THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

All the professors and Hollywood stars love to explain why third world workers are so poorly paid. It always comes back to White Guilt and an Evil Conspiracy. If the world economy were just turned over to the professors, they would do as good a job of distributing goods as the United Nations and the IOC do.

Please read Whitaker Online for November 7, 1998, THE BEAD BUYERS. Here I explain once again a very simple fact of life: the reason some people make very little money is because if you pay them money they will give you almost nothing for it.

Eric Hoffer was talking about an American who had immigrated from Eastern Europe years before. This naturalized American was taking a vacation back in his homeland. People there knew he was an American and they knew that American workers got paid many times what they received for an hour's work.

So this new American was watching some workers in his original country laying some pipe. One of the workers laying the pipe said, "What would we get for doing this same job in America?"

The American, who was a pipe fitter himself, took one look at their work and said, "Nothing."

I worked on a plant in the 1950s in Germany and I was appalled at how slowly they worked. In South Carolina, our workers did many times as much work and got paid two or three times as much per hour, and that was with a recession in the United States and a labor shortage in Germany.

Since then, even Europeans admit that their standard of living has shot up only because they adopted American methods and a more American pace of work. America has become easier to compete with because we have adopted leftism and our work force and voting population is more and more third world.

All this is simplistic. But it is also true. If you doubt it, do what all the liberals say, "Follow the money."

Actually, workers don't do much work in the third world, but the pace of their work is the least of it. The reason nobody will pay decent wages in Mexico is not because of the pace of the work. The reason is because Mexico is run by MEXICANS.

Foreign bureaucracies are almost invariably cheap, stupid, mindless and dishonest, just like the ones we see in the UN and the IOC.

They also have lots and lots of academic degrees. In fact, they hire largely by academic degrees in high jobs in most bureaucracies around the world. "Doctor" Albierto de Whatever in South America does as good a job running his country's economy as the Doctors this and that here do running American education.

Think, for a moment, about American "intellectuals" trying to run any serious business.

This should give you a whole new insight into those International Institutions that are supposed to be so "sophisticated."