Jerry Miskulin – 9/25/14

This page was last updated on September 29, 2014.

Labor becoming less valued; Jerry Miskulin; Beaver County Times; September 25, 2014.

I encourage you to review Mr. Miskulin’s body of work in the archives. Mr. Miskulin has written at least 100 letters since 2004 (I didn’t critique all of them.). Most (all?) are illogical and full of falsehoods (not just wrong).

Mr. Miskulin expressed displeasure with the tea parties (here and here), proclaimed “Rush Limbaugh is a propaganda minister,” and told us “Tariff is the best way to reduce deficit.” Mr. Miskulin’s most recent letter I critiqued was “Hope we don’t get fooled again.”

Below is a detailed critique of the subject letter.

“When the day comes where a robot serves you a beer at a bar, or you have to order your meal at a restaurant via a computer, that is the time I stop going out.”

[RWC] What about jukeboxes (“robots”) instead of live music?

“Labor just isn’t valued the way it once was. If we eliminate almost all labor in the marketplace, who is going to buy the goods the Chinese produce?”

[RWC] I wonder if Mr. Miskulin buys anything online, you know, “via a computer” replacing multiple salespersons, stock boys, checkout clerks, janitorial staffs, display designers, construction jobs, and so on with some website developers and hardware. Does Mr. Miskulin pump his own gas or seek a full-service gas station? Does Mr. Miskulin avoid stores that use scanning at checkout? Price scanning reduced both stock boy (no more price stickers to apply) and checkout clerk (quicker to check out a customer) jobs.

“I remember the old phrase, ‘Another day, another dollar.’ Today, you’d have to say ‘Another day, another half-dollar.’

“It’s labor that made this country great and the lack of it will be our downfall. Now so many are unemployed or underemployed, and saddest thing is that we’ve accepted it.

“So many people are right on the brink and the most dangerous thing is it gets them to think. In the old days, you’d talk to the bartender while you had a drink, but those days are going the way of the dinosaurs -- extinct.”

[RWC] Which human labor is OK to eliminate? How about the first guy who used a lever to move something by himself instead of needing someone else to help? What Mr. Miskulin describes goes back to the first human to use something in addition to his bare hands to accomplish a task.