The Flag was defined by the Second Continental Congress 14 June 1777 meeting in Philadelphia.  The Flag of the United States would have thirteen stripes alternating red and white, and the “union” in the upper left would contain thirteen white stars in a blue field representing the new constellation.  Congress subsequently determined that upon the admission of a new State, its own star would be added to the union on the next Fourth of July succeeding admission.  Thirteen stripes continue to signify the thirteen original colonies, which became the first states of an independent federal Republic.  As you can imagine, the 100^th birthday of the Flag in 1877 was quite an occasion considering the nation united had barely survived War Between the States.  Indeed, the year 1877 would mark the end of military occupation and “Reconstruction” in the South.  To commemorate the Flag’s centennial, the U.S. Government requested that it be flown from all public buildings and from that time, unofficial Flag Day celebrations continued each year.  In the 1890s it was popular in Philadelphia for schoolchildren to gather at Independence Square or near the Betsy Ross House to celebrate the Flag’s birthday.  To this day, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania is the only state where Flag Day is a public holiday, although the day is observed to honor the Flag in all 50 states. 

October 12, 1892 was the 400^th Anniversary of the discovery of America, so that particular Columbus Day celebration was very much anticipated and planned for.  In September that year, a Boston-based youth magazine called The Youth’s Companion published the first rendition of what would become the Pledge of Allegiance.  When Columbus Day rolled around the following month, some 12 million school children across the nation recited the words.  Originally the pledge was to “my Flag,” but so many immigrants had come and were coming to the country by the late nineteenth/early twentieth century there was justifiable concern that some might mistake the meaning!  In 1923 “my Flag” became “the Flag of the United States,” and the following year it became “the Flag of the United States of America.”  Also in 1923 citizens who gathered for the first National Flag Conference in Washington, D.C. not only amended language of the Pledge, but also codified guidelines for “unofficial” proper display and respect for the Flag.  Their National Flag Code served as basis for what became public law, adopted by Congress in 1942 and contained in Title 36 of the United States Code.  The Pledge was included in that code and so gained official sanction.  A year later the Supreme Court ruled that school children could not actually be forced to recite the Pledge, although virtually every schoolchild did. 

The last change in the Pledge of Allegiance occurred on Flag Day 1954, when the words “under God” were added.  President Dwight D. Eisenhower remarked, “In this way we are reaffirming the transcendence of religious faith in America’s heritage and future; in this way we shall constantly strengthen those spiritual weapons which forever will be our country’s most powerful resource in peace and war.”  The resultant thirty-one words comprise an individual profession of loyalty and devotion, not only to the Flag but to an American ideal and way of life: I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands: one Nation under God, indivisible, with Liberty and Justice for all.

The insertion of the words “under God” was particularly key and fundamental—and a proper change, although most advocates argued the words were implied from the beginning and generally understood in much the same way as “my Flag” had always meant “the Flag of the United States of America.”  Notice, however, that while many people will recite the Pledge with a pause after Nation, there is in fact no comma there.  The words “under God” modify Nation and qualify the word indivisible.  To Boston educators who wrote the word “indivisible” into the first draft appearing in The Youth’s Companion, it may have meant something more than the words “under God,” either implicitly or explicitly.  To Southerners, however, the words “under God” mean and have always meant the most.  Indeed, it is only if and as the Nation remains a moral compact—sanctioned, blessed, protected, in accordance with Him as it were—that any manmade Union or governmental construct can or should be considered indivisible.

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Wesley Allen Riddle is a retired military officer with degrees and honors from West Point and Oxford.  Widely published in the academic and opinion press, he serves as State Director of Republican Freedom Coalition (RFC) and is in the Republican Primary Run-Off Election for U. S. Congress TX-District 25 on July 31st. He is author of two books: Horse Sense for the New Millennium (2011); and The Nexus of Faith and Freedom (2012).  See www.WesRiddle.com, e-mail: This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

What is required to be a journalist?

Two things, replied Sarah Palin: integrity and work ethic.

Bloomberg Businessweek of May 29 had a fascinating article propounding a “Big Mac” labor value theory, and using it to suggest that all restrictions to international migration were economically damaging. I have disagreed strongly with that conclusion from time to time in this column beginning in 2004, but yet found the basic data evidence compelling. I thus thought it worth deconstructing the article’s logic to see where its reasoning was in error and what economically sound conclusions could be drawn from the data presented.

The earnings evidence is clear. In the United States, a McDonald’s employee earns an average of $7.22 per hour, compared to a Big Mac cost of $3.04; thus the employee earns 2.38 Big Macs per hour. In India, the average employee earns 46 cents per hour while the Big Mac costs $1.29, so the employee earns 0.36 Big Macs per hour. According to Bloomberg Businessweek, both employees do the same work; thus the U.S. employee earns 6.6 times as much as the Indian employee, simply for living in the United States.

The article then goes on to recount the fate of employees of one of the big Indian software companies, who earn far more when transferred to the United States than they do in India, and are then back on Indian pay scales when they return to India. The article draws from these examples the highly questionable conclusion that world welfare would be maximized if all immigration barriers were removed, so that Indian McDonalds employees and software engineers could flood to the United States and earn the juicy remunerations available in the Land of Opportunity.

It requires a little deconstruction to determine why this conclusion is rubbish. Is the differential between Indian and U.S. McDonalds employees purely a matter of location, and would Indians be able to pick up the higher U.S. living standards by mass migration to the U.S.?

One factor glaringly left out of the Bloomberg Businessweek calculation is that of productivity. Its glib assumption that the job of McDonalds employees in India and the United States is identical is almost certainly wrong. For one thing, a Big Mac occupies a different market position in the relatively impoverished India to that in the United States.

Even when I lived in Zagreb, Croatia, a country considerably richer than India, McDonalds had a very different social position from that in the U.S. Being American, McDonalds was where the relatively affluent young Zagrebacki hung out on a Friday evening. For families, being taken to McDonalds was more of a treat than in the U.S., and children’s birthday parties were held at McDonalds even by the affluent and sophisticated. The “product,” defined to include the ancillary services and overall experience, was different too. You were much more likely in Zagreb to have the food brought to your table when it was ready, and the outlet was spotlessly clean, far more so than most McDonalds in the United States. 

For the less affluent in Zagreb, there was an alternative to McDonalds in the cevapi houses, which served the local delicacy of meat on a skewer, accompanied by a little salad in a pita bread half. Those outlets were “faster” than McDonalds – more crowded, with rushed service and tables that weren’t spotless. While the cevapi were delicious, they doubtless involved less McDonalds-style quality control.

Given that the product and its market position were different in Zagreb from the United States, I’m quite sure staffing levels and the jobs involved were also different, as they would be in Mumbai. For one thing, far more man-hours must have been devoted to keeping the place clean and providing modest service to its upscale clientele. It makes sense; if labor costs only 0.36 product units per hour instead of 2.38, then the optimal production and service mix will use considerably more of it. Thus productivity, in terms of the number of Big Macs served per employee, will be lower in a poor country even if the employees themselves work equally hard. I would also guess that the training involved for a McDonalds employee in Mumbai is more substantial than for one in New York, since the disciplines of hygiene and regimentation needed to succeed are less ingrained in the local society as a whole.

The Indian software example is more difficult, until you consider what function the software engineer fulfils within the Indian company. For the company, it is much costlier to have software written in the United States than in India, unless the productivity of the U.S. workforce is much greater than that of its Indian staff. However, the company employs software engineers in the United States because it needs them to be in the same timezone as its customers, and if necessary able to visit them, in order to provide marketing, customer service and support activities. The two jobs are not identical, even if the engineers are the same people, and the company would lose huge amounts of money if it transferred all its Indian workforce to the U.S. since its employees’ wages would be raised by competition from local employment opportunities.

In a theoretical economic model, welfare might be optimized by eliminating immigration restrictions. But that could not happen by moving the Indian, Chinese and African population to the United States and raising their wages to U.S. levels, because they would not be sufficiently more efficient in a U.S. setting to support the higher wages. Instead, while the overall global average wage might be somewhat higher, most of the differential would be eliminated by U.S. wages falling to emerging market levels. U.S. politicians, responsible for the welfare only of the U.S. electorate, would be betraying their voters if they contemplated any such move.

In reality, any such mass migration would incur such huge assimilation costs that the theoretical benefits of leveling the playing field would be largely wiped out. However, that is not a counsel of despair. Free trade is not the same thing as free migration; the case for it is very much stronger. In particular, the “globalization” caused by the Internet and modern telecommunications has hugely increased economic welfare for the citizens of poorer countries, provided those countries are even moderately competently run. (The recent economic histories of India and China, both badly run countries by any Western standards outside Greece, are good examples of this.)

It is now clear however that globalization has also depressed living standards for the less able citizens of rich countries, raising their unemployment rate as wages are to a certain extent “sticky” on the downside. That does not mean that globalization should be rejected by Western politicians; having been an artifact of technology rather than policy, it would almost certainly have been impossible to stop, and any attempt to do so would have left the country attempting it both poorer and more isolated than when it began. In any case, there is every sign that the initial effect of the Internet revolution is approaching completion; the rapid increase in Chinese wage rates and disappearance of the Chinese balance of payments surplus certainly suggests that a new equilibrium is being reached.

To improve the living standards of Western countries’ citizens in this new equilibrium, and reduce their debilitatingly high unemployment, new policies are necessary. Increasing mass immigration increases the pressure on domestic living standards, especially at the bottom; it should thus be avoided.  Education, so often touted as the panacea for facing the increase in international competition, is clearly no such thing, because it is of mediocre quality and excessive cost. In any case at all but the most exclusive levels it can easily be copied overseas (as the recent Indian successes in the software business have demonstrated). Instead, interest rates must be raised to levels that rebuild the capital base in rich countries, rather than decimating it as has been the case with the Greenspan/Bernanke polices. By increasing the incentives to saving, and the returns from it, policymakers can increase the rich countries’ natural advantage in capital availability, and reduce their pension and medical expenses by providing citizens with higher investment returns.

The other need is for policymakers to reduce the level of waste in the public sector, most of which produces “output” that is laughably overvalued in GDP statistics. Especially in Europe, living standards, already under threat, have been reduced further by the exactions of oversized and unproductive public sectors. Cutting this waste will leave more money in citizens’ pockets, and improve their living standards thereby.

Wage differentials between rich and poor countries are natural, caused by differentials in those countries’ capital endowments, infrastructure and institutional effectiveness. Their natural level has been reduced by the Internet, and will doubtless be reduced further by future technological advances. But as far as possible, responsible Western policymakers should work to ensure that this reduction in differentials produces only improvements in emerging markets’ living standards, without allowing it to immiserate their own people.

(Originally appeared in The Bear's Lair.)

Martin Hutchinson is the author of "Great Conservatives" (Academica Press, 2005)—details can be found on the Web site www.greatconservatives.com—and co-author with Professor Kevin Dowd of “Alchemists of Loss” (Wiley – 2010). Both now available on Amazon.com, “Great Conservatives” only in a Kindle edition, “Alchemists of Loss” in both Kindle and print editions.

When Henry, my cousin, graduated from TCU in 1957 with a Business Degree he was offered a job at Convair (now Lockheed).  When Hank went for his interview I tagged along.  Having just graduated from high school, I filled an application at Convair while Hank was interviewed.  Shortly, Hank and I were hired at Convair to work on the B-58 project, Hank as a business analyst and I as an aircraft assembler.  My job as an assembler, which paid a good wage required little to no skill.  My job duties were to assemble wing parts with a riveting press. Truthfully, it was a repetitious and boring job.  After a few weeks at Convair a union rep came and asked me if I wanted to join the UAW Machinist Union.  I recall asking the union rep what advantages I’d have if I joined the union.  He told me I’d have job security and I’d get wage increases every year.  Well aware that Convair had layoffs often, I declined to join the union.  I told the union rep that if the B-58 program would be axed by the Air Force, I, and other workers would lose our jobs and there was nothing the union could do for us to keep them.  After two years the Air Force axed the B-58 contract and I along with thousands of union workers were laid off.  Hank however, kept his job where he worked for over 40 years until he retired.

Taking Print Shop at Tech High, I learned the linotype (a typesetting machine) well enough to be awarded the best linotype operator in Texas at a Vocational Printing competition in Galveston.  Laid off and needing a job, I sought a typesetting position in several typesetting firms in Fort Worth.  Back then, most typesetting firms were unionized and I had to undergo a 2-year apprenticeship at a low wage before I could operate a linotype while paying high union dues. Dejected, I went back to building mobile homes, a job I learned during my summer vacation high school years that paid a good wage.  In the early 60s I read a classified that Jordan Typesetting, a non-union shop, was in need of a part time linotype operator.  I applied for the job and told Jack Jordan, the owner, that it had been years since I touched a linotype keyboard, but was willing to work for free if he just gave me the opportunity to set type.  Jack agreed, paid me $1 and hour and bingo, I was doing what I always to do — set type.  In two months I regained my typing speed and Jack increased my wage to $2.50 an hour.  After 6 months Jack offered me a full time position at $3.75 an hour.  I declined Jack’s offer because he offered no benefits. Benefits that I had at Artcraft Homes and needed for my family and myself.  For 2 years I worked 2 jobs — 40 hours building mobile homes and 25 hours setting type.

One Friday while off due to inventory at Artcraft Homes, I went to visit a friend at St. Joseph Hospital in South Fort Worth.  After visiting my friend I decided to stop at Motheral Printing Co. a nonunion print shop not far from St. Joseph to chat with Rick Martinez, a cameraman at Motheral and a Print Shop chum at Tech High.  Rick told me that he heard I was setting type.  I told him that I was, and he informed me that Motheral was in dire need of a full time night typesetter.  Soon Rick called Don Reed the shop superintendent and told him of my typesetting skills.  After chatting with Mr. Reed, he offered me the nighttime typesetting position at 5.75 an hour. Not wanting to quit Mr. Jordan due to him giving me my typesetting opportunity, I quit Artcraft Homes. Thus, I’d set type with Jack during the day and at night at Motheral’s.

After a few months working the night shift at Motheral, I was put on the day shift.  At the time Motheral’s was a small print shop. Wanting to expand, the Motheral brothers, Wess and Foist, called their brother, Carl Motheral, then a business tycoon in Mexico to revamp the company.  Under the leadership of Carl, the company grew by leaps and bounds.  Carl enlarged the company, adding top of the line litho and web presses.  My linotype job soon gave way to computers to which I adapted well.  Soon Motheral grew into the largest commercial printer in Fort Worth.  Motheral’s soon lured many lucrative accounts like: American Airlines, Mary Kay Products, Alcon Laboratories, General Dynamics, and Bell Helicopter to name but a few of the many customers the company had. Several times Motheral printers entertained the thought of being unionized.  Carl quickly would have shop meetings illustrating the dues union workers paid in comparison to Motheral’s wages.  Folks, it was a no-brainer, Motheral’s wages let workers keep more of their pay without having to pay union dues, and, Motheral’s offered great benefits.

In time, Motheral’s grew significantly adding a new Small Press Shop.  Soon we were the top dogs of printing in Fort Worth.  “Why?”   Some might ask.  Folks, all of Motheral’s unionize competitors, and there were plenty, went under.  Most couldn’t pay the wages the printing unions demanded, so they shut their doors.  I remember many of my print shop union buddies were looking for jobs in whatever they could find.  The sad thing about these printing union workers is that they didn’t get a dime from the unions after contributing untold dollars to their coffers for years.

After 18 years at Motheral’s I was offered and took a job at General Dynamics, (formerly Convair) as a non-union Engineer Illustrator.  While working at GD the UAW went on strike demanding higher wages.  As an illustrator I often typed many of the company’s business transactions with the Air Force.  Folks, the Air Force had a set price for each F-16 and the price was locked.  GD could not offer higher wages without operating at a loss.  Under pressure GD soon caved to the union’s demands.  However, to recoup their losses, GD sent the F-16 electrical components parts to be assembled in Mexico that resulted in the lay off of hundreds of GD employees.  In the end, the union workers got their pay raise, but many GD employees lost their good paying jobs.

Today, UAW workers at Lockheed (formerly General Dynamics) are again on strike demanding higher wages.  Lockheed has yet caved to the union’s demands after several weeks.  With all the cuts in defense spending, Lockheed is in no position to meet the union’s demands.  In fact they are hiring to replace striking workers.  Meanwhile UAW striking workers are tapping their banks, their retirement funds and many are losing their homes.  In contrast, union bosses are getting paid and enjoying their benefits.  Seems that unions can’t understand that “you can’t get blood from a turnip!”