Dean Baker at Beat the Press thinks that newspaper columnists in the USA should open up their jobs for foreign competition - journalists who could do their job for less money and perhaps write even better, and I agree, naturally. Newspapers need to keep prices low especially since they have been hit hard from other information centers such as the Net where it is often free. These champions of the China Syndrome, the peculiar notion that cheap imports somehow helps out America's poor, need to put their own jobs on the global auction block since they are so concerned about the buying power of the underclass. This I've written ad nauseam before, and I can't help but playing the same side of the record over and over again. Frankly, I feel like a slacker because I haven't spinned it enough.....
Dean also takes America's physicians to task: I guess that doctors just can't make it on an average of $200,000 per annum(after malpractice insurance), and some of them are putting themselves in the same work boots as a steel worker. The doctors in the USA, via the AMA, are a protected caste and still they whine about ambulance chasing lawyers, and the cost of malpractice insurance. The reality is, is that they do not feel that they should be held accountable, period. Physicians, lawyers and educators are like the old medieval guild systems and the government gives them protection that it does not believe should apply to anyone else in any other field. Lawyers and doctors have very powerful lobby edifices as well(since most public servants are lawyers by trade - and increasing numbers are physicians - they got it made in the first place ). The American Medical Association, the various Bar Associations have no competition in the global economy and they fight tooth and nail if they believe that their monopoly is threatened. High time that these hallowed Guilds gets busted up in the same spirit of Anti-Trust Laws. But this is a pipe dream given that, again, most politicians are attorneys, and some physicians; the cause should be to bust the Trusts that public servants and the Fourth sphere of government - lobbyists - have over the people of the United States. The contradiction is that a lobby would have to be formed to shed the power of lobbyists and the protected guilds of the professional class...and so on. Next time that I meet a doctor, lawyer or educator who sings odes to the virtue of the Free Market and the global economy...well, never mind. I don't want to go jail;-)

At least the professional class should be partisans of all fields and careers in the job market should have their protected guilds that they enjoy. That waxes like some Distributist(I am not one) but at least Distributists have an alternative to the present state of affairs in the economy; they want everyone to have their own guild and would be an alternative to labor unions. Most Distributists are traditionalist Roman Catholics who reject the predatory, usurious aspects of capitalism and the leveling of Marxism simultaneously. The morale is that 'third ways' do exist and always have. The National System of economics is also an alternative, and to me is the alternative for the United States. It was the system that we had in various forms until recently in our history. It wasn't perfect, but it worked better. Distributists can be brought into the coalition, if ever one gets going to arrest TINA(There Is No Alternative) and get her off the streets.