One, is that politicians and others seem to bestow an almost sacred glow upon old-fashioned manufacturing and resource extraction jobs -- like logging, or the Georgia Pacific pulp mill -- as "family wage" jobs. It's not that "family wage" jobs aren't desirable, it's just that -- when you're talking about 300, or the 420 that were lost when the pulp mill closed -- that's not really so many jobs, relative to the population.

So I have to wonder, what makes those particular jobs so special and worth protecting? I mean, if it was costing taxpayers $150,000 for every logging job -- can't we just pay each logger half that, or better yet, pay twice as many loggers half that -- and then let them do whatever they want? If they want to keep cutting down trees, that's okay, they just have to do it without subsidized roads, you know, cut the trees down one at a time and drag them through the forest the old-fashioned way. They could do interesting scientific research into sustainable forestry. Or they could use their chainsaws to carve weird faces into tree trunks deep in the forest and freak out the occasional hiker. Whatever. The point is, if something is a commercial enterprise, it should make money. If it doesn't make money, then it's not a commercial enterprise.

Now, I'm an old-fashioned kind of liberal, so I'm all in favor of things that aren't commercial enterprises -- things that are a public good. I just think we need to make a clear distinction between them. So, something is either a commercial enterprise (and should be expected to pull its weight financially) or it is a public good, and subsidized (though if a public good does manage to pull its weight, so much the better).

With all due respect to the 300 loggers, I am hard pressed to consider the mere fact that they are employed as loggers a public good.

Which brings me to the pulp mill. Now, the GP pulp mill used to make downtown Bellingham smell like spoiled luncheon meat. Which, I believe, tended to suppress downtown development. I didn't have a problem with this personally -- because you got used to the spam smell after a while and I don't really like development -- but I have to admit that, from a community economic point of view, there is probably more money in NOT smelling like deviled ham.

It is probably true that those 420 pulp mill jobs were replaced, mostly, by lots more service-sector type jobs with low wages and no benefits. But there's a reason for that. That reason is unions, and labor agitation and strikes and worker organization that happened almost a hundred years ago. Circa 1900, manufacturing jobs were pretty much hell on earth. There was no health and safety protection, no overtime, no child labor laws, and, certainly, wages were low. So it's not like there is some God-ordained state of affairs where cutting down trees and making them into pulp is intrinsically and inevitably worth more than making a really great latte.

I mean, maybe it is in the sense that people won't be willing to pay the end price required for a barista to make a "family wage." But maybe they are. The strikers of the early 20th century didn't worry about that part of it.

My impression, as a consumer, is that many "service" workers are already engaged in a kind of personal mini-strike, which involves providing slow and inattentive service, in which the low pay (say, thirty percent of what they feel their time is really worth) results in about thirty percent of brain activity being devoted to the task at hand.

*Not to be confused with Ted Stevens, Senator R-Alaska, who is most recently infamous for "the Internet is not something you just dump something on. It's not a big truck. It's a series of tubes."