Posted on 07/30/2010 9:48:37 PM PDT by Pride_of_the_Bluegrass
Have the American people outlived their usefulness to the rich minority in the United States? A number of trends suggest that the answer may be yes.
In every industrial democracy since the end of World War II, there has been a social contract between the few and the many. In return for receiving a disproportionate amount of the gains from economic growth in a capitalist economy, the rich paid a disproportionate percentage of the taxes needed for public goods and a safety net for the majority.
In North America and Europe, the economic elite agreed to this bargain because they needed ordinary people as consumers and soldiers. Without mass consumption, the factories in which the rich invested would grind to a halt. Without universal conscription in the world wars, and selective conscription during the Cold War, the U.S. and its allies might have failed to defeat totalitarian empires that would have created a world order hostile to a market economy.
Globalization has eliminated the first reason for the rich to continue supporting this bargain at the nation-state level, while the privatization of the military threatens the other rationale.
The offshoring of industrial production means that many American investors and corporate managers no longer need an American workforce in order to prosper. They can enjoy their stream of profits from factories in China while shutting down factories in the U.S. And if Chinese workers have the impertinence to demand higher wages, American corporations can find low-wage labor in other countries
(Excerpt) Read more at salon.com ...
The New America Foundation is some kind of quasi-socialist front group/think tank isn't it?
Leftwingers and their mental tics. They love trains and they hate private contractors working for the military.
A depression is likely very soon. Even a Republican takeover of Congress won't stop it.
The questions I have are 1) if the economy collapses will all hope for freedom collapse as well and 2) will hungry bellies change the average American's view of the utility of capitalism?
I'm pretty sure about the latter but not the former. I know that in any other era, a president like
Obama would be thrown out of office for worsening the economic situation to such an extent.
But it looks like the corruption of Democrats is so deep, that even with a depression, they will be difficult to dislodge.
It the purpose of this screed is to intimate that the U.S. rich don’t care about the business of the local peons, I’m not sure that has been proven. Yet.
Neither did Reagan’s election stanch the Carter malaise, that is, not until a couple of years passed. Then the US economy began to smile again.
Only those that refuse to vote DNC.
The elites fight hard to flood the US with poor.
Contract? The author better check his/her premise!
Exports account for less than a fifth of India's economy. Or so I've heard.
Atlas shrugged and took his factories overseas.
There is alot of truth here...look at the gathering of trans-national rich elite taking place in Rhinebeck NY this weekend. This goes to the heart of why the elites hate the tea parties...they are a huge threat to this vision. Time to end free trade, NAFTA. Time to start mandatory jail sentences for employers of illegals and time to end legal protections for corporations that move jobs and money overseas
My favorite episode of the Twilight Zone... The Obsolete Man.
This misconception is commonly held because the microchip manufacturers themselves chose to headquarter in California in the early 80's. The tech' industry revolution, however, started in Texas.
Another great piece of American thought.
The Twilight Zone - The Obsolete Man
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EXzQD2SRESs
Lind's thoughts reflect the thinking of most leftists that the average person is an unfortunate, unthinking specimen who is lost in the modern world and incapable of adapting. History proves otherwise. The rich are richer than they used to be, but so is everybody else. And we'll get richer if we can keep government out of the equation. I'll trust my future to one hundred, unfeeling capitalists a lot more than I'd trust it to one hundred liberal congresscritters who "looking out for me."
The ancient world was built on slavery.
The Obamacrats are creating virtual slavery via debt.
I got no dawg in that hunt . In fact I have no technical background in microelectronics, and my first microcomputer was a Radio Shack (Tandy) TRS-80 Model III bought in 1981. But here goes.
The scientific basis for solid state semiconductors was developed by William Shockley, who went on to invent the transistor at Bell Labs in what? New Jersey? Shockley left Bell Labs in the 50’s to open his own transistor company in Mountain View California. In nearby Palo Alto, the framework for the electronics industry complex that came to be known as “Silicon Valley” was put in place by Hewlett Packard in the late 1930’s. (I preferred their “reverse Polish” calculators to Texas Instruments’, but I may have been in the minority.)
The first integrated circuit was invented by Jack Kilby,of Texas Instruments in Jan 1959. But in Mountain View, CA, Bob Noyce (who previously worked for Shockley) was working on the IC simultaneously, and came out with his integrated circuit about 6 months later. Noyce’s IC became the industry standard.
Noyce started up Intel in the late 1960’s, where he developed the first semiconductor memory chip.
In the early 70’s one of Noyce’s engineers, Ted Hoff, came up with the microprocessor, which put all the essential functions of a computer on a single chip and it was just a small step from that to the personal computer revolution.
For New Englanders, such a revolution meant that, within a single generation, future fortunes were to be found on the factory floor and not the family farm, causing a massive influx of city-bound laborers. It also caused a rare reversal of traffic in which most manufactured goods would thereafter be exported from a region which had previously depended almost wholly upon trade for durables, implements, and instruments. In fact, New England's real economy had been TRADE itself, and the first Industrial Revolution 'flipped' that from the import business to the export business. Not only did sea lanes and shipping traffic patterns of the time change, but so too did American maritime architecture and even the building of portage, shifts which serve as high-water marks of change and which persist to this day in the shaping of many large coastal cities.
Midwesterners saw the like when their regional economy changed in a rapid succession of revolutionary and innovative shifts, again within a single generation. The upper Midwest's economy went, in quick order, from being based upon the opening and sale of cheap, supposedly farmable land, to becoming the continental transportation hub (in large part to bring in folks to buy the land), to, finally (can I say "finally"), the heavy industrial manufacture which both depended upon and produced the transportational infrastructure which went along with being the hub. So one generation of Midwesterners, hoping to raise families on the farm, instead see their children off to vocational school because the economy had created the environment in which the having of technical training, not the reputation a strong arm or work ethic, would serve as passport to living the comfortable lifestyle of America's new middle-class. Indeed, the persistent inclusion of "shop class" in many public schools stems from this economic trend.
But the innovations which had spurred on these economic shifts did not originate in either region. New England's Industrial Revolution was, in the most literal sense, build upon inferior wood-patterned versions of British manufacturing equipment - outright intellectual property theft! The Industrial Revolution of the upper Midwest was caused, firstly, by the British development of Bessemer steel, and later, by the German invention of the modern automobile. We nevertheless correctly refer to these major economic shifts as "revolutions" by region, not because of these places are the source of ideas, but because these places are where the ideas manifest their impact.
In one generation, really in one decade, the economy of most large Texas cities changed radically in way that was not occurring in the most of the rest of the country at the time. If a total stranger to the area had to guess what the top three industries in Texas were, and had nothing more upon which to rely than a cartoon-fed reputation of the state and a thumbnail sketched map marked "Texas", he would likely suggest 'oil, cattle, and real estate' and would have two of the three right. In fact, for a very large part of the population, the hauling and fitting of pipe and other such labor in the gas and oil fields of Texas was considered both honorable and profitable as late as the 70's. The curricula of most technical schools were dominated by interest in heavy industry, and that was mostly applied to it's utility in the oil and gas business. And though Texas has great resource to land, it's value, at the time, was nearly wholly dependent upon what lay beneath. The only real land market upon which to speculate was oil and natural gas potential. There was comparatively little commercial development and not enough population shift to warrant it. Cities grew, but more slowly and incrementally. This would all change with breathtaking speed in the late 70's and early 80's with the arrive of the tech' industry.
The first major change occurred in the schools. Not only did standing institutions very quickly change their major focus to the electronics industry, but many became very serious research centers. Texas A&M, of all places, became as nearly reputable and about well funded a research institution as MIT. There were also more schools founded, MANY more. The opening a new schools actually spurred a new growth in the real estate racket as speculation soared upon the hopeful expectation that any large contiguous plot could be the next established campus.
The land market was also fueled by an explosive growth in commercial and housing development heretofore not seen. This happened because, while there were certainly jobs to be had in the new technology fields, the influx of hopeful northerners greatly outpaced actual job creation. Apartment complexes filled and trailer parks swelled with out-of-staters who all soon found that the best steady work to be had while working through technical school was retail work, selling consumer goods to other newly arrived northerners. Cities sprawled outward across the plain at a shocking pace. The consumption of building materials to fed the growth in Texas actually impacted global supply and inflated the price of steel and concrete. For a short while, the somewhat underdeveloped town of Denton, the third city of Texas's Dallas-Fort Worth triangle, was the fastest growing city in the country and had the notable distinction of being one the few cities to actually experience southerly growth (when most historians will tell you that cities tend to grow to the north).
The technological Industrial Revolution that became attached to Texas does not demonstrate some innate virtue of either the population or the geography. It demonstrates the portability of the industry which, indeed, passed rapidly through California on it's way overseas. It could have happened in Ohio. As it happened, it left it's mark in Texas.
As the saying goes, “If ya ain’t Texan ya ain’t sh$t.”
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