the leaders of tomorrow

Now that I think about it almost all the buildings on the campus of the non ivy league college where I suckled at the teat of knowledge were called halls, Harker Hall, Gregory Hall, Altgeld Hall, and so on.  We didn't have any ivy growing on them as I recall.  Well we were a land grant college. a college of the people, not some stuffy eastern former preacher mill  where they dressed up funny and sipped tea and spoke abstruse matters in affected tones.  We were flat and open to the sky, waves of corn waving proudly into the horizon.  We were into practical shit.  Learning and Labor that was the motto inscribed into our seal.  Over the doorway to one of those mysteriously name halls was inscribed "A century of learning leads the way to a millennium of labor."

Not that I have ever been a big fan of labor, for myself that is, but I like it well enough as an abstract concept, performed by others.  Which takes me back to the negative income tax and that radio show that it was mentioned on. The show comes on while I am typing my post in the morning, probably around 6 AM, maybe it's called Planet Money.  I'll keep an ear out for it this AM, but I am up an hour early so it may not come up until after I have published.  I was looking for a word to indicate making my post and I glanced up at the blogger thing and the orange button said Publish.  Now there is a high class word.  Maybe a little ivy would suit my tweedy suitcoat with the elegant patches on the elbows.

Yesterday they were speaking of automation, just as we have been, one wonders if they read our publishments.  That parochial blogger spellcheck doesn't recognize it, though Merriam-Webster does, calls it archaic which is perfectly fine and it seems to apply more specifically to announcements, but that is fine also.

See here's the thing, maybe in the old days the guy on the farm next door worked harder and that's why he was richer than you, and there is a rough justice there, even when the money goes to his no good son, doesn't a dad get to choose where his money goes?  And that McCormick fellow surely he deserves money for being ingenious and promoting his product.  But you know he could never have invented it if there had not been a lot of technology before him.  And this technology was created by people in general, the guys who invented agriculture, who invented steel, who invented machines to make things out of steel, a mass of people thinking and tinkering as far back as the guy who dropped his mammoth chop into the fire and found it later and ate it and found it good.

Our ancestors.  The ancestors of all of us.  In a way this shit belongs to all of us, so how come this one guy gets all the money for it?  I'm just using McCormick here as an example, I don't begrudge him, they were still plenty of jobs in the fields after his invention.

But anymore automation is eating up jobs and there are no more in the fields, and the guys who are profiting from this are just buying it off the shelf.  This is our collective heritage and it is being used against us.  Well not us safely retired Beaglestonians, but the kids of today.

The kids of today.  It seems to me that at some point towards the beginning or the end of the Mickey Mouse Club there was a little thing where the big mouseketeer, I think his name was Jimmy, never liked that guy, would intone solemnly, while an American flag whipped in the breeze in the background, "The kids of today, the leaders of tomorrow."

Anyway it seems like there is something especially unfair about the sons of the rich using the heritage of all of mankind to sweep the leader of tomorrow from the land and begging for a negative income tax.

Well that sounds like commie drivel, and I know it's more complicated than that, but it's Friday.