Invisible Hand and Group Size

Over at PJ Media's The Belmont Club, guest poster Leo Linbeck writes some insightful remarks about cooperation and competition:

An underappreciated story of the Progressive Movement and its progeny (The Fair Deal, The New Deal, The Great Society, The New New Deal, and so on) is its emphasis on collaboration over competition. FDR put it this way:

Competition has been shown to be useful up to a certain point and no further, but cooperation, which is the thing we must strive for today, begins where competition leaves off.

This has it exactly backwards. It is cooperation that is useful to a certain point, and then we must rely on competition.

Cooperation arises from trust. Robert Axelrod, in his 1984 book The Evolution of Cooperation, used game theory to describe the way in which cooperative behavior arises from competitive game structures:

For cooperation to emerge, the interaction must extend over an indefinite (or at least an unknown) number of moves…

For cooperation to prove stable, the future must have a sufficiently large shadow. This means that the importance of the next encounter between the same two individuals must be great enough to make defection an unprofitable strategy…

In order for cooperation to get started in the first place, one more condition is required. The problem is that in a world of unconditional defection, a single individual who offers cooperation cannot prosper unless some others are around who will reciprocate. On the other hand, cooperation can emerge from small clusters of discriminating individuals as long as these individuals have even a small proportion of their interactions with each other.

“Indefinite number of moves,” “shadow of the future,” “small cluster of discriminating individuals” – these are characteristics that break down as the size of a human grouping grows. With your neighbors, you’re likely to interact with them repeatedly in the future, the future interactions are likely to be important, and there aren’t that many of them. But as the scale grows, these conditions erode, and with them the possibility of cooperation.

That’s when competition kicks in. The fact is that human beings compete in groups; there is a significant advantage to be gained by having multiple skill sets and personalities united in a common effort. (Engineers and salespeople are famously different, but rely heavily upon one another for their livelihood.) There is cooperation within these groups, but competition between them.

Smith's "Invisible Hand" is required precisely when actual hands start to become invisible due to the size of the group.

Scary Reading of the Day

For the libertarian/conservatives among us, if you want to read something really scary check out the following:

It's For Your Own Good!

The fact that the ideas in the article are even being taken seriously is appalling in my opinion.

Wishful Thinking

USA Today requested that readers come up with a single word to describe the state of the union and compiled the results into the following word cloud:

What word jumps out the most?  Well, according to USA Today:

The words that were mentioned the most include: "improving," ...

I don't know about you, but I think that anybody who looks at that cloud and sees "improving" first is "screwed", "pathetic", and pushing "propaganda".

Who's Arrogant and Condescending?

In an article linked to by Instapundit, a teacher complains about a conference he attended:

"I spent the last thirty minutes listening to a group of arrogant and condescending noneducators disrespect my colleagues and profession. [...] 

Today I have listened to people who are not teachers, have never worked in a classroom, and have never taught a single student tell me how to teach.”

The last part is extraordinarily unlikely.  We've all been students and have all taught ourselves (for example, at minimum, that would be the ostensible purpose of homework).  Therefore, we're all experts to some degree on teaching and, more importantly, learning.

If I had to do it over again with my kids, I'd be sorely tempted to home school them

As Long As We're Talking About Lettuce...

I might as well post about some recent handiwork by my company (Vision Robotics Corp.), a robotic lettuce thinner...

When growers plant lettuce, they plant a lettuce seed every 2 to 3 inches.  Ultimately, they want a lettuce plant every 10 to 12 inches.  The reason for the over planting is that many of the lettuce seeds either don't come up at all, or don't survive the first couple of weeks.  However, they end up with too many plants and need to thin the survivors.  Except for our new, Robotic Thinner, the thinning is currently done by laborers with hoes.

Our Thinner uses cameras to detect the lettuce and decide which ones to keep.  It actuates sprayers which spray the lettuce plants to be removed with fertilizer. It turns out that fertilizer kills the plants it's sprayed on, then is absorbed into the soil and fertilizes the "keepers".  The Thinner is mounted on a tractor.  The Thinner uses the tractor's tanks and pump system and electrical power.

Here is a link to a 30 second youtube video of it in operation:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xlw_OBpwtFs

In the video, as the tractor goes by, you can see the thinner mounted to the back.  You can see the banding of the fertilizer.  The dark areas are where the fertilizer is sprayed to thin lettuce and the light bands are where the "keepers" are located.

The pictures below show the effects of thinning the lettuce.  In addition to costing about 1/3 as much as manual labor using hoes to thin, notice that the ground is undisturbed by the thinner which, according to the growers using the thinner, allows the "keepers" to be more consistent in size and health since their roots are undisturbed.  In addition, fewer weeds are able to get started in the unbroken ground.

In the "4 days after thinning" shot, if you look closely, you can see little brown dead lettuces that have been thinned by fertilizer in between the remaining green keepers.  In the "4-5 weeks old" shot, the lettuce has been cultivated (weeded) so at this point the ground is disturbed but the lettuce is way ahead of any possible future weeds.

Each Thinner takes the place of roughly 30 to 50 people with hoes.  The world (well, North America) only needs about 150 Robotic Thinners to thin all of the lettuce so it's a pretty small market.  That will displace about 5,000 laborers, but it's really terrible work and the growers are having trouble getting people to do it anymore.

It's been a fun project.  I know a LOT about growing and processing lettuce now.

Changing Comment Settings

There's been a lot of anonymous spam lately.  Blogger usually knows it's spam, but somehow it gets through to the reader anyway.

I'm trying a different setting for comments that disallow anonymous comments.  I don't think I've ever had a anonymous non-spam comment.  My one test seems to still work.  Let me know if you can't comment (I'm pretty sure y'all have my email address).

Wash Your Veggies

At Restating the Obvious, Harry points to an article that notes that "[a]bout 1 in 5 illnesses were linked to leafy green vegetables — more than any other type of food."

I work with lettuce growers and they're horrified that somewhere downstream from them someone packages their lettuce and puts "already washed, ready to eat" on the package.  They think it's idiotic that anyone would eat any vegetable without rewashing it first.

I've seen one of the packing plants and it's amazingly sterile.  The people are wearing sterilized gloves, lab jackets, boots, and hair nets and everything (including hands and lettuce) is continually washed down with a chlorine solution.

The problem is that one little bacteria that somehow survives the chlorine onslaught and makes it in the package becomes a lot of bacteria after a few days en-route to the market, then your home, and then finally the dinner table.  For the vast majority of people nearly all the time, no problem, but still, it's a good idea to rewash vegetables before you eat them.

Congrats to aog:

Illinois’ credit rating has taken another hit. Standard & Poor’s Ratings Service downgraded the state from an “A” rating to “A-minus”, making it the worst in the country.

I rather thought California was going to win this race to the bottom, but Illinois might just beat us out.

Raw Sewage and Gender Equality

I've been enjoying discussions on a wide range of topics with my 16-year-old daughter.  I've probably poisoned her ability to ever be an unthinking person of the Left.  Sure, she goes to a California high school and is surrounded by Leftists (even though it's a private school) and as a result she still leans towards various ideologies like catastrophic global warmenism, but I've sown enough of a seed of doubt in such topics that she'll never be able to buy it hook, line, and sinker and will be easily able to reject it one day.  She has developed an impossible to completely suppress healthy skepticism of most topics.

Lately, she's been studying various gender and racial topics and she's been suffering from some cognitive dissonance. Things like, "there should be full gender equality but if they bring back the military draft, women shouldn't get drafted."  She knows that there's something not quite right about that statement, but she just can't bring herself to buy into the concept that men and women are different.  Yet.

Our drains backed up this morning.  I'm guessing that in this situation, a male deals with the drains and the associative disgusting raw sewage at least 95% of the time.  I mopped up the pools of backed up water, got the powered drain snake out, ran it through various clean outs, and cleared the blockages (roots of course, what else?).  As I was snaking the drains my daughter was getting ready to go shopping.  I called out, "You remember that discussion we were having about gender equality the other day?  As long as it's always guys who deal with the disgusting stuff like this, the concept of complete gender equality is nothing more than a giant load of stinking BS, much like I'm finding in these drains!"

She just smiled and walked out the door, but I think the point got through.

Dedicated followers of fashion (they are pretty clueless)

As a teenager interested in markets, mostly stock and commodity markets, but also economics I read the New York Times and The Wall Street Journal everyday.  Within a few years it was quite clear to me that the matters described and analysed in many instances were not even adequate as after the fact explanations.  The conventional wisdom was not to be taken at face value.

Motivated by intense curiosity I pursued better explanations of how the world actually works.  This allowed me to see beyond the statist assumptions that were so big a part of elite non-thinking.  I didn't even know the word statism back then.  My sense was that there were gains to be had in greater centralization but only up to a point.  

In a recent post  by my coblogger about resilience and collapse, I made a somewhat glib comment about how there were forces running counter to the trends of centralization that seem so irresistibly powerful.

In an article by Walter Russell Mead, The Crisis of the American Intellectual he expresses concern over having reached that point.  Because of his views he gives more credit to the Mandarins regarding past progress than I would, but here is some of his take on the matter:

Since the late nineteenth century most intellectuals have identified progress with the advance of the bureaucratic, redistributionist and administrative state.  The government, guided by credentialed intellectuals with scientific training and values, would lead society through the economic and political perils of the day.  An ever more powerful state would play an ever larger role in achieving ever greater degrees of affluence and stability for the population at large, redistributing wealth to provide basic sustenance and justice to the poor.  The social mission of intellectuals was to build political support for the development of the new order, to provide enlightened guidance based on rational and scientific thought to policymakers, to administer the state through a merit based civil service, and to train new generations of managers and administrators.

 Most American intellectuals today are still shaped by this worldview and genuinely cannot imagine an alternative vision of progress.  It is extremely difficult for such people to understand the economic forces that are making this model unsustainable and to see why so many Americans are in rebellion against this kind of state and society – but if our society is going to develop we have to move beyond the ideas and the institutions of twentieth century progressivism.  The promises of the administrative state can no longer be kept and its premises no longer hold.   The bureaucratic state is too inefficient to provide the needed services at a sustainable cost – and bureaucratic, administrative governments are by nature committed to maintain the status quo at a time when change is needed.  For America to move forward, power is going to have to shift from bureaucrats to entrepreneurs, from the state to society and from qualified experts and licensed professionals to the population at large.
...

So there you have it.  The foundational assumptions of American intellectuals as a group are firmly based on the assumptions of the progressive state and the Blue Social Model.  Those who run our government agencies, our universities, our foundations, our mainstream media outlets and other key institutions cannot at this point look the future in the face.  The world is moving in ways so opposed to their most hallowed assumptions that they simply cannot make sense of it.  They resist blindly and uncreatively and, unable to appreciate the extraordinary prospects for human liberation that this change can bring, they are incapable of creative and innovative response.

None of this is a great surprise to anyone who bothered to work things out rather than blindly parroting the ideas of the intellectuals.

(h/t Maggiesfarm)

Might Makes Right: Monopoly on Compassion

The wealthy actor Gérard Depardieu gave up his French citizenship in order to avoid France's seemingly ever increasing taxes.  The French socialists have been howling about the injustice of the huge and hugely wealthy man avoiding his obligation to help the French poor.

Theodore Dalrymple wonders if the socialists are really concerned with injustice and proposes the following thought experiment:

"Suppose that Gérard Depardieu were to undergo a conversion experience and see that his wealth was not unjust but unseemly in view of the difficulties or hardships of others, and that as a consequence he decided to give it away to those most in need (as determined by him) in exactly the same proportion as he would have been taxed. Would that be acceptable to all those who criticized him for refusing to pay his tax? 

"I suspect not: for in the modern world, the state claims the monopoly not only of force, but increasingly of compassion as well."

I find that the state's monopoly of compassion is an interesting concept.  Charity is one of the components of compassion, at least at the individual level.  The Jewish philosopher Maimonides lists 8 levels of charity (in ascending order of "goodness"):

1. Giving unwillingly.
2. Giving willingly, but inadequately.
3. Giving adequately after being asked.
4. Giving before being asked.
5. Giving publicly to an unknown recipient.
6. Giving anonymously to a known recipient.
7. Giving anonymously to an unknown recipient.
8. Giving that results in a person no longer living by relying upon others.

Giving anonymously is considered a preferred form of giving.  It has the advantage of not advertising the goodness of the giver but rather helps ensure that the giver is giving because of compassion with few other benefits to self.  The second advantage is that the person receiving the charity can't feel beholden to any individual since he has no idea from where the charity originated.  If anything, the recipient will feel beholden to the community, to humanity, and since this is a religious philosophy, the recipient will possibly feel beholden to God as well.  This all adds to social cohesion and harmony.

With the state having a monopoly on giving, in some sense the giving is anonymous.  Unfortunately, the benefits of that anonymity is preempted by the fact that the giver is often doing so unwillingly (many resent paying taxes).  On the other side, while the "givers" or taxpayers are unknown to him, the recipient can be sure that the vast majority of the charity comes from outside his community and therefore feels no sense of obligation to that community.  Government replaces God as well.

And that's probably the point.  Reduce the capacity for societal cohesion at the family and community level and replace that with worship at the altar of government.  It's not about injustice, but power.

Might Makes Right.

Let's Party on eBay!

This brought a smile to my face.

"Let's Party" is a rock CD that I wrote, recorded and produced about 15 years ago.  I printed 1,000 of them and have given away most of them (I never tried to sell them).

So I'm quite surprised to see that one is being sold on eBay by an eBay "CD Store"! They're listing it for $22.99.  It's advertised as:

The real thing, not a CD-R.   (1187 is # on spine of case)
Cd is STILL SEALED AND UNPLAYED.  PERFECT SHAPE.  
NOT a cutout and NOT a record club edition.

Pretty funny! I wonder how it got there?

Quote of the Day

Any system that has unimaginable complexity can not be centrally planned or directed.

The Furnace and the Tax

My furnace recently quit.  Fortunately, it wasn't that big of a deal because I live in San Diego and it's just not that cold, even in the middle of winter.

It was obvious what was wrong.  A motor started making lots of noise and then quit completely.  I looked it up and it was the "Draft Inducer Motor".

I got a local furnace repair place that I qualified with Yelp to come start the repair process.  I told the dispatcher what was needed.  The repair guy showed up without the part ("We don't stock our trucks with that part").  He verified that it was indeed that the "Draft Inducer Motor" needed to be replaced.

The next day he gave me a quote of around $900 to fix the furnace.  I was in the middle of a meeting in the middle of some lettuce fields when he called so I told him I'd get back to him.

$900 sounded like a lot to me so I removed the motor assembly from the furnace (took 1 minute), got the part number off of the motor, and looked it up on the Internet.  I found it for well less than $100.  Ultimately, I bought from a place that seemed reputable and was able to deliver it overnight and from them the motor was $140.

When it arrived, I disassembled the draft inducer motor assembly and reassembled it with the new motor and put it back in the furnace.  Everything was very straightforward and easy and took me about an hour and the furnace works fine again.

A $900 estimate for a $100 part and an hour of time (or less for someone who does this frequently)?  Great work if you can get it!

I gave them a bad Yelp!  The owner commented to my Yelp!:

"We appreciate this members concern with regards to pricing.  However there are a lot of things to account for when running an HVAC business that this customer fails to see. 

"First of all the service call and diagnostic are totally refunded from the repair charge that I quoted at $865 bringing it down to $770 when all is said and done. Secondly of course when you buy a non factory part online that comes with no warranty and install it yourself you are going to get it for cheaper, much cheaper!  We only install factory parts from the manufacture that comes with a 5 year warranty not to mentioned installed by a licensed and insured contractor. 

"For example my son's braces cost me over $4,500 this year however all the parts and metal only cost the dentist $185.  Do I feel I got ripped off because of this?  Absolutely not!  When you acquire a professional service to perform work; you are paying for many things, not just the part. You are paying for the skill and technical know how of the technician.  Not to mention things like Insurance, trucks, liability, workers compensation, employee training, vehicle maintenance, gas, test equipment, state and federal taxes, employee compensation, advertising, tools, warehouse and  office rent, phones, lighting, warehouse and truck stock, management administration, office equipment, computerization, legal fees, employee benefits, office staff and supplies just to name a few. [...]"

The motor I ordered was new and an exact replacement part with a 5-year warranty.  I remembered his quote being $900, but maybe he said $865, not really a significant difference.  The braces analogy made me laugh - my kid's orthodontist and assistants spent many, many hours over a period of years working on my children's teeth.

But then he gets to some valid points: "Insurance, ..., liability, workers compensation, ..., state and federal taxes, ..., legal fees, employee benefits, ...".  A whole lot of costs imposed by government and lawyers.  I rather doubt they justify charging $900 for a $100 part and less than an hour of time, but it justifies part of it.

Now let's consider what I would have to earn in order to cover that $900 fee.  Since I'm a programmer and I do some hourly consulting, I actually can consider what it costs me on a marginal basis pre-tax.  Between FICA (15.3% - both halves since I'm a consultant),  Federal Taxes (36%), and State Taxes (11% in California), with AMT ensuring that there are no deductions, my marginal rate is 60+%.  In order to pay that $900, I'd have to earn $2,250 pre-tax.  Of that $1,350 off the top would go to various governments, $800 would go to the furnace repair company of which a significant portion would also go to various governments, I estimate that $15 would go to the motor distributor, and finally $85 would go to the motor manufacturer and much of the manufacturer's cost also would reflect taxes and costs imposed by various governments.

This is a great example of a simple transaction in which governments are sucking the life out the economy.  Probably near 80% of the money required for this simple repair would've gone to governments.  All for no real gain by me, rather just trying to repair a rather critical household item and get back to where I was before it broke.

Sailing, Sailing

I'm leaving this weekend for a family sailing vacation in the British Virgin Islands.  We're renting a 37 foot sailboat and will sail hither and thither around the islands for a week.  Hopefully, we won't run into any pirates!

Happy Holidays!

Public Shooting Musings

With any change in government policy there are always winners and losers.  Modifying gun control laws would be no exception whether making them stricter of less strict.  Different people will die at different times depending on the changes.

Whenever I put significant effort into yet again contemplating gun control, I start by re-reading "Of Holocausts and Gun Control".  There are many chilling excerpts in it, and the two I found most chilling and focusing are (emphasis added):

"Governments have exterminated or cooperated in the extermination of something like one hundred and seventy million of their own people in the twentieth century"; and

"...it is nevertheless an arresting reality that not one of the principal genocides of the twentieth century, and there have been dozens, has been inflicted on a population that was armed..."

If you think that something like that can't happen here, as explained by the essay mentioned above it almost did at least twice.  Examples include Japanese internment camps during World War II and the violence of the KKK in the south.

I then notice that:

"With a single exception, every multiple-victim public shooting in the U.S. in which more than three people have been killed since at least 1950 has taken place where citizens are not allowed to carry their own firearms."

This follows the genocide paradigm on a smaller scale.  In this case, the killings are too few to be a statistic, not too many to be a terrible tragedy (to paraphrase Joseph Stalin). We feel the pain of public shootings more intimately than a genocide lost in history, because they are more intimate.  We can watch each parent cry on TV and cry along with them.  We can read the notes that the small children wrote to their parents that they would meet them in heaven as tears well up in our eyes.  Anything but this, we say.  Anything but this, I say.

But then I dry my eyes and realize that the similarity is striking.  Unarmed people are sitting ducks, whether for populations of millions or for a building full of school children and unarmed teachers, administrators and other workers.  Predators are attracted to the easiest prey: the sick, the weak, the old, and the unarmed.  School-zone mass shootings didn’t begin until after passing Clinton’s Gun Free Schools Act. The gun-free zone designation is a giant neon sign to the predator: "We're here and helpless. Kill us."  And killed they were.

So the choices are: take weapons away from predators or arm as many people as possible so there's a chance of defense against the predators.  The former seems impossible.  Building guns is not rocket science. Even if every gun magically were confiscated, anyone with minimum determination could build one and each day it gets easier and easier to do so.

That leaves arming as many people as possible.  School teachers should be heavily encouraged to get concealed carry permits.  They should be reimbursed for training to use those weapons.  Same with administrators and even janitors.

But in the end it is a judgment call, a matter of opinion.  I'm not risk adverse, I value individual freedom and responsibility heavily, I don't trust governments, and I'm wildly skeptical that any form of gun control will substantially reduce access to guns by criminals and psychopaths.  If someone else believes the opposite on most or all of these things, they're likely to reach the opposite conclusion.

Since the process is incremental in either direction, there will be more mass killings, more tragedies and more tears.

Minimum Wage Arithmetic

A recent article in the Economist discusses minimum wage laws.  Some representative excerpts about the current state of empirical evidence include:  "... minimum wage has done little or no harm..." and "... a moderate minimum wage probably does not do much harm and may do some good...".

This hardly seem like a ringing endorsement of minimum wage laws to me.  I interpret the article as basically saying that this particular government intrusion and loss of freedom at best has little effect other than to increase the size and power of government and limit freedom of the populace.

While that seems like a bad thing to me, many are thrilled to know that their favored approach of having the government do as much as possible is probably not going to screw things up too badly in this particular instance.  The Economist, for example, seems quite happy with minimum wage laws.

Barbarism and Tolerance

Richard Fernandez describes a couple of events in far reaches of the world (Tunisia and the Philippines) and concludes that barbarism is at least partly made possible by tolerance.

Possibly that is because moderation itself — with its emphasis on tolerance and rational cogitation — is vulnerable to violence in ways that the raw human instinct is not.  The moderate Tunisians are far too well mannered to act against extremists. Like tolerant people the world over, they withhold judgment until the last. Their moment of presentiment never happens; rational thought is retrospective to start with and the decision point may come not at all.

The basic man still has some advantages over the supreme intellectual in the immediate face of danger. What saved [some people] was not their education or refinement. It was the memory of living in dangerous places and the instincts formed thereby. ... education as much as anything else, prepared many Jews to voluntarily walk into the gates of Auschwitz. They could not conceive of something as awful, as barbarous as that death camp, even as they passed it portals. Only the men who had seen others at their worst could perceive the danger and ready themselves to resist what rational man could not apprehend.

He explains in more detail (In the comments):

It is fundamentally a good thing to be tolerant and civilized. But in order for civilization to work, barbarism must be constantly kept at bay. In the state of nature tolerance is repaid with death. Hence, it is the duty of the King’s Justice to keep totalitarian influences in check in order to preserve the luxury of civility. You need a fund of safety in order to afford to be decent. Run out of safety and you run out of civility.

Tolerance spent wastefully may eventually so empower extremists that it will destroy the tolerance itself in the long run. So while tolerance is good it must shelter beneath a roof through which the rain must never pour.

Barbarism was defeated so thoroughly 70 years ago that most of the Western World think it is just a boogeyman story; something that never existed except in the stories of old people to scare children today. They feel so secure they can’t comprehend the dangers of letting the plague get a foothold again. It is unfortunate they cannot conceive of the Design Margin running out.

In Michigan today, barbarism reared its ugly head.  In addition to a union thug punching out conservative comedian Steven Crowder at a protest, the crowd pulled down a tent and began walking across without knowing whether or not people were left inside the tent.  If there had been people inside, they would've been killed.

We're seeing more violent protests like this one in the west and in the United States.  Violent mobs that don't meet violent resistance and/or rapid retribution and punishment for their violence are likely to embolden others who have a penchant and/or use for violence, possibly causing violence, intimidation, and terrorism to snowball.  Like the moderate Tunisians, conservatives in the west may also be too well mannered to resist effectively.  The curse of interesting times may be rapidly approaching.

Employer of Last Resort

Businesses are subjected to lots of constraints such as competition, regulation, and taxes for example.  Each of the constraints renders certain activities either unprofitable or unable to provide an adequate return on investment to be viable.  That's how the world works and it's no big deal.

From the perspective of a business, a minimum wage law falls in that category.  It makes certain activities not worth doing because the value that potential employees could provide does not provide an adequate return after taking the wages required by the minimum wage law into account.  Again, no big deal, just another constraint.

However, from the perspective of an unskilled and inexperienced person who cannot provide adequate value to justify being paid the minimum wage, minimum wage laws are egregiously unfair.  The minimum wage law says to that person, "you may not work for anybody, any time, under any circumstances since no rational business person can justify hiring you at the required wage".

One way to rectify this situation is to have the government offer employment to all takers at or somewhat below the minimum wage.  That way the incredible imposition of the minimum wage law on the unskilled worker is mitigated by providing employment in the public sector.  The concept is that the government becomes the "Employer of Last Resort" (ELR). 

As you can probably tell, I personally am strongly opposed to minimum wage laws because of their severe oppression of young, unskilled workers.  However, given that we're probably stuck with them, having an ELR sounds almost reasonable to me.  There have been some experiments with this sort of thing (for example, one in Britain), and the results haven't been terrible.

Nonetheless, I think the concept is very dangerous.

The problem I have with it is that setting it up puts us one very short step away from all out communism.  All a regime has to do once an ELR mechanism is in place is to begin raising the minimum wage.  This would cause layoffs requiring an expansion of the ELR program.  Further incremental increases in the minimum wage would drive even more workers out of the private sector into the ELR program.

The ELR program would need capital equipment, other assets, and an ever growing management structure to successfully employ the workers and would end up inefficiently producing ever more goods and services.   Eventually, this would drive the vast majority of companies out of business and we'd all end up working for the government and that'd be the end of history.

Might Makes Right: Marauding Bandits

Marauding bandits use violence or the threat of violence to steal and then use the resulting gains for whatever they fancy.  While marauding bandits are generally considered immoral, the legend of Robin Hood shows that marauding bandits are not universally considered inherently immoral, since Robin Hood and His Merry Men were nothing if not marauding bandits*.  In the case of Robin Hood, it seems that the ends can justify the means if the bandits take from those who are rich and/or not well-liked and/or not particularly innocent and the bandits give at least part of the plunder to the poor or other "deserving" group or cause (I suspect they kept most of the loot for themselves - that's why they were merry, or as Robin Hood sings in the animated film "Shrek", "I steal from the rich and give to the needy, I take a wee percentage, but I'm not greedy").  The tales of Robin Hood and other similar stories and legends transform Marauding Banditry from being immoral and despicable into at least sometimes being honorable and even heroic.

From a sheep's perspective, a shepherd and a wolf have a lot in common and they both look like marauding bandits.  One fleeces you and eats your young (and maybe you) and the other eats you and your young.  The sheep might be somewhat grateful to the shepherd for protecting it from the wolf, but that protection comes with a cost and if the shepherd is particularly incompetent or bad, the sheep might be better off with just the wolf.  The primary difference is that the shepherd is more powerful than the wolf and might makes right so "shepherd" has a good connotation while "wolf" has a bad one.

A government has many things in common with marauding bandits.  Both use violence or the threat of violence to take from those too weak to resist and use the resulting gains for whatever they fancy. "Government" generally has a better connotation than "bandit", but from the perspective of the populace, the government may actually be worse than bandits because the populace at least has a prayer of protecting themselves from bandits while the might of the government is overwhelming.  It's a popular notion that the government provides benefits that couldn't otherwise be obtained by the populace, while the bandit does not, but this notion assumes that the populace could not provide those benefits for themselves.  This notion seems unlikely to me, since the government is comprised of people - the same people that make up the populace, so it's unclear why those same people in government would suddenly be able to provide those benefits.

Each of us has some shepherd, wolf, and sheep in us.  Each of us is tempted to be part of the government to shepherd (and take from) others to do those things we think should be done (i.e. that which we fancy), each of us is tempted to swindle, loot, beg, borrow, or steal and play the part of the wolf, and each of us is consigned to live in society and play the part of the sheep.  In the end, each of us is going to attempt to maximise our power and the power of those people and things that are important to us by playing our roles as best we can.

Notes:
* Depending on exactly which version of the folklore of Robin Hood one is considering.