If you hang around the websites of the central planners or read their blogs, you can’t help but notice they are concerned and puzzled by the labor markets. All over the developed world, the number of people working is in decline. The US labor market never fully recovered from the crash. Countries like Spain, Portugal and Greece have unemployment rates reaching 30%. Everyone expected the labor markets to be back to normal by now. They are no where near recovered.

One argument is that technology is eliminating job growth. The warehouse is not adding new people as the business grows; it is adding new robots. This is most certainly true, as technology sweeps through modern economies. Even mom and pop operations can afford software and mobile devices to automate big chunks of their business and replace human labor. The book The Second Machine Age takes the concept to the extreme, imagining a world without work.

Skepticism about the robot future is always wise, but we may be heading into a time of less work. We have been conditioned to accept work as a feature of life. Christianity built it into the religion. Even pagan cults had mystical explanations for why man was forced to toil for food. In modern times when most men do not actually toil in fields, year round work has been the norm for generations. We head into the office in all sorts of weather and under all sorts of burdens.

It was not always so. Pre-agricultural people probably only worked 20 hours per week to get enough food and shelter. Early farmers did not farm all year long. In northern climates, people had loads of free time from harvest until planting. From spring through fall they worked very long hours, but there were long breaks in there as well. Once the crops are in the ground, there’s not a lot of tending to them so farmers had time off in the summer. Still, farming life was most certainly more time consuming than foraging.

The industrial age brought year round work and crazy long hours. It was not unusual for men to work ten hours a day and then a night shift at a mill with some weekend work when they could get it. From the 19th century forward, all consuming work with little time off was the norm until we get into the middle of the 20th century. This is the world we have always known, but it may not be the world of the future. This story from Sweden is a possible sign of things to come.

Gothenburg (Sweden) (AFP) – Robert Nilsson, a 25-year-old mechanic in Sweden’s second city Gothenburg, may be the harbinger of a future where people work less and still enjoy a high standard of living.

“My friends hate me. Most of them think because I work six hours, I shouldn’t be paid for eight,” Nilsson said, talking while fitting part of a rear window onto a Toyota Prius with swift, expert moves.

Sweden often stuns first-time visitors with its laid-back prosperity, making foreigners wonder how it is possible to have both lots of money and lots of leisure.

Scandinavians are always stunned by how much Americans work. They get over 30 paid holidays a year, while Americans get half that number.

Part of the answer, according to economists, is a productive and well-educated workforce that adapts to new technologies quicker than most.

Exactly how much –- or how little –- Swedes work compared with other nations is a somewhat open question.

“We have a 40-hour work week, but also we have a little more absence than many people and we start work late in life because we study longer,” said Malin Sahlen, an analyst at Timbro, a libertarian Stockholm-based think tank.

In 2012, the average Swede worked a total of 1,621 hours, according to the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

This is more than the Netherlands with 1,381 hours, but less than Britain with 1,654 hours or the United States with 1,790 hours – and way below Chile’s 2,029 and Mexico’s 2,226 hours.

It also helps to have a nation full of Swedes too. Let’s ship over a few of our blacks and see what happens.

But far from looking to increase time spent at work, some in Sweden are out to prove that less is more and that cutting hours can boost productivity.

In an international productivity ranking by the Conference Board, a non-profit business research organisation, Sweden was already placed close to the top, coming 11th out of 61 countries.

The United States was third, the Netherlands number five, and Britain number 13, whereas Chile and Mexico were both in the bottom third.

Now, the Social Democrat-led city government in Gothenburg is planning to test the impact of shorter hours on productivity, in an experiment beginning on July 1.

One group of government workers in the elderly care sector are to work six hours a day, while another will work the eight they are used to.

There’s a bit of an undiscussed truth about most work these days. People screw off a lot more than in a previous era. The culture has changed, but having the Internet at your fingertips is the biggest issue. It is simply too easy to goof off at work. You can shorten the work day, but demand the same work product. It’s a trade-off most people would accept, as long as they could maintain their lifestyle.

The thing is we may be reaching a point where we need fewer and fewer people working. If we can have all of the material wealth of today, but have robots doing the work, is that such a bad thing? It would revolutionize social relationships. Think about all the rules, written and unwritten, that are linked to work. Think about how much of our politics is geared to issues related to work. Taxes, jobs, growth, trade labor law, etc.

That’s where the futurists fall on their faces. They always assume people will be the same in the future. It will just be a super high tech version of today. That’s not how it works. As the environment changes, humans change. When our old customs no longer meet our needs, new customs rise up to replace them. A society without work will have vastly different rules than modern society.

Or, we will simply be food for those who still work.

The politics of crime and punishment have been mostly a fight between the Left releasing criminals on the middle-class and the Right trying to stop it. In the 1960’s and 1970’s liberals flung open the cage doors and crime went through the roof. In the 1980’s we started rounding up the crooks and putting them back in their cages. It seemed like the Left learned their lesson in the 1990’s and gave up on the idea of turning murderers loose on the public. That’s not true, of course.

For more than a decade, researchers across multiple disciplines have been issuing reports on the widespread societal and economic damage caused by America’s now-40-year experiment in locking up vast numbers of its citizens. If there is any remaining disagreement about the destructiveness of this experiment, it mirrors the so-called debate over climate change.

In both cases, overwhelming evidence shows a crisis that threatens society as a whole. In both cases, those who study the problem have called for immediate correction.

If you were not from earth and you read that, you would assume the American government randomly captures and imprisons people for no reason other than sadistic amusement. The blank slate ideology of the Left means people lack agency, so the criminals are victims. Therefore, everyone in jail is a victim of a system that created them and now punishes them

Several recent reports provide some of the most comprehensive and compelling proof yet that the United States “has gone past the point where the numbers of people in prison can be justified by social benefits,” and that mass incarceration itself is “a source of injustice.”

This is a very strange bit of rhetoric. Is there some tipping point where it no longer makes sense to incarcerate murderers or rapists? To argue that, it means the pretense of murderers and rapists has some benefit to society. After all, if too many is a problem then there is a number that is just right. Even further, it means there is a number that is too few. The underlying logic seems more than a bit strange.

That is the central conclusion of a two-year, 444-page study prepared by the research arm of the National Academy of Sciences at the request of the Justice Department and others. The report highlights many well-known statistics: Since the early 1970s, the nation’s prison population has quadrupled to 2.2 million, making it the world’s biggest. That is five to 10 times the incarceration rate in other democracies.

Maybe we have a lower tolerance for crime than other democracies. Maybe we’re better at catching criminals. Maybe we have more criminals. After all, 13% of our population has crime rates we see in sub-Saharan Africa. Another 15% has crime rates on par with Latin American countries. The rest have crime rates similar to Europe and Asia.

On closer inspection the numbers only get worse. More than half of state prisoners are serving time for nonviolent crimes, and one of every nine, or about 159,000 people, are serving life sentences — nearly a third of them without the possibility of parole.

This is a real concern. There are few reasons to send non-violent criminals away for decades or life. Most of this is for drugs and those life sentences are for career drug dealers and gangsters so the numbers are misleading. Still, that’s a legitimate line of inquiry. Instead of falling back on 1960’s liberal twaddle, the Times should have dug into that issue and maybe moved the conversation forward. The other side of debate is the standard stuff.

We have a lot of people locked up because circumstances demanded it. Quite simply, crime ranked among America’s most pressing political issues between roughly the mid 1950s and mid 1990s. As crime declined—coincident with building more prisons—the problem disappeared from the public imagination.

Demographics had something to do with it too. We had a larger cohort of young people at the peak of the crime wave. Young people will commit crime than old people, regardless of race. As America grew old, crime declined. The waves of young migrants say a new wave of crime is coming for the same reason.

Second, contrary to the implications flowing from the NYT, others on the left, and a few on the libertarian right, there are very, very few “innocents” being locked up. Most non-violent offenders have done very bad things.

This is one of those bits of data that is hard to quantify, but we know it is truth nonetheless. The American criminal justice system is defense in depth. There are thousands of laws that are used like a net to remove people from the streets. The most expeditious course is chosen by the state, which often means dropping a violent crime and taking a plea on a non-violent one, but for the maximum sentence.

Third, although a lot of people (me included) would favor a lot more efforts to help both prisoners within jailhouse walls and after they get out, decades of social science have produced few certain ways of doing this. Many programs that sound good – vocational training, in-prison counseling, literacy classes, even most drug treatment – actually show mixed or negative results.

This is obviously true, but it never leads these guys to think past this point. We generally think that humans respond to incentives up to a point and within the confines of biology and culture. What that means is we strive to be good at what our biology and culture value. The two often overlap. We construct rules, both written and unwritten, to guide behavior in directions we collectively think is to our benefit. That’s how human societies work.

Some members of every human group respond in aberrant ways to the menu of incentives. Freeloaders, for example, have been a problem for human settlements since human settlement. Religion and the corresponding morality is thought to have evolved in response to this fact. Violent people have been a feature of human existence since before modern man. Fratricide is not in the Bible for nothin’.

All of the evidence is pointing toward a biological source of crime. Certainly, crimes of opportunity like drugs are a separate class, but violent crime is most likely biological in origin. Habitual theft of various types is most likely biological as well. Recidivism rates among career thieves and child molesters are so high that it is impossible not to conclude biology is the source. Some people are just born bad.

The question is what do we do with unfixable and defective humans? Locking them up is a good start, but letting them out is madness. Throwing the biologically violent in with petty thieves is cruel and senseless. Whatever chance for redemption the thief had going into jail is gone once he bunks up with a rapist or murderer. There are no great answers to crime, but the point of crime control is to defend society.

As you read this story or watch the video, what’s on your mind? What is the question you have as the story unfolds? What is not answered until you read the comments section? Most likely, everyone reading it had the same questions and slowly started to have the same answers. Even the the truest believers in multiculturalism know the answers, even if it they try hard to suppress it.

Imagine if it was a gang of Hell’s Angels rioting at the beach. The copy would have full descriptions of everyone involved along with scary pictures of the bad guys. If a bunch of skinheads, assuming there’s enough of them around anymore to create a ruckus, were fighting on the streets their race and ideology would be front and center, probably in the headline. That’s not the case here so we are left to wonder who they were and what they looked like. Were they Chinese octogenarians?

Of course, everyone knows what’s going on here. That’s the way it is these days. Large parts of reality are simply unmentionable. We live in unreality-ville. That’s where we know things by their absence, in the same way astrophysicists identify a black hole by examine the space around it. That which can never been seen or pointed out is known by the warping of objects around it. It is there, but not there, because no on dare mention it, at least not in public.

What makes it laughable are the comments on every one of these stories. It has become a game among the commoners to come up with the pithiest way to fill in the missing parts. In fact, it is the the best part of crime stories these days. What makes it even zanier is the PC fanatics who run these sites don’t bother to police the comments section. Maybe they have simply thrown in the towel or perhaps it is just another weird angle to the unreality.

The big Ta-Nehisi Coates case for reparations has finally hit the web. There is a soft case in favor of reparations. By soft case, that is a general nod in favor the argument of reparations with lots of qualification. We have tried for at least two generations to relieve a certain segment of the white population of their unfounded guilt over slavery and discrimination. The only way to do that is to settle up with the blacks. We hammer out an agreement, write the checks and close the books on the issue for good.

The Coates story has been anticipated for a while, since he is the latest novelty on the progressive circuit.  Right out of the shoot we get a Biblical quote and a snippet from John Locke. Then the whole thing falls apart. Instead of making the case for why reparations will solve the problem, he spends thousands and thousands of words bitching and moaning about whitey and how rotten it is to be black in America. Anyone over the age of ten has heard it all before and has no interest in hearing it again.

It’s not just laziness, it is cowardice. Look, reparations in the abstract are easy. It is when you get to nut-cutting that things get tough. How much does each black person get? How do we determined who is eligible? Who pays? How do we figure that out? More important, how do we then de-construct the previous efforts at reparations like affirmative action? That’s tough and it takes skill to make the case. It also takes a degree of honesty not popular in the comfy lefty confines.

Coates, of course, is really just a grifter. He’s not well read or educated, but he knows how to game white liberal elites into giving him stuff. He reads enough to drop references and book titles with some skill. That pleases liberal whites. He does the authentic black guy bit by living in Harlem. He’s checking off all the boxed for his benefactors. This article is aimed at them. It allows them to weep and wallow in their self-inflicted misery. They get to feel good over feeling bad about their privilege.

Maybe he lacks the wherewithal to make a sensible argument in favor of reparations, so maybe that’s part of it. He’s another victim of affirmative action. Even so, he could make the old black demand for free stuff. He can’t even do that as the free stuff would have to come from his Jewish benefactors. That would risk his place on the gravy train, so he just goes with emotive pap. That’s what makes him a character.