produce decided not to put in the effort for high school,college, or graduate degree, so what they produce is of relatively little value to the economy. Some people also choose to limit their value by refusing to work more than 40 hours a week. Some people have skill sets that are too common, making their personal contribution unnecessary, and thus, undesirable. Despite all of these factors, outside of work you are a consumer and are considered such by most product making companies.
So now imagine that there is a huge electric generator at the center of the US, probably around, say, Missouri. Now imagine on the map that there are lines reaching out of the generator to all of the houses that use electricity. Now watch the electricity flowing from the generator, through the lines, and ending at the houses. To make that electricity requires power, and lots of it. And the more people that want electricity, the more power is required. You pump more power into the generator, you get more electricity. Simple enough? Now when that electricity gets to a home, it is consumed. Gone. To make more electricity, you have to get more power from somewhere outside of this chain. If you take away some of the power from the generator, the generator either needs to become more efficient to meet demand, or reduce the number of houses it can sustain.
Yeah yeah, you got me. The generator isn’t really a generator at all. It’s a business. A business that supplies you with things that you need, or more importantly, things that other countries need. It’s a very simple concept: If you take away money from the company, you take away their ability to deliver products. The result? You start sucking the well dry. Yes, you get a personal benefit in the short term, but products start coming out slower and becoming more scarce. Things begin to slow. To make it worse, this money is being laundered through the US Government, which is a veritable black hole rife with inefficiencies, scandal, and detrimental social engineering practices. Meanwhile, the businesses in other countries start picking up the slack and meeting our unflagging demands. Eventually, they start crowding out the businesses in the US, and suddenly our country is getting its lively hood from other countries. Soon, the well goes too dry to sustain the growth of government and the increased welfare. The solution? More loans from other countries!
So where does that leave us? I think there’s a similar analogy that just happened recently in America where people got loans that they had no way of paying back…something about mortgages or some nonsense. I might be remembering this incorrectly, but I think it was a pleasant story through and through with a feel good ending. Oh, never mind, the news is saying that it’s causing economic crisis. Hey, you don’t think that’s what’s going to happen to the US, do you? Probably not. I’m sure we can keep this up at least till we all die, so then the next generation can deal with it. Let’s tax the filthy rich producers some more! Some of them on Wall Street are scumbags, so obviously they all are!
The long and short of it: Thank your boss for their sacrifice on monday, and at least feel a little guilty if you voted for any elected official that thinks that taking money from producers and giving it to consumers is a good idea.
Well I think the producer section of this seems a bit arrogant about being a PHD. There are plenty of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates out there who didn’t even get a BS, they got right down to business. Actually many, many of the inventors through history were not of the “educated elite.” Education is often a better breeder of liberal thought than of useful production.
I especially resent this quote:
“Some people that do produce decided not to put in the effort for high school,college, or graduate degree, so what they produce is of relatively little value to the economy”
Also, keep in mind that those who caused the crisis and committed the greatest moral failures were the educated elite in the financial sector. The whole crisis really has nothing to do with Joe American and his work habits and everything to do with the Fed, fiat currency, and politicians. Joe American only plays a part when he doesn’t make wise political choices… but it’s typically the educated elite again who are making the bad political choices.
My wife says I was harsh. But I’ve known Johnny since he was like 8 so I reserve the right to rag on him =)
I think you read more into it than I was trying to say. It was my personal example of hard work, there are others that don’t involve getting a PhD. I haven’t seen anything on how elite the education was of those in the financial sector, it was my understanding that it was an across the board kind of thing.
Education is a breeder of liberal thought if you’re in a major that places focus on politics or social abstraction. Although I suspect a lot of my professors in engineering are liberal, it just doesn’t find it’s way into the classes. My confrontations with liberals in college, interestingly enough, have often been in the majors that have the smallest amount of relevancy to the public at large.
This also isn’t an argument about the crisis, I am arguing against the idea that taking more from producers and giving to consumers is somehow going to stimulate us out of the crisis. I suspect that this tactic, however, will find it’s way into congressional bills anyway. Remember the last stimulus rebate check? I think most people can agree that it did nothing.
We have come to a time where we all realized that large pieces of our economy were a figment of our imaginations, and taking more money from the real backbone and feeding to that hallucination is beyond absurd. It’s like we’re trying to go back to blissful ignorance, like maybe if we all think it’s still real, the economy will magically act like it’s real again.
Also, I think you are somewhat founded in resenting that quote. Last time I checked, our two biggest exports were software and entertainment. Software takes a lot of hard work and will power to learn the material. Entertainment, though it can take a lot of training, doesn’t really measure up to the level of CS. That’s a pretty broad spectrum of levels of long-term commitment, so maybe I was too general there.
On the other hand, some people select jobs that they know will not produce wealth. Take a mechanic for instance, or a screw driver on a production line. If they understand that they have made a choice to select a job that just isn’t worth 50 dollars an hour, that’s fine. The problem is that they THINK that they are worth much more than they are. In addition, they think that the people that work above them are worth less money than they really are. They’re jealous, and it’s only human nature to try and convince yourself that your jealousy is rational.
America has lost its grip on reality.