Mondale Nominated on First Ballot: Coast Man Kills 20 in Rampage

Still Pissed Off at Weatherman After All These Years

There’s a review in the New York Times of a new book about the radical times of 1969-70 that devotes a lot of space to recollections of the Weather Underground.  The usual suspects are interviewed, Bill Ayers, Bernadine Dohrn, Mark Rudd.  There is some contrition, some bombast.

But listen to this quote from the review by Jon Wiener:

Reading these interviews, it’s not hard to understand what you might call the Weatherman temptation. S.D.S. had held the first antiwar march on Washington in 1965, but four years later the war was bigger than ever. Over those four years, Bill Ayers says, “we had tried everything that we could think of: organizing, knocking on doors, mass demonstrations, getting arrested, militant nonviolent resistance.” None of it worked to end the war — and the Weathermen understood why, as one of its leaders, Mark Rudd, explained: Ordinary Americans, especially white workers, were morons — except that’s not the word he used.

And this is the part that really, really got me at the time and gets me still.  Many, maybe most, of the Weather honchos came from upper income, corporate families.  They grew up thinking workers were stupid, and when they became “revolutionaries” they still thought this, although now they had new reasons.  The apple doesn’t fall very far, does it?

Those of us who came from less exalted stock and still dreamed of a majoritarian, radical movement were simply plowed under.  The media, transfixed by glamor and violence, ignored us, and before long we had become invisible even to ourselves.

Incidentally, in the mid-70s I had occasion to look at my (heavily redacted) FBI files.  In it was a claim that I had harbored a Weather fugitive earlier in the decade.  I can remember how upset it made me that I had been targeted on the basis of a supposed act that I never would have committed,  since I regarded the Weather folk, pound for pound, to be more reactionary in their political effect than the most violent cop in riot gear.

Doctrinaire, Uninformed Ideas in Economics Never Die: The Mankiw Edition

Greg Mankiw, that guru of Econ 101ism, displays his art in a wave-of-the-hand dismissal of that old bugaboo, rent control today.  I've already had my say here and here.

When I count my blessings in life, one of them is that I never had to be a student in Mankiw's class in "thinking like an economist".

An Ethical Debate about Robots, Shorter Workweeks and Unemployment

I was delighted to receive a cordial and thoughtful reply from Omar al-Ubaydli to my open-letter blog post to him about his "counterpoint" piece on shorter working time and unemployment. The purpose of this post is both to reply to Omar and to recap and contextualize the exchange to make it accessible to the general reader.

A few days ago, I was writing a blog post about the significance of the "first use" of the expression, "lump o' labour" in an 1843 novel by John Mills. Mills's use of the expression would appear to faithfully reflect what its common meaning and context of usage would have been to ordinary working people in the mid-19th century -- at least there is no reason to suspect otherwise. That meaning would have been concrete and definite: the expenditure of just so much effort to perform a given task. The context would have been the idea of a appropriate, proportionate compensation for the amount of effort expended.

In the midst of writing that post, I heard about the point-counterpoint exchange on shorter working time and employment between Dean Baker and Omar al-Ubaydli. Dean's piece was titled Shorter Workweeks Will Defeat the Robots and Omar's was titled, Shorter Workweeks Will Increase Unemployment. Omar's counterpoint waved the red flag of the fixed amount of work:

A glaring red flag is how simple the proposed solution seems to be: Proponents of work-sharing believe an economy requires a fixed amount of work to be performed by a limited number of people. High unemployment, they contend, is due to allocating too many hours to current employees. A more equitable redistribution of work hours, according to this logic, may diminish unemployment: Instead of Alex and Chris working 45 hours a week and Jo being out of a job, each can work 30 hours, eliminating unemployment.

... 

In contrast with an elementary work-sharing analyses, the real world reveals that there isn’t a fixed amount of work to be done. The total demand for labor depends upon how it’s restricted or divided.

Much of the discourse about robots -- and, before that, about automation or machinery -- has revolved around the question of the amount of work that will be left for people to do. This is asking the wrong question. But it is the question they want you to ask.

"If they can get you asking the wrong questions," Thomas Pynchon warned in Gravity's Rainbow, "they don’t have to worry about answers." In this case, the question they don't want to worry about answering has to do with proportions, not quantities.

The Purging Of Pablo Picasso

That is the purging from the most public place his political views.  This has happened at the Picasso Museum in Paris as a result of its renovation, with its reopening in 2014 after several years removing any hint of Picasso's political views.  As it was, he joined the French Communist Party in 1944 and remained a member until his death in 1973 at the age of 92, although there is evidence his enthusiasm waned somewhat after 1968.  NevHe admired them for their resistance to the Nazis and also because of  their position in the Spanish Civil War.  And at the end of WW II, they were the largest political party in France, even if today their support is in the neighborhood of 2% or less.

The sign of this shift is the disappearance of his 1951 "Massacre in Korea" from display in the museum, a protest against US actions in Korea modeled on a famous painting by Goya.  Prior to the renovation,  it was the culmination of a visit to the museum, the last thing one saw as one went through the museum, and an obvious indication of his political views.  It is now not to be seen, nor is there any other overtly political painting or sculpture in the museum, much less any mention of his political views on any of what one reads on the walls as one goes through.  Picasso's political views have been purged from the museum.  Instead there is now a massive amount of his sculpture, almost more than there are  paintings, much of  this not well known and also  very impressive.

Of course there was always a problem regarding Picasso and the Communist Party, a great big contradiction.  They, or at least the Soviets, hated his modern art, which they considered to be bourgeois western decadence.  Picasso was fully aware of this, but it never seemed to bother him.  He even painted Stalin in a way he thought complimentary, but the Soviets hated it.  I do not know where this painting is.  And he was also quite wealthy in his older age and very much involved with selling his  painting to wealthy capitalists and all that.  But that Picasso  had this contradiction, this is no longer to be seen or known in the museum where the greatest amount of his art work is located.  Whatever one thinks of his views, something has been lost.

Addendum:  Let me relate this to the current situation in France, where indeed the Communist Party may be making its last stand as a power in French society and economy.  As many of you may know, the Socialist government of Hollande has proposed a labor "reform" removing many rights of workers that is supposed to raise employment.  The more leftist labor group, the Confederation Generale du Travail (CGT), closely linked to the French Communist Party is strongly opposing this and has been engaging in strikes, and is calling for a general strike in a few days.  It is not being supported by the more conservative Confederation Francaise Democratique du Travail (CFDT).  While CGT union members are only 2 and 1/2 percent of the French labor force, a percentage about matching support for the Communist Party, they are in some crucial sectors, especially transportation, so if they all go out on strike, they can really shut the nation down, and the European soccer tournament has just started.  Despite their low membership, many in France are sympathetic.  This is a big showdown, but if they lose, they may go the way of people recognizing Picasso's membership in the French Communist Party.

Barkley Rosser

Californians, Your Votes Don't Count!

Update: It is hard to tell exactly what is going on here. According to a pdf from the Secretary of State, as of 9:10 a.m. today, approximately 2,640.855 ballots remain uncounted. The total I gave below of 873,242 is based on the total reported number of presidential ballots cast minus the vote totals for all of the candidates. As Bruce Webb mentions in comments, Los Angeles and Orange counties do indeed have a large share of that 2.6 million -- some 822,000 + but that still leaves  a half dozen or so counties with over 100,000 uncounted ballots each, etc.

According to the California secretary of state's office, as of 11:04 a.m., June 10, 2016, a total of 873,242 votes from the June 7 presidential primary -- about 13.7% of the votes cast -- remain uncounted. A little more than 68% of the votes already counted were in the Democratic primary. If the party affiliation of the uncounted votes are proportional to those already counted, approximately 570,674 Democratic primary votes remain uncounted.

Given Hillary Clinton's lead of 456,699 among counted votes, it is unlikely the final count will affect who "won" the state but since delegates are assigned proportional to votes, it may well affect the number of delegates each candidate received from California.

Nothing to see here, move along.

AP already made it clear that Californians' votes don't count by proclaiming Hillary Clinton the presumptive nominee the night before the California primary.

A Possible Perfect Economic Storm For Donald Trump

Right now Donald Trump is down in the polls, with his remarks about the judge on his Trump University case reverberating and Hillary Clinton getting a bounce from having finally captured the Dem nomination (I know, I know, Bernie still has a chance if she gets indicted before the convention, but... ).  But it was just quite recently that they were nearly even in the polls, and that condition could return.  Nobody should forget that at this time in 1980, Jimmy Carter had a double digit lead in the polls over Ronald Reagan and Dems were just salivating at the chance to run against that "extremist." But, well, heck, there we go again.

So the problem is that it looks like the US may be weakening.  Last month's job report was simply dismal, and most are writing it off as a one month wonder.  I hope so.  But there have also been reports that the US job market has been weakening since January.  We may be on a trend here that may be hard to reverse.

Janet Yellen has been still talking up interest rate increases, but even she recognizes "four uncertainties," and a concatenation of more than one of these could easily tip a weakening and fragile world economy downwards even into a recession, possibly with a market crash this fall.  The obvious near term shock could be positive Brexit vote, and while I think some have exaggerated the near term badness of this for the UK economy, even a small shock at the wrong time can push things over, as old chaos theorist me knows all too well, and we may have such a fragile situation.

Once things get going down this can easily spread.  Parts of Latin America, especially Brazil, are not doing well.  Europe has interest rates as low as they can go pretty much, even though all of the EU except Greece currently has positive GDP growth.  Concerns about China have retreated somewhat, but its property market remains way overvalued, and its growth has decelerated.  All this is fragile.  And one of the uncertainties is oil, where a shock of one sort or another could show up with little warning.

In short, the probability of the US economy actually going into a decline prior to the November election is higher than many think, I think.  All it probably takes is a couple of those uncertainties hitting, and the Fed is pretty limited  in what it can do in the short term, and, of course, there will  be no fiscal policy stimulus.  Heck, the Republicans in Congress would welcome such an event,  given its likely political result.

Throw on top of this the non-trivial possibility that terrorist groups will make a major attack shortly before the election in an effort to get Trump elected (having an overtly Muslim-hating US president would be great for  their recruiting), and, well, I shall be holding my breath all the way, whatever others may be doing.

Barkley Rosser

Hoisted from Comments: Omar al-Ubaydli Replies

Here is Omar's response to my blog/letter addressed to him. I will have a follow up post either tomorrow or over the weekend but I just want to say I think this is a genuine breakthrough, facilitated by the Rapoport ethical debate prescription. There is a lot of additional context but the immediate context can be gleaned from the series of posts commencing with Pain for Profit on June 6 and including As Common as Ditchwater and the aforementioned Dear Omar al-Ubaydli. See also my posts back in April on game theory and Rapoport.

Dear Tom 

Thank you for taking the time to provide a comprehensive response, and your position is much clearer to me than before. Here are some of my thoughts. 

1) In retrospect it was sloppy of me to imply that all the proponents hold a certain position when the reality is clearly that only some of them do. 

2) Your summary of my position is satisfactory but it omits the most important part, which is what the data from Europe show. 

I was asked to take a position on the expected effect of shorter work weeks on unemployment as part of a point counterpoint. My position is primarily based on what the data show, which is mixed effects, but never a substantial decrease in unemployment. 

Given the position of the other contributor it made sense to cast me in the "more unemployment" role. While many of the other outcome variables that you consider are important they are not part of the brief, and one can only consider so much in 750 words. Also in the EU unemployment is unquestionably the overriding impetus behind work sharing schemes, assuming that one takes politicians at face value. 

I then use economic theory to explain these empirical findings, and to explain why simple models may underlie the position of some proponents. 

3) The goal of my contribution was not to provide, or claim to provide, the final word on the issues at hand. Point-counterpoints are supposed to engender constructive discourse. I think that your contributions are valuable, but they seem to regard my contribution as verging on the conspiratorial, or reeking of ignorance. I think that you should lower the bar on what you expect to be delivered by such pieces, and refrain from accusing contributors of lying, especially since you are clearly not just a troll, but that's a minor point. 

4) If I was to repeat the exercise, it would have been useful for the brief given to the authors to be disclosed openly to minimize confusion over the goals of the contributors. 

Best 

Omar

Dean Baker on Australia’s 25 Percent Corporate Tax Rate

Dean is right about a few things here:

As Australia’s election campaign heats up, it seems that one of the central issues is likely to be a plan to cut the country’s corporate income tax from 30 percent to 25 percent. The argument is the same that proponents of corporate tax cuts make everywhere; it will cause companies to invest more money in Australia. This is great children’s story, but it has little basis in reality. There actually is a great deal of research on this topic and it finds very little relationship between corporate tax rates and investment. In the case of my country, the United States, the investment share of GDP peaked in the 1970s when corporations faced a 50 percent tax rate, considerably higher than the 35 percent rate they now face. Of course since U.S. corporations have become quite adept at avoiding taxes, their effective tax rate is close to 20 percent.

His main theme, however, is very misplaced (even if the last sentence in the above quote is quite right):

One of the ironies of proposals to reduce Australia’s tax rate is that the U.S. Treasury would be a major beneficiary. The logic is straightforward, even if seldom advertised by proponents of the tax cut. Under tax treaties, the U.S. credits it multinationals with tax payments to the Australian government on a dollar for basis. This means that if a U.S. multinational has its Australian tax bill cut by $10 million then its U.S. tax bill likely increases by the same amount. The money saved by the company in Australia will go straight to the U.S. Treasury.

This statement not only contradicts his claim about U.S. multinationals having an effective tax rate near 20% - it forgets about permanent deferral of repatriating foreign based profits. Dean may have been misled by the Australia Institute:

It’s important to understand that the US is the largest foreign investor in Australia accounting for over a quarter of all foreign investment. All of those companies will pay the same tax as before, only less to the ATO.

The Australian Tax Office (ATO) is actually much better than the IRS at enforcing transfer pricing. The UK government actually cut its tax rate from 30% to 20% but is putting pressure on its tax authority to step up its game with respect to transfer pricing enforcement. We Americans should learn from the Aussies and the Brits. Also note that if only 25% of Australian foreign investment is from U.S. based multinationals, then the other 75% is from other nations which often have tax rates that may be lower than 30%.

Hung Out to Dry: "Democracy" in the U.S.A.

This is a "polling station" in Long Beach, California at Super Suds Laundromat.

Let's not quibble about AP "calling" the Democratic Party nomination the day before the primary voting or whether the broken machines and fouled-up voter registration rolls were a conspiracy to suppress votes.

Just look at the picture. This is a picture of official contempt for the voting process. The polling place is only in a laundromat because they couldn't fit all the paraphernalia into a portable outhouse. The U.S. Supreme Court has declared, in Citizens United, that only money counts as speech. The on-the-cheap dysfunctional voting system in the U.S.A. is more of that same speech.

It says: "your votes ain't worth shit."

Dear Omar al-Ubaydli:

Yes, Omar, I would be delighted to elaborate. Thank you for asking.

The point I am trying to make was stated by John Stuart Mill in On Liberty, "He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that." The truth of that maxim is illustrated by the claim, in your counterpoint to Dean Baker, that "proponents of work-sharing believe an economy requires a fixed amount of work to be performed by a limited number of people."

Not only is that assertion untrue, but it has been repeated ad nauseum for two hundred and thirty-six years without any effort by claimants to ascertain what "proponents of work-sharing" (etc.) actually believe.

Not only is the claim unfounded, but it has been refuted half a dozen times or more by notable economists. Those rebuttals have never been addressed by the antagonists who repeat and repeat the fixed amount of work mantra.

Not only is the claim untrue and unfounded, but it is rote -- a monotonous, mechanical repetition of the same catchwords and phrases that have been recited a thousand time over the span of more than two centuries.

The Rise Of Negative Interest Assets

An article buried deep in the Weekend Financial Times reports that the total of public bonds bearing negative yields has now passed US $ 10 trillion.  I have made an effort to check on the current global  size of such issues. I found a 2012 number that put it at 56 trillion, so maybe this number has now risen to 70 trillion of higher.  But I am sure it is still well below 100 trillion.  So, this total of negative yield public bonds is well over 10%, whatever precisely it is.  It is now a non-trivial portion of the total.

The article also reported that there is also a noticeable, if  much smaller, amount of privately issued such bonds, now at about US $ 380 billion.  This is certainly a miniscule portion of those bonds, but most people probably think that this total is zero or barely above. 

I am one of those who early on became aware that we might have nominal negative interest rates (as well as negative prices) with these first appearing momentarily publicly in the mid-1990s in Japan, even as the vast majority of economists declared such a phenomenon to be impossible.  As a a matter of fact I know that the federal funds rate went negative during intra-day trading on Dec. 31, 1986, the last day of the old tax code prior to the implementation of the Reagan tax simplification.  The rate also went as high as 18% during that day of wild trading, obviously an extreme case.  I have this from the person who handled Fannie Mae's trading account with the Fed and is not public informiation.  But it happened.

I have been someone not all that bothered by this phenomenon and have even welcomed moves by central banks to use them.  However, I confess that seeing a rising portion of public assets bearing such negative yields, I  become concerned about longer run if this continues.  Yes, boring annuities and insurance companies and such entities, and all that, but they have trouble doing what they are supposed to  do if there are not some positive interest rate assets around out there.  I imagine that the vast majority will  remain positive, so probably this is not a big deal.  If the world economy will just get growing more solidly, these negative yield bonds will  disappear, and I am not a fan of  some of parts of the insurance industry, such as the US health care part.  But if in fact positive yield bonds become scarce, there will be a lot  of things society will  have to do, such as taking over  insuring against fire, theft, and many other things.  This is probably silly paranoia, but then I was aware of the reality of negative interest rates long before most thought such were even remotely possible.

Barkley Rosser. 

As Common as Ditchwater

I would like to draw the readers' attention to an item I posted yesterday and say a few words about the significance of the discovery mentioned in it. The mock "theory of the Lump of Labour" was invented in 1891 by David Frederick Schloss in an article titled "Why Working-Men Dislike Piece Work." The Oxford Dictionary cites Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor (1851) as an early published instance of "lump work," referring to a form of labor subcontracting that was common on the docks and persisted in the building trades.

John Mills's 1843 novel, The Stage Coach, or the Road of Life predates Mayhew by more than half a decade, it employs the exact phrase, "lump o' labour" rather than a close approximation and, most importantly, it provides a substantial context that illustrates what the characters meant by the phrase. From that context, it is clear that the lump of labor refers to a given expenditure of effort and is related to the expectation of a proportionate reward for that effort. Jack Hogg's father ruminates, "we ought to be well satisfied when we get moderate profits to a lump o’ labour or pain."

Evidence that the phrase is consistent with working-class London patois from the period is found in the expression "lump o' lead," which is Cockney rhyming slang for head. The Lump or "lump hotel" is a slang term for the workhouse. Mills's lump o' labour thus had a concrete reference and is not an abstraction contemplating change -- or lack of it -- in the macro-economy. The theory of the lump of labor is strictly Schloss's fiction. More precisely, the kind of fiction Schloss engaged in was caricature, based on social class, that presumed the superiority of the classes from which the readers of The Economic Review were drawn. Such derisive caricature -- frequently based on ethnic, racial and gender stereotyping -- was rampant in the late 19th and early 20th century.

Schloss's caricature of "theory" was relatively mild -- condescending rather than overtly hostile and defamatory. But that should not obscure the fact that it patently wasn't an attempt to explain or understand what workers thought. Rather it was a routine maneuver in the construction of otherness -- so standard as to be a cliche. Schloss's "certain fixed amount of work to be done" hearkened back more than a century to Dorning Rasbotham's "certain quantity of labour to be performed" by way of half a dozen or so intervening slight paraphrases and reiterations.

It is almost as if the Schloss/Rasbotham fixation on fixedness is trying to tell us something about their own discourse. In "The Other Question," Homi Bhabha described the "dependence on the concept of 'fixity' in the ideological construction of otherness" in colonial discourse:

Fixity, as the sign of cultural/historical/racial difference in the discourse of colonialism, is a paradoxical mode of representation: it connotes rigidity and an unchanging order as well as disorder, degeneracy and daemonic repetition. Likewise the stereotype, which is its major discursive strategy, is a form of knowledge and identification that vacillates between what is always 'in place', already known, and something that must be anxiously repeated... as if the essential duplicity of the Asiatic or the bestial sexual license of the African that needs no proof, can never really, in discourse, be proved.

To state it plainly, the lump-of-labor fallacy myth is colonial discourse in which the worker is the colonized other -- the "idiot Luddites" Larry Summers was taught as an undergraduate at M.I,T, to dismiss as "a bunch of goofballs." That was way back in the 1970s. Just the other day, in a point/counterpoint with Dean Baker (Point: Shorter Workweeks Will Defeat the Robots), Omar al-Ubaydli (Counterpoint: Shorter Workweeks Will Increase Unemployment) trotted out the old formula:

A glaring red flag is how simple the proposed solution seems to be: Proponents of work-sharing believe an economy requires a fixed amount of work to be performed by a limited number of people.

That old colonial discourse. Shame.

Growth in GDP, Growth in Carbon Emissions: Cause and Effect

There’s a link at Naked Capitalism to a Real News Network debate between Bob Pollin and Peter Victor over whether degrowth is part of the answer to the threat of climate change.  I posted a comment to NC, but it never got posted.  Readers of EconoSpeak might be interested, however, so I’m putting it up here.

To wit:

I put a question about this on a statistics exam a couple of weeks ago, based on recent work by Mir and Storm challenging the so-called Carbon Kuznets Curve.  (Updated from the original comment.)  The evidence that increases in GDP per capita are strongly correlated with increases in carbon emissions per capita is incontrovertible.  If you use a consumption-based rather than production-based metric for emissions, no decoupling is yet visible.

But: correlation is not causation (that was the answer), and the GDP per capita variable is, ahem, not identified.  In fact, from the vantage point of the broad sweep of human history, it seems clear to me that the discovery and exploitation of fossil fuel resources has been a major boon to economic growth.  To put it negatively, if we adhere to the program of reducing fossil fuel consumption (weighted by greenhouse effect) by 8% per year, we are likely to see economic growth here and elsewhere take a major hit.  I realize that Bob Pollin disagrees, and that’s worth exploring at some point, but let’s put that aside for now.

To the extent that decarbonization will have negative effects on measured economic output, what do we do about it?  What bothers me about the degrowthers is that they appear to celebrate this.  Who needs all that nasty GDP stuff?  Let’s simplify our lifestyles and turn economic shrinkage into an opportunity.  I think the unreality of that position, it’s disinterest in how economic collapse is likely to play out in the real world, is frightening.  (Or it’s just sprinkled with fairy dust, as in Naomi Klein’s assurance that we will have both reductions in GDP and an increase in jobs.  Right.)

So I guess I have problems with both sides.  I think it will be difficult to prevent serious economic harm if we mobilize against climate change, and we should do what we can to keep that harm to a minimum.

Pain for Profit

from The Stage Coach, or the Road of Life (1843) by John Mills, chapter XI “The Mudlark”:

The night was very bright; a sharp frosty air whistled from the east, and the moon and the stars sparkled like frozen sleet in the sun. After the governor had scraped off the worst part of the slush, cleaned my face, and did the best he could for me, he shelled out the contents of the sack upon the side o’ the wessel, and commenced countin’ and feelin’ the pieces of silver with wonderful pleasure. 

“I feel, Jack,” said the governor, smilin’ as if a feather was blown into his ear, ” I feel, Jack, as though I could play leap-frog with the lamp-posts. There’s a hundred ounces if there’s one.” 

“If there hadn’t been a good swag,” replied I, almost fit to blubber with smarting so, “there’d a-been a deal o’ pain for short commons o’ profit.” 

“As common as ditchwater, that is,” added my father, fixin’ the sack over his shoulders, “and we ought to be well satisfied when we get moderate profits to a lump o’ labour or pain. However, Jack, get on my back, and I’ll carry ye home.”

The above is the earliest literary mention of the “lump o’ labour” that I have ever found. “One-eyed” Jack Hogg is telling the story of the time when he was 10-years old and there was a fire at the silversmith’s shop at the corner of Adam Street.The melted silver was carried by the water into the storm drain. Jack’s father, a scavenger (the “mudlark”), sends him into the sewer to recover the lumps of silver but on his way back Jack drops his lantern and is immediately attacked by the sewer rats. He runs to the exit where his father beats off the last clinging rats and then cleans him up in the river. The retrieved “swag” is enough to keep the family in relative luxury for the next six months.

The preceding chapters of the book tell the story of a visiting professor of phrenology and the ruse played on him using a plaster cast from a Swedish turnip. I found the Mills book when I was looking up statistics in connection with something I was writing about John Ramsey McCulloch and the story about the turnip and the phrenologist seemed a perfect parody of McCulloch's approach to inquiry:

It was only in the mid-1820s that governments began to publish systematic social statistics of any description, yet already in 1827, the political economist John R. McCulloch proclaimed the soundness of Dorning Rasbotham's 1780 opinion and concluded, definitively, "There is, in fact, no idea so groundless and absurd, as that which supposes that an increased facility of production can under any circumstances be injurious to the labourers."

The double injunction against any disputation is telling. Not only is it "groundless and absurd" to question the beneficence of machinery "under any circumstances" but it is, "in fact," the most groundless and absurd idea. "In fact"? That is to say this is no mere opinion or observation but is incontrovertible.