My new VDARE.com column: Human Directionals

"Human Directionals: The Cheap Wage / Expensive Land Economy Personified:"

America's proud history as a middle class country rests fundamentally on two advantages of settling a mostly empty continent: a small supply of labor and a large supply of land. This meant relatively high wages and low land prices, so Americans could afford to buy their own farms and homes.

In turn, this virtuous cycle encouraged Americans to invent labor-saving technologies like the reaper, the washing machine, the assembly line, and the semiconductor.

Which made Americans even richer and more independent.

Sadly, mass immigration has created a wasteful abundance of cheap labor and contributed to a shortfall of cheap land.

In that harbinger of the American future, Southern California, once the Promised Land of the middle class, unskilled labor has become so plentiful that now a common weekend sight is people who are paid to stand on corners and try to catch your eye by randomly wiggling brightly colored directional arrows, typically pointing to real estate open houses.

It's the 21st Century equivalent of the Depression-era advertising practice of hiring unemployed men to walk around wearing sandwich board signs saying "Eat at Joe's."

And it's just as depressing.... [More]

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer