Trump says he opposes dockside automation - has he become Luddite? Can this be true?
 As much as one admires President Donald Trump, one cannot be anything but disappointed at his support for the dockers' union stand against automation.
The president might as well oppose his worthy associates, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, whose drive against inefficiency will result massive job loss for the same reason waterfront jobs are lost through automation.
In both cases, less effort is required to get more work done and therefore one needs fewer workers. One does not deny that such developments result in mass dislocations and awkward re-adjustments. But we also know from history that such periods have resulted in economic booms, however wrenching they are in the short term.
After World War I came the "Roaring Twenties" and after World War II came the "Fabulous Fifties". Too often, the prospects of these events cause us to throw up our hands in despair to insist on some far-reaching social plan. Which according to Stanford University economist Thomas Sowell is shown to be well-intended, but wrong-headed. That's because such remedial measures misunderstand the problem and when identified at last, it turns out to be something else entirely.
While laissez-faire solutions are often best, in which those affected by change are best able devise ways to extricate themselves from difficulties.
One cannot believe that Trump is a latterday convert to 19th century Ludditism, praising those protesters of yesteryear who went on destructive rampages, smashing cotton mills.
One can hardly see Trump waging war against mechanical elevators that haul building materials aloft, the development of which deprived construction workers of the task of carrying rods and girders on their backs up winding ramps as they do building Chinese high-rises.
More likely as not in the chummy-clubby atmosphere on the golf links of Mara-LarGo, Trump was sucked in by the bonhomie of a bunch of dockers, where he found it easy to blame foreign shipowners for all that was ailing his guests. Or could it be that agents of a malignant legacy media cherry-picked an unguarded, and unwise comment, about the greed of foreign shipping companies, which was undoubtedly applauded by his new found waterfront companions.
The American dockers union, the International Longshoremen's Association on the east and Gulf coasts with its rich criminal history and its west coast equivalent, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, with its links to the Communist Party, lost their good guy choir boy status long ago.
First, as unskilled and semi-skilled labour they have been fantastically well-paid for decades. With overtime, they earn six-figure wages, as much a medical doctor or an FBI agent with a law degree.
Ask a docker union boss why this is the case, and he will simply say it is the result of their being members of an excellent union. While that is true, it is not the whole story.
Most unions negotiate with a single employer. And one would think it was the same thing on the waterfront because the United States Maritime Alliance (USMX) seems to be something of the same thing.
But not quite. The USMX, like other docker employer associations, is made of its members, the foreign shipping lines, each willing to pay the dockers more or less what they demand. Some may be willing to pay more, if a rival shipping line can only pay less and thus go out of business if they did so, with the winner picking up the loser's market share.
Thus, they go into labour talks as a house divided against a union whose tribal loyalty to themselves from Boston to Houston is rock solid.
This extends to work done within the port, which may be a government site, wholly on government property, but because of the union power is very nearly a separate country. On the west coast, it was decided that a final check had to be administered on a container truck to see that the box was properly attached to the trailer. A task that might have been allotted to the truck driver.
No way, said the union. That task must be performed by a handsomely paid union member. A similar case arose in Portland, Oregon, when the port authority wanted the electrician union to assume responsibilities of ensuring there was no break in refrigeration when reefer boxes came to fill racks in the port. The dockers' union said no, and only their members could touch those boxes.
The reason dockers union is so powerful is that it physically controls choke points of international trade, where one union faces a multiplicity of rival employers, who would be just as pleased if one of their fellow employers would go out of business.
Of course much has changed over the years. If it weren't for union rules to prevent it, there is little to stop a burly docker being replaced by a stay-at-home mum with little more than a lap top on her kitchen table. She needn't be anywhere near the cargo she's shifting from ship to shore, technology being what it is. Already there are driverless automated trucks, taking containerised cargo hither and yon throughout the vast precincts of major ports. Very soon such driverless trucks will be on the road delivering inter-city service.
The result is almost certainly to be massive dislocation and seriously disruptive. A greatly expanded military can absorb some. Education can absorb more. A basic annual guaranteed income will probably have to be contemplated. With the collapse of the commercial real estate market in major cities, much redundant office space can be converted into housing and much more of the world can start living the way we do in Hong Kong, which delivers far higher quality of life and has done for decades than most other places on the planet.
But for heaven's sake let's hear no more of Mr Trump's Luddite talk of forbidding learning and applying lessons learnt.
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