By Steve Sailer
09/07/2012
When I was a kid, everybody assumed that high wages were "good for the economy." Now, everybody who is anybody assumes that low wages are "good for the economy." If the natives of a country (or even the previous immigrants), are enjoying relatively high wages, whether in computer programming or stoop labor, then the borders must be opened and wages hammered down for "the good of the economy."
One reason everybody has signed on to this new low wages uber alles ideology is that the people telling you this, whether plutocrats or television presenters, are much better looking on average than the people making the low wages.
The difference wasn’t always this stark. In the old days of J.P. Morgan and friends, the Fat Cats literally were fat. Then, for much of the middle of the 20th Century, the affluent and the wage-earners were similar in weight. Now, rich people are much more slender than the non-rich.
Now, though, a fat rich lady, Gina Rinehart, Australian mining heiress and the richest woman in the world at the moment (and mother of four), has enunciated the globalist conventional wisdom. But, looking as she does more like a miner’s mother than a mineowner, she’s getting all sorts of pushback, such as suggestions that she looks like Jabba the Hut. From Reuters:
"The evidence is inarguable that Australia is becoming too expensive and too uncompetitive to do export-oriented business," Rinehart told the Sydney Mining Club in a rare public appearance. A video of her address was posted on the club’s website.
"Africans want to work, and its workers are willing to work for less than $2 per day," she said in the video. "Such statistics make me worry for this country’s future.
"We are becoming a high-cost and high-risk nation for investment."
Rinehart, whom Forbes estimated to be worth $18 billion in February, opposes a recently introduced mining tax as well as taxes on carbon emissions, which has created tensions with Gillard’s government.
Rinehart has also called for miners to be allowed to bring in foreign workers, and her company Hancock Prospecting was granted government approval in May to hire just over 1,700 foreign construction workers for her Roy Hill project in Western Australia.
Gillard criticised Rinehart’s remarks, saying the resources sector was doing well and had an investment pipeline of $500 billion, of which nearly half was at an advanced stage.
"It’s not the Australian way to toss people $2, to toss them a gold coin, and then ask them to work for a day," Gillard told reporters. "We support proper Australian wages and decent working conditions."
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