Insurance industry workers

 

I’m not worried about what all the people in the health insurance industry will do anymore if they get put out of work by a single payer health care plan like medicare for all.  They’ll all either go to work for the government running the new plan or wander off to do something else.

 

It’s not like entire industries haven’t been replaced in the past.  All the mechanization and automation of manual labor that has been developed since the 1900s has displaced countless workers.  Consider the spinning wheel, production lines, paint spray guns, bottling machines, and all the construction equipment replacing men with shovels.  What about the entire industry built up around horses and buggies or wagons as transportation?  The internal combustion engine put the horse and buggy industry out of business in a flash  (maybe a 50 year flash, but yeah).  Horses required so much infrastructure.  Hay and grain fields.  Stables.  Farriers.  Buggy and buggy whip makers.  Teamsters.  Even people who would dispose of manure and dead animals.  All those industries and workers had to adapt.

 

It’s not to say we don’t have sympathy for displaced workers, we could protect men with shovels and outlaw bulldozers and save jobs, but refusing to use a productive piece of equipment like a bulldozer wouldn’t make any sense.  As each industry goes away, the next generation of workers has to aspire to the next generation of jobs, not the jobs that used to be.  Life is a little harder for the people caught in the middle, the ones working in the industry that dwindles.  Some will adapt.  Some won’t.

 

Uh-oh.  I just got back to my original question, what to do with the people displaced by improvements in processes.  I think it comes down to the fact that capitalism can be cruel.  I like to think that we could have compassionate capitalism that would care about people left behind, but I don’t think compassion is written anywhere in the rules for capitalism.  There can be government retraining programs for people displaced, but that’s not unfettered capitalism, that’s the government trying to protect us from capitalism.  When you look at the income and wealth disparity in this country that capitalism has produced, it makes me think that government isn’t doing enough.

 

Okay.  So I started out concerned about displaced workers in disrupted industries and ended up dissatisfied with capitalism and railing about a lapse of government.  So what.  Remember, I’m just saying what the voices in Judy’s head tell me to say.