Posted on 09/05/2011 9:49:48 PM PDT by Bratch
Once, it was a Labor Day tradition for Democrats to go to Cadillac Square in Detroit to launch their campaigns in that forge and furnace of American democracy, the greatest industrial center on earth.
Democrats may still honor the tradition. But Detroit is not what she was, not remotely. And neither is America.
Not so long ago, we made all the shoes and clothes we wore, the motorcycles and cars we drove, the radios we listened to, the TV sets we watched, the home and office calculators and computers we used.
No more. Much of what we buy is no longer made by American workers, but by Japanese, Chinese, other Asians, Canadians and Europeans.
"Why don't we make things here anymore?" is the wail.
Answer: We don't make things here anymore because it is cheaper to make them abroad and ship them back.
With an economy of $14 trillion, we may still be the best market in the world to sell into. But we are also among the most expensive markets in the world in which to produce.
Why is that? Again, the answer is simple.
U.S. wages are higher than they are almost anywhere else. Our health, safety and environmental laws are among the most stringent. Our affirmative action demands are the most exacting, except possibly for those of Malaysia and South Africa.
Does the cost of production here in America alone explain the decline in manufacturing and stagnation of workers' wages?
No. For since the Revolution, America has had a standard of living that has been the envy of the world. From the Civil War through the 1920s, as we became the greatest manufacturing power the world had ever seen, our workers enjoyed pay and benefits that were unmatched anywhere.
Yet our exports in those decades were double our imports, and our trade surpluses annually added 4 percent to the gross national product. How did we do it?
We taxed the products of foreign factories and workers and used the revenue to finance the government. We imposed tariffs of up to 40 percent on foreign goods entering our market and used the tariff money to keep taxes low in the United States.
We made foreigners pay a price to get their products into our market and made them pay to help finance our government. We put our own country and people first.
For corporate America, especially industrial America, this was nirvana. They had exclusive free access to our market, and foreign rivals had to pay a stiff fee, a tariff, to get their products in and try to compete with U.S. products in the U.S. market.
What happened to this idea that made America a self-sufficient republic, producing almost all it consumed, a nation that could stay out of the world wars as long as she wished and crush the greatest powers in Europe and Asia in less than four years after she went in?
A new class came to power that looked on tariffs as xenophobic, on economic patriotism as atavistic and on national sovereignty as an antique idea in the new world order it envisioned.
By 1976, editorial writers were talking about a new declaration of interdependence to replace Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence, which was now outdated.
The new idea was to replicate America on a global scale, to throw open the borders of all nations as the borders of the 50 states were open, to abolish all tariffs and trade barriers, and to welcome the free flow of goods and people across all frontiers, thereby creating the One World that statesmen such as Woodrow Wilson and Wendell Willkie had envisioned.
By three decades ago, this globalist ideology had captured both national parties, a product of universities dominated by New Dealers.
But why did corporate America, with its privileged access to the greatest market on earth, go along with sharing that market with its manufacturing rivals from all over the world?
The answer lies in the trade-off corporate America got.
Already established in the U.S. market, corporate America could risk sharing that market if, in return, it could shift its own production out of the United States to countries where the wages were low and regulations were light.
Corporate America could there produce for a fraction of what it cost to produce here. Then these same corporations could ship their foreign-made products back to the USA and pocket the difference in the cost of production. Corporate stock prices would soar, as would corporate salaries -- and dividends, to make shareholders happy and supportive of a corporate policy of moving out of the USA.
Under globalization, America's investor class could and did get rich by the abandonment of America's working class.
America is in a terminal industrial decline because the interests of corporate America now clash directly with the interests of working America -- and, indeed, with the national interest of the United States.
And both parties are either oblivious to or indifferent of what is happening to their country.
The welfare state has created generations of dysfunction and dependency and overpopulation under its umbrella.
Here’s the scary part of the welfare state: the other side of the dependency mountain.
(1) Countries like Haiti aren’t going to “adapt” to the end of Western charity. Just imagine what is going to happen to Black Africa when there are no more European liberals around to dump charity on that continent.
Is the piracy we see in Somalia any indication?
(2) Here in America, the dependents of the welfare state are going to “adapt” to the end of the welfare state through the mechanism of the gang, through the “flash mob,” through stealing and using force to take from others, and using guns to shoot people and rob businesses ... the familiar form of barbarism.
Liberals have spent the past 50 years destroying the family, destroying the community, destroying tradition, destroying character, destroying the nation in the name of “progress” ... now comes the next 50 years of the consequences.
What do you think the Goths and the Vandals and the Vikings were? They were essentially migrating flash mobs of barbarians who were pushed out of Northern Europe for various reasons.
(3) Of course as Wall Street and Washington, who are in league with the European central bankers, finish off the American economy and plunge the world into what will first appear to be a “depression” ... THEN we get to see how “diversity” and “multiculturalism” and “interdependence” and “tolerance” really work under stress.
A fad? You are predicting an 80% crash in the human population here.
When you need to be close to the hardware, because you have a heavily computation bound task, it’s hard to beat C and subsets of C++ (full C++ is a pig in the way it allocates/deallocates arrays on the heap) — unless you go to assembler. Angry Birds doesn’t need to produce 3-dimensional graphics, so it would be happy enough in Java.
There aren’t many new ideas in the world.
“Globalization” is hardly a new idea. It has been tried many times before. This is only the most extreme example of globalization in world history.
Suppose you live in a small town in Tennessee. You spend most of your time buying what you need at Wal-Mart. Where does it come from?
Most of the manufactured junk seems to come from China, Japan, South Korea, Thailand and so forth. The textiles come from Haiti, Guatemala, Honduras and so on.
The capitalists then beat their chests and brag about the “superior” system they have created. Yeah, but it comes at the tremendous cost: the cost of being dependent upon vaguely hostile foreigners who live far away, the cost of losing the know how to produce things nearby, the extraordinary cost of vulnerability in some kind of crisis.
Again, we have become more dependent upon foreigners for literally everything: not just the manufactured crap, which we could produce here if we wanted, but dependent upon the energy reserves of foreign countries, dependent upon foreigners to finance our debt addled “post-reality” lifestyle, increasingly dependent upon foreigners to come here and prop up the higher sectors of our economy.
Americans sheepishly go to the gas station and fill up with regular unleaded at Citgo. They go to the supermarket to buy food that is shipped in from god knows where. They invest their deposits in banks which does god knows what with them. They go to the Wal-Mart to buy stuff that comes from vast distances.
Let’s see how long it works! Not long, I bet. And when that system unravels, it will produce a very familiar type of chaos.
Say no more, say no more :-) Thanks for the responses.
Great screed. Look up Smoot Hawley. How’d that work out?
Tell Americans jocks to put down their wrenches and shovels, and toss away outdated visions of muscle-fueled manufacturing greatness. Ask them to sit in front of a keyboard and learn OOP and C++. The future is theirs.
Software writing and verification is actually the easiest to outsource to foreign countries. All it takes is a high speed data line.
I worked with US CAD companies that wrote and checked code on a 24 hour basis. Three separate teams working in three time zones - US West coast - France - India. The code modules just kept getting passed around the world according to daylight working hours.
The higher level design concepts may be US, but the actual bodies/workers writing the code can easily be world-wide.
Corporations get a cost benefit with lower foreign wages as well as a time-to-market benefit.
Very little if anything that we do is confined by our realm of personal experience.
For example, how do you know what the constitutions says? How do you know what, for example, Jefferson thought, and Washington thought, etc.
You probably read a book written by a constitutional expert.
If you do have a copy of the constitution and have read it how, do you know that the copy you have is the correct one, what is the provenance?
Skepticism is healthy, and I understand what you are saying here, but this stop and go is very slow. At some point you have to ask yourself the question, is this the best way of going about and doing things?
Yes, I trust my banker. Yes I trust the grocer and the owner of the gas store not to cheat me, or to make me sick. I make about 10 decisions every day to trust people, because I simply have no choice.
“Not so long ago, we made all the shoes and clothes we wore, the motorcycles and cars we drove, the radios we listened to, the TV sets we watched, the home and office calculators and computers we used. “
I guess ole Pat never heard of Gucci, Chanel, BSA, Triumph, Rolls Royce, or Jaguar. Hell, Isotta Fraschini was a hot import in the 1920’s. VW’s have been coming in since shortly after WWII. Radios and TV’s from Asia have been imported to the U.S. for 60 years. The best watches were from Switzerland.
How about we don’t exaggerate there Pat?
Uh, plenty of nations outsource food production to large countries with low population density.
Places, like, I dunno? Iowa?
“These are growth segments of our population. They are not going to be software engineers.”
We have to be the only country (other from Europe and Britain) that has an underclass that outbreeds the high achieving. I have no idea what will have to be done wiht them since we are close to having small caches of safe places with safe people, while the rest of the underclass gorws and grows and grows.
I have to admit it feels that way.
But I still have hope. I think the jury is still out though time is clearly running out.
If that “underclass” had to work to fill their tummies it would keep them a little busier doing productive things.
How is Pat a moron?
We’ve had decades of “free trade.” This economy is the result. This is the “free trade” economy.
Good point. In the 1950s Europe, Russia and Asia were ruined, in ashes from WWII, Africa was a mud-pit, S. America was recovering from numerous dictatorships. The US was the only real industrial state around.
As the W. Europeans and Japanese caught up in the 60s and 70s, we kept moving, but they moved faster (as they were starting from nothing and perversely, because they were destroyed, they had no legacy architecture)
Then in the 80s, the Asian tigers and then the Celtic tigers came up.
But then in the 90s, a completely game change -- the two sleeping giants: India and China awoke, communism collapsed. in the Naughties we see Eastern Europe, India, China removing the shackles of socialism slowly and building
As Myrddin pointed out, the standards and regulations and unions that we put in place in the 50s have put us at a severe disadvantage today.
Not everyone can learn OOPs, C++, Ruby on Rails, PLSQL, etc. — it requires a different skillset, heavily logical mindset. Most are not built for that.
C and C++ are useful, very powerful languages - Java's "program once, use anywhere" is not completely true and its creation of a virtual engine, never-ending sequence of libraries, and not completely compiled status has advantages and disadvantages
C has its uses and is still heavily used in POS machines.
More to the point, COBOL, MVS, JCL, shell-scripts etc. ARE the languages to learn and know. A lot of the core stuff for most transactions are still COBOl
And I suspect Angry Birds has a C core and guess they use some OOPs language for the rest, but don't know. I think it has some .lua files, but...
Ruby-on-Rails, on the other hand, while easier to get things ready to run (development time in weeks) is not scalable to enterprise level -- it's like the programming language version of MySQl -- useful to a point.
Not gonna happen. At a random guess I think you need to have at least a 120 IQ to be able to design and code. Below that, it's an "html programmer" :-P
And that's only 10 to 20% of the population.
There has to be jobs for the other 80%.
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