Yesterday I wrote about Harvard asshole Greg Mankiw. Today I’m writing about non-Harvard asshole Darren Forse, owner of a trucking company down in Texas, quoted in a recent post about Texas politics by Dave Weigel over at Slate. According to Dave, Darren had this to say about the current state of the nation:
“You get people to come in and apply for jobs. First thing they ask is, ‘What’s it gonna pay?’”
Yes, imagine that. Someone applying for a job, thinking he has the right to bargain over his own goddamn salary. You’re not here to bargain, dude! You’re here to beg!
For hard-headed, hard-hearted, two-fisted (and, no doubt, hard-fisted) Darren, the notion that “the market” might set wages is, basically, insane. The market don’t set wages. Darren sets wages!
Darren’s thinking on the matter is remarkably similar to that of Harvard-dropout asshole* Bill Gates, whose support for the H-1B visa program is based on the fact that he feels it’s “insane” for him to pay Americans $100,000 a year just because that happens to be the going rate for programmers.
Both Darren and Bill are quasi-Aristotelian in their thinking. They think they know how much a given job is worth according to its “essence,” regardless of the actual supply of workers willing to work at the “true wage” for the job. If no one will work for that “true wage,” well, that’s a violation of, well, of something, and the government has to fix it (in Bill’s case) or (in Darren’s case) to stop the goddamn coddling of the goddamn poor and put the goddamn fear of God into them the way Jesus would! If they were starving, they wouldn’t be so goddamn uppity! What’s it pay, my ass! It pays what I goddamn want it to pay! Any more goddamn questions?
