A friend asked me for my thoughts on the riots in Baltimore. I replied with the following: We interviewed a Baltimore-based state legislator for http://www.realworlddivorce.com/Maryland and she pointed out that the laws in Maryland are crafted by rich people in Montgomery County. A system set up by highly educated high-income people is not necessarily one that will work out well for poorly educated low-income people. Maryland is a fantastically wealthy state and, despite taxing away a higher-than-average proportion of residents’ income, it is a great place to be a government worker, lawyer, lobbyist, or medical doctor. But people who have found a way to stand in a corner of the shower of gold centered on Capitol Hill probably aren’t thinking about what it would take to attract employers to the Baltimore area rather than to, say, Georgia, North Carolina, or Texas.
5 thoughts on “Baltimore Riots: Poor people aren’t always best off in an environment of laws created by rich people”
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Baltimore’s largest employer was once Bethlehem Steel, which operated the Sparrow’s Point shipyard. Bethlehem Steel went bankrupt in large part due to asbestos lawsuits by former shipyard workers. The owner of the Orioles became filthy rich off such lawsuits, while the remaining shipyard workers lost their jobs. Baltimore’s biggest employer now is JHU and its hospitals, who produce nothing – they just suck up resources produced elsewhere.
So, Johns Hopkins hospitals “produce nothing-they just suck up resources produced elsewhere.” That sounds like a neo-Marxist view that “heavy-manufacturing-is-the-only-good-work.”
They “produce” cutting-edge health care, regularly save or improve people’s lives, and employ thousands of people in Baltimore. Moreover, they provide relatively well-paying jobs not only for the doctor, but middle-class and working class people like nurses, physician assistants and building workers.
If you think Baltimore is bad now, just see what would happen if Johns Hopkins shuttered its doors.
It’s pretty simple…rich people don’t give a damn about poor people, no matter what state you’re in.
So if we could increase health care and education to 100% of our GDP, we’d all be really rich, right?
Reductio ad absurdum. So if we just threw up trade barriers to protect inefficient, unprofitable domestic heavy manufacturers forever, we’d all be really rich right?
Given the rest of the world pays to send their children to our top universities, yeah, I’d bet on them over manufacturing jobs whose global market-clearing wage is about $10 a day.
If you’re going to criticize service sectors, how about looking at finance– or is that your sector?