Posted on 10/01/2011 5:01:37 AM PDT by Kaslin
This is one of the best articles I have read in a long time. Andy Kessler eloquently dismantles the arguments from the left.
As you may or may not know, I live in one of the most left wing areas of the country. The recent statements by Massachusetts far left Democratic Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren were being repeated and put on Facebook pages everywhere.
“You built a factory out there? Good for you,” she says. “But I want to be clear: you moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for; you hired workers the rest of us paid to educate; you were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did.”
She continues: “Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea? God bless. Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.”
Kessler takes the socialist/communists to the woodshed.
Give something back? Greatbatch did well specifically because he provided something that society needed. His and Medtronic’s profits are what you and I are willing to pay above costs for these life-enhancing devices. This is true of Apple iPhones and Genentech Herceptin and Google Maps and Facebook Likes.
Ever since the mid-19th-century era of so-called Robber Barons, this country has had a philosophical divide over the role of business in a democracy. It’s time to set the record straight.
History has proven that the road to increased standards of living and wealth was built on productivity—doing more with less. It was the Industrial Revolution that got us out of the growing fields and into factories, which allowed us to pay for roads and teachers and civil servants. And now the move out of factories into air-conditioned offices is creating anxiety. It shouldn’t. Labor replacement is productivity. James Spangler’s vacuum cleaner. The Walker brothers’ dishwasher. Clarence Birdseye’s flash freezing. DuPont’s Kevlar. And John Simpson’s guidewire catheter for angioplasty and heart stents—the list goes on. Each invention generated wealth because it improved our lives, not because someone “gave back.”
Click over and read the whole thing. It’s really brilliant and echoes what I have been writing about here regarding entrepreneurship, and “social justice“.
People on the right often quote the Chinese proverb, “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.”
However, the sentiment is correct but the real point is missed. Someone has to invent and manufacture the fishing pole, the reel, the line, the sinker, the hook, the bait, the knife, the charcoal, the cooker, the silverware, and the plate before he can eat that fish. They all raise our standards of living.
Society pays them for their service-but society gets back far more in consumer surplus than it pays. That’s the grand bargain of capitalism.
Conservatives need to communicate from this theoretical perspective. Logic and economics are on our side, along with human nature. All the liberals have on their side is brute force and propaganda, unfortunately a powerful combination.
"Progressives" do that sort of thing.
Writers wrong.
What is being created is poverty, the hollowing out of the middle class and the loss of our manufacturing base. Our "air conditioned offices" will be call centers for customer service for India or China.
Press 2 for English.
Yes, logic and economics are on our side of the argument. Sadly, though, we are arguing with folks who have no interest in either. They are short-sighted, seeing only the so-called wealth they want to redistribute, not the the risk assumed in order to accumulate it, or the ‘social good’ that is inherent in an abundance of jobs for people interested in working for their sustenance and success.
Progressivism is a disease, a mental disorder of debilitating impact on the nation.
The hollowing out of the middle class mostly has occurred after 2008. Until that point, the Left liked to say the middle class was under assault, but the fact that the middle class was buying second homes, speed boats, huge TVs and was seeing good salary gains ran contrary to that notion.
Now here is where the populists here will pile on me. Frankly, moving call centers and the manufacturing of mai tai umbrellas and rubber ducks to China is a good thing. I don't know about any of you, but I'd rather my country be known for the fact that it has lots of high-paying jobs, not lots of low-end jobs producing junk.
The real problem is the government's war on everyone. It swings a wrecking ball at virtually every productive part of this economy. We would be manufacturing more high-end products in America if the feds didn't throw every roadblock conceivable in the way. Furthermore, our schools produce such idiots now that we have to go to China and India to get people who can do the work that involves an education.
So the liberal gets to frame the arguement with the underlying social contract. Of course, only the liberal gets to declare that there is a contract and gets to define what the terms of that contract are.
Well, I am the King of Fairness. I will decide whether this contract and it's terms are fair. After all, it's my turn, my turn, my turn.
The biggest thing affecting American workers, however, is the fact that labor has now become a global commodity. U.S. workers have now been merged into a global labor pool. Americans must now directly compete for jobs with hundreds of millions of desperate people willing to work for slave labor wages on the other side of the globe.
So exactly how is an American worker supposed to compete with a highly motivated person on the other side of the planet that makes $1.50 an hour with essentially no benefits?
Just think about it.
If you were a big global corporation, would you want to hire American workers which would cost you 10 or 20 times more after everything is factored in? It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out why millions of jobs have been leaving the United States. Corporations love to make more money. Many of them will not hesitate for an instant to pay slave labor wages if they can get away with it. The bottom line for most corporations is to maximize shareholder wealth.
Slowly but surely the number of good jobs in the United States is shrinking and those jobs are being sent to places where labor is cheaper.
According to the U.S. Commerce Department, U.S. multinational corporations added 2.4 million new jobs overseas during the first decade of this century. But during that same time frame U.S. multinational corporations cut a total of 2.9 million jobs inside the United States.
So where are all of our jobs going?
They are going to places like China.
The United States has lost an average of 50,000 manufacturing jobs per month since China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001.
In addition, over 40,000 manufacturing facilities in the United States have been closed permanently during the past decade.
What do you think is eventually going to happen if the U.S. economy continues to bleed jobs and factories so badly?
As the U.S. has faltered, China has become an economic powerhouse.
Ten years ago, the U.S. economy was three times as large as the Chinese economy. At the turn of the century the United States accounted for well over 20 per cent of global GDP and China accounted for significantly less than 10 per cent of global GDP. But since that time our share of global GDP has been steadily declining and China’s share has been steadily rising.
According to the IMF, China will pass the United States and will become the largest economy in the world in 2016.
Should we all celebrate when that happens?
Should we all chant “We’re Number two? Our economy is falling to pieces and the competition for the few remaining good jobs has become super intense.
The average American family is having a really tough time right now. Only 45.4 per cent of Americans had a job during 2010. The last time the employment level was that low was back in 1983.
Not only that, only 66.8 per cent of American men had a job last year. That was the lowest level that has ever been recorded in all of U.S. history.
Just think about that.
33.2 per cent of American men do not have jobs.
And that figure is going to continue to rise unless something is done about these economic trends.
Today, there are 10 per cent fewer “middle class jobs” in the United States than there were a decade ago. Tens of millions of Americans have been forced to take “whatever they can get”. A lot of very hard working people are basically working for peanuts at this point. In fact, half of all American workers now earn $505 or less per week.
Things have gotten so bad that tens of thousands of people showed up for the National Hiring Day that McDonald’s held. With the economy such a mess, flipping burgers or welcoming people to Wal-Mart are jobs that suddenly don’t look so bad.
Right now America is rapidly losing high paying jobs and they are being replaced by low paying jobs. According to a recent report from the National Employment Law Project, higher wage industries accounted for 40 per cent of the job losses over the past 12 months but only 14 per cent of the job growth. Lower wage industries accounted for just 23 percent of the job losses over the past 12 months and a whopping 49 per cent of the job growth.
Thanks to the emerging one world economy, the U.S. is “transitioning” from a manufacturing economy to a service economy.
But it certainly doesn’t help that China is using every trick in the book to steal our industries. China openly subsidizes domestic industries, they brazenly steal technology and they manipulate currency rates.
A recent article on Economy In Crisis described how the Chinese paper industry has been able to grow by threefold over the past decade while the U.S. paper industry has fallen apart….
From 2002 to 2009, the Chinese government poured $33.1bn into what should be an unproductive industry. But, with the help of government subsidies, China was able to ride export-driven growth to become the world’s leading producer of paper products.
In the same time frame that China pumped $33bn into its paper industry, U.S. employment in the industry fell 29 per cent, from 557,000 workers to just 398,000.
So why should we be concerned about all of this?
What is the G.O.P plan to stop this hemmoraging of jobs offshore? More “trickle down”? The tax cuts haven’t done anything to create incentives for multi nationals to stay in this country to create jobs..but globalism is enriching the globalists.
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