130406 Intelligent Thinking

Not everyone is the same. This is good. It takes diverse talent to achieve ‘most anything, and no one person can know everything. Sometimes, I get so used to ‘dumbing down’ my speech so that others can understand me, than people think I’m dumb. When my thoughts move so quickly that my words trip over themselves, the same thing happens. Now that my children have reached a reasonable age, it gives me great pleasure to talk at length on certain topics that make other people’s heads spin. The elder and I discuss politics, while the younger and I discuss physics. It is glorious.

I have a cousin who ‘knows everything’ and lives in Liberal La-la Land. He fails to acknowledge that I might know a thing or two that he doesn’t. He and I studied quite different subjects in college. My majors centered in science and math, while he had a liberal arts education. “Liberal” used to mean generous, but in the US today, it means following a certain code that bypasses thinking and depends on feel-good assumptions. Facts and figures get thrown out the window when they don’t fit the litany. I know, because I have old BOOKS and don’t depend on the Internet for my information. I want to be the epitome of the former, but consider myself to be the opposite of the later definition.

My failure is that I expect people to think logically. It seems to be a lost art. I have altered my opinions and given ground when someone can show me why something is true, because I use my brain. One example is minimum wage. I used to like minimum wage, because it gave me a standard. Then, I took Economics 101 and saw how supply and demand affected the cost of goods and services. Minimum wage leads to unemployment. Which is better? Low wages, or NO wages? My younger daughter would get a job, but no one will hire her unskilled self at $7.25 per hour. Also, a superfluity of laws dictate what young people can and can’t do.

My cousin simply says that minimum wage has to be raised, because no one can live off of it. That may be true, but who takes those low paying, unskilled jobs? Not the heads of households, (except in extremely rare, but much publicized sob stories.) People used to find roommates to share expenses, but there are restrictive laws about this, too. In 1976, my very first job paid minimum wage. A year later, my second job paid twice minimum wage, because by then, I had gained skills. A mere four years later, my income exceeded the national average. That doesn’t seem possible today. Who will take a chance on a nobody? Bosses can’t even fire people anymore.

Today, I’m not working because I don’t want to work. Well, I don’t want to work if it means unrelenting pain from standing or stooping all day. Those are the most abundant jobs available, and I could work tomorrow at one of them. Instead, I signed up with Manpower, a great organization for people with certain skills, but they have no current assignments for me. In a sense, I am practicing some of those skills here today by typing. I like this kind of work, and it usually pays slightly above minimum wage. Employers, however, have become a little more skeptical about hiring unknowns. God can do anything. Now that I’ve made a decision, He will act. :)