Good point.

I wasn't addressing that issue at all. I just ran across that quote, and was struck by the fact that John was saying the time for wedgies was over, when he earns a big part of his income by giving wedgies. That's what the "PC versus Mac" commercials are all about. He works for the Luddites.

The part I quoted was a quote someone else had clipped, and it appeared to be third-, fourth-, or seventyfifth-hand. I have since run across the quote in context. It's preceded by

I think that we are necessarily moving toward a geek culture. The health of our society is going to rely on information technology. It's going to rely on a familiarity with math and science and technology. Geekery in general is founded on questioning and proof via analysis of the actual world and not the world as we wish it to be. By contrast, jockdom -- not sports -- jock culture proceeds from a certainty you create in your mind: 'My town is the best because the incredibly wealthy owners decided to keep the team for now.' Or, 'My political team is the best because it was my dad's and they best stoke my primitive fears,' as opposed to 'They have the best policies for me and my family.'

But even that doesn't give the whole quote. You can find the complete interview by Chris Packham at The Pitch, which describes itself as a Kansas City news blog. Mea culpa; I should have sought out the original source and given them proper credit.

I would disagree with both you (and Frederick Taylor) and Hodgman, and I will confess up front that I need to reread Frederick Taylor (and intend to tonight.) It's been years since I even heard his name.

My assertion is that capitalism worked when capital was the limiting factor, when manpower, materials and energy were cheap, and what was expensive were the capital goods that allowed for products to be manufactured efficiently. That's no longer the case. Materials and energy are increasingly scarce. You may have heard of "peak oil", but the fact is, we're going to run out of zinc and a number of other critical elements (such as the rare earths used in video screens) in little over a decade, and we've got much more oil than that, and we've got centuries of coal.

Capitalism is dying as we speak. Our current problems were proximately caused by the inflation caused by massive deficits in the Dubya administration, but we've been losing manufacturing jobs since the late 1960s, and not just to overseas. We've been losing them to technology.

During WWII, photographers made their own film by spreading emulsion on glass plates. Then they went to sheet film in the late 1940s, replacing 4 hours of work by a skilled photographer to 2 minutes work for technicians. Then color film came in in the late 1960s. Not only did a day's worth of darkroom work go to a photolab where technicians and machines did the work in ten minutes, it also eliminated 3 days work of colorizing the portraits by hand with transparent oils. Now, we've eliminated the film, and the photolab, and the photographer uses a PC and a printer, taking even less time. Instead of $30 worth of labor and $2 worth of materials for a $40 portrait, we're using $1 worth of labor and materials, and the portrait is $4.

Same thing with farming. One farmer can handle 1000 acres today, which used to require 20 men, but it employs one man in a industrial settings, manufacturing equipment and chemicals. With GPS technology and LISA technology, though, we're learning to produce more crops with fewer chemicals, and fewer passes across the field, so instead of one farmer providing one industrial job, he's only providing 1/5 of an industrial job.

When a $200,000 piece of photolab equipment is being replaced with a $200 PC, though, and a $120,000 tractor is lasting 20 years instead of 5, we need fewer factories - and the same sorts of technologies are making it possible to build factories that need fewer pieces of heavy equipment to produce a product. Attach a computer to a screw machine, and you can produce a different product every hour, because changing setups is almost instantaneous. You don't need to have 40 screw machines, each being dedicated to producing only one part. That means instead of needing 4000 employees to keep that factory busy, you can build a factory that only needs 100 employees, and since they only produce 1/40th the output, they can produce a niche product.

Everybody customizes their Harley anyhow, right? The Springettsbury HD plant is far more obsolete than the politicians and the unions, or even management realizes. Instead of a huge plant that makes complete motorcycles, they need small factoriess to make wheels, and motors, and frames, selling these parts to shops like Orange County Choppers that assemble the parts into the custom bikes that their customers want.

So if capitalism is dead or dying, because capital is no longer the limiting factor, that doesn't mean free enterprise is dead as well.

And as owners of this government we live under, we need to recognize that there is a fundamental difference between corporations and unincorporated businesses. Corporations are limited liability organizations. Corporations are inherently evil, because nobody is responsible for what the corporation does. If you're running a corporation, you take risks with other people's money, and you don't have any skin in the game. If the risk looks like it's going to work out well, you hit up the board for a big raise. If it looks like it's going to backfire, you jump ship, and you're busy working at some other corporation six months before things turn to crap. For that reason, corporations need to be highly regulated.

On the other hand, if you are the sole proprietor of your business, any risk you take is your own. You're going treat the money like it's your own, because it is. Recognizing that unincorporated businesses have owners who are responsible, we need to regulate them minimally, and have the tort laws set up so that anyone damaged by a company owner's misdeeds is made whole.

They just passed a law saying that if you make a product for kids, it needs to be tested by an independent lab for lead and certain other toxins before you can sell it. If I cut down a tree in my back yard, saw it into wooden blocks, and carefully sand them so they have no splinters, I would feel comfortable letting my great-granddaughter play with them, stick them in her mouth, etc. I know they are safe, no independent lab test needed. But I can't sell them without that lab test, which is expensive enough that I'm not going to bother manufacturing blocks. The only ones who can afford the tests are the corporation - which is inherently irresponsible. That doesn't make good sense.

As I said, you make a very valid point. And if you look at the whole interview, Hodgman makes a very valid point. And I think that my point is very valid, as well. We need manufacturing in order to have a healthy economy. But we don't need larger and larger corporations, acting in irresponsible ways. I suggested last July that each of us needs to cash in your stocks, quit your job, B.Y.O.B., and get horizontal. Corporations are evil, and a bad place to put your money. Your employer doesn't give a rat's ass about your future, so you better quit your job in order to be your own boss. And you probably don't want to have a lot of employees, either, since they don't give a rat's ass about anyone's future but their own, so it pays to have a niche product, and own that niche.

Daggoned it, LS/MFT. Whenever you post a reply, you goad me into writing a longer comment than the post you replied to. If I had some tinfoil in my hat, I'd be sure that you're involved an insurgency! But thanks for replying.