Tag Archives: work

The Visible Hand

The visible hand is the one that’s invisible to Socialist congregants… it holds a deadly weapon. 

unproductivehandsmith

Adam Smith’s formulation of the forgotten, unproductive and withering hand of parasitism

Every socialist, communist and miscellaneous looter is fond of reciting Smith’s mention of the visible “invisible hand” of freedom, for it gives the impression of mystical superstition and life-after-death as the basis for valuing freedom as opposed to coercion. When was the last time you saw THIS tidbit of Adam Smith’s writings?

But if we consider the matter more closely, we shall find that this interested diligence of the clergy is what every wise legislator will study to prevent; because, in every religion except the true, it is highly pernicious, and it has even a natural tendency to pervert the truth, by infusing into it a strong mixture of superstition, folly, and delusion. Each ghostly practitioner, in order to render himself more precious and sacred in the eyes of his retainers, will inspire them with the most violent abhorrence of all other sects, and continually endeavour, by some novelty, to excite the languid devotion of his audience.

William Graham Sumner’s original formulation of The Forgotten Man included a cast of four characters: A and B, who put their heads together to decide what C shall be forced to do for D. “C” is the Forgotten Man, the robbery victim, the slave. The Forgotten Hand is an appendage of which of these characters?

The Forgotten Hand, the one holding the gun, belongs to B–the man A sends to rob C in order to pay the both of them for pretending to be doing something benevolent for D. “B” is a gang of government agents, paid to believe that whatever “A” decides is good enough to kill for, nothing more. “A” is the real culprit. “A” is the Congress that assures the crowd that freedom is selfish, that only the terrified, fearing for their lives, can be generous (or else!).

“A” is also the voter who elected to send men with guns out to take someone else’s money by force. Why? So that A and B can preen and strut as beacons of selfless nobility and disinterested altruism. In the Republican version “A” is the Congress, “B” is the IRS and DEA, CIA, FATF, AML, TF, CFT, DNFBP, IRS-CID, INL, ICRG, GIABA, GAFISUD, FSRB, FIU, FinCEN, EAG. In the Democratic Party version, “B” is the IRS and FDA, HEW and an alphabet soup of other, equally unproductive parasites.

These are the armed and infatuated ruffians who arrogate the power to destroy wealth in furtherance of some scheme of  expropriation. A “protective” tariff, such as caused the Rebellion of 1776, the Nullification Crisis, then the Civil War, is promptly countered by speculation in smuggling. Smith described the economic results of an entrenched kleptocracy’s resort to asset forfeiture:

By the ruin of the smuggler, his capital, which had before been employed in maintaining productive labour, is absorbed either in the revenue of the state, or in that of the revenue officer; and is employed in maintaining unproductive, to the diminution of the general capital of the society, and of the useful industry which it might otherwise have maintained.

The domino effect of confiscation, withdrawal of deposits, collapse of credit, liquidity crises and widespread bankruptcies brought about by Presidents Harrison, Hoover, Reagan, Bush and Bush Jr is simply the reaffirmation of what Adam Smith wrote in 1775, and Ayn Rand improved and set on an ethical footing in 1957. There, too, was The Forgotten Hand:

I mean that I hold the upper hand!”
“With a gun in it?”
“Oh, forget about guns! I—” 

If you want to change America back into a free country, consider making a small donation to the State Libertarian Party in places like Oklahoma, Ohio and Alabama. This is easy to do over the internet using a PayPal account (except to the suicidal Travis County Libertarian Party).

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Reading a contract

One of the judges I worked for regularly during the Great Purge following the attacks on the Pentagon and civilian skyscrapers suggested I work for an additional company. She was referring to these bloated and top-heavy organizations governments are comfortable with exempting from competitive bidding. Court interpreters tend to focus extra attention on recommendations made by judges, so I contacted the company and received a dreary stack of forms to fill out.

Because life expectancies are limited,  it pays to read over the material before reaching for a pencil and filling in blanks. The main contract contained sentences with no object, others with no verb, and similar scars of the sort that result from inept editing. Repairing these contracts is a waste of time. This I knew from having spent dozens of hours on the thankless task over the course of several years. So I informed the employee that the contract was defective, with problems on page such-and-such, and to contact me again after corrections were made.

The reaction was the sort of gasp you’d expect were you to tell a mother to put her baby in the oven and turn on the gas. But it is the same everywhere. The people who seek these corporate timecard jobs do not think like free-range independent contractors who live by their wits or starve. I would bet money the problem was never reported back up the pecking order, and that hundreds of eager and starry-eyed young linguists hurriedly signed the mess without a why or a wherefore. When the judge eventually asked me about the company I reported that their contract was a garbled mess. She smiled, and that was the end of the matter.

With no surprise, and some schadenfreude, I notice the same company is suddenly getting a lot of free publicity. The  Department of Labor is forcing them to pay hundreds of employees and thousands of interpreters close to a million and a half dollars for letting themselves get screwed by blindly signing defective agreements.  The Home Office in what used to be England is also experiencing difficulties with its mass-herding of careless interpreters.

This is evolution in action. Folks who do not bother to put up a website and state their policies are fair game for economic exploitation by bigger fish. Signing contracts without reading and understanding the text is just plain dumb.  When someone baits you with a bad agreement, you can make a counteroffer using standard agreements from the Freelancers Union, the American Translators Association or by writing or having an attorney write you a bid form or agreement boilerplate.

This has been a continuing education presentation by www.Portugueseinterpreter.com