Posted on 09/26/2010 4:44:23 AM PDT by RS_Rider
The United States is rapidly becoming the very first "post-industrial" nation on the globe. All great economic empires eventually become fat and lazy and squander the great wealth that their forefathers have left them, but the pace at which America is accomplishing this is absolutely amazing.
It was America that was at the forefront of the industrial revolution. It was America that showed the world how to mass produce everything from automobiles, to televisions, to airplanes. It was the great American manufacturing base that crushed Germany and Japan in World War II.
But now we are witnessing the deindustrialization of America. Tens of thousands of factories have left the United States in the past decade alone. Millions upon millions of manufacturing jobs have been lost in the same time period. The United States has become a nation that consumes everything in sight and yet produces increasingly little.
Do you know what our biggest export is today? Waste paper. Yes, trash is the number one thing that we ship out to the rest of the world as we voraciously blow our money on whatever the rest of the world wants to sell to us. The United States has become bloated and spoiled and our economy is now just a shadow of what it once was.
Once upon a time America could literally outproduce the rest of the world combined. Today that is no longer true, but Americans sure do consume more than anyone else in the world. If the deindustrialization of America continues at this current pace, what possible kind of a future are we going to be leaving to our children?
(Excerpt) Read more at seekingalpha.com ...
I recall something about a tariff on tea, or something like that.
I was wondering how far I would have to read before I found someone smart enough to question if the Republicans hadn’t done it to America with the free trade agreements.
Everyone else on FR is whining about the unions but IMO it is the joint effort by BOTH political parties to hurry us along the path to One World Government via the United Nations. Most folks try to blame this on the Rockefellers and their allies but Republicans certainly have their shoulders into the push for a New World Order.
The Democrats were the primary cause in bringing the EPA into the picture but the Republicans certainly didn’t fight the ‘environmentalists’ very hard. Nixon signed the Bill to allow the EPA. Look today at how many problems and how costly it is for business to try to abide by the environmental laws. All of this slows production which of course is the goal.
Our food is increasingly imported from the third world countries as Monsanto works hard to align the US farmers into a formation they can control without much difficulty.
The third world countries economies are growing as expected while our shrinks.
If we don’t smarten up and get rid of the current crowd in DC, cancel these ‘agreements’, this free Republic will soon become a has been.
Voting for Ralph Nader is a good first step. /s
Having worked in manufacturing engineering the last 10-15 years I concur with your assessment 100%. Technology has had a huge impact on the # of labor hours required to produce a given # of products.
Get the following machines and you can pretty much make anything: a Metal lathe, 5-axis machine, small injection molder, SMT picknplace and a small SMT oven at an amazing rate and with very few people if they know what they’re doing.
There is a great parallel with the family farm as well - as margins decrease due to increased output/acre (due to technology) and the basic law of supply and demand then scales of economy become more important meaning it is more difficult to produce a viable profit for the risk on a smaller plot.
Once we went on a couple of vendor site visits and saw the P&P machines running, we knew our assembly line was doomed.
This was years ago, but even then we saw PC Motherboards coming down the belt, one every 70 seconds. At that time we had hourly employees with soldering irons. They may as well have been making shoe buttons and buggy whips.
Our present headache is, of course, that the Chinese and others have these machines, now, as well. And their automation technicians work cheap.
It was a rather frightening experience, because it meant everything we knew was at that moment, obsolete. It is one thing to see a promo video about automation, but to have been making a product the old way, then stand there and grasp the implications, I now know how a Clipper captain, tacking against the wind felt, when he was passed by a steamboat. You just know things will never be the same.
As an environmentalist, he is part of the problem not the solution.
He is simply another person looking to the government to solve his perceived “problem.”
Government and those darn free trade agreement took all our national companies and made them into international foreigner employers.
It is a good thing to have “people stamping out galvanized buckets” because that is all some people can do. We’ve got a whole lot of high school graduates who need jobs and aren’t suited for college ... where are they supposed to work? Once they find a non-fast food or retail store clerk job, how are they going to support themselves, much less their eventual families? They used to be able to work in factories.
Well, we sould have them dig ditches. Create a Stimulus Act of some sort, and build roads without the benefit of machinery.
Therefore, we need more government . . . to mitigate the pernicious effects of these durn free trade agreements.
“
The United States is rapidly becoming the very first “post-industrial”
nation on the globe.
“
My general (and inexpert) thought would be that the UK beat the USA
to the title of the first “post-industrial” nation.
Not a knock on the UK. The “winners” of WWII ended up paying a
very high price.
Not from where I sit. #1 get us out of the UN! Then I’d strip DC of 3/4 of the current agencies that operate out of there now.
http://www.umich.edu/~urel/admissions/legal/gru_amicus/32_internatl.pdf
3M
Abbott Laboratories
American Airlines
Ashland
Bank One
Boeing
Coca-Cola
Dow Chemical
E.I. Du Pont De Nemours
Eastman Kodak
Eli Lilly
Ernst & Young
Exelon
Fannie Mae
General Dynamics
General Mills
Intel
Johnson & Johnson
Kellogg
KPMG
Lucent Technologies
Microsoft
Mitsubishi
Nationwide Mutual Insurance
Nationwide Financial
Pfizer
PPG
Proctor & Gamble
Sara Lee
Steelcase
Texaco
TRW
United Airlines
General Motors Corporation
http://www.umich.edu/~urel/admissions/legal/gru_amicus/gru_gm.html
Environmentalist have a lot more to do with this crap than many of us think! If you want to build something these days on YOUR OWN LAND you can(and probably will be) sued for “destroying” some freaking “endangered” bug.
Sounds like a good idea to me. It obviously is working, so we oughtta borrow the proven idea.
Totally, factually, ignorantly untrue.
We had Sheriffs. Shire...rvees, or county lords.
You had a problem? You had to go before a judge and file a complaint. A complaint against the law of the common people, or common law.
We hand no, zero, zip, nada police.
Bump!
I quite obviously wasn't quoting the Constitution and the preamble is not law. There are no quotation marks found anywhere in my post. I was generalizing for the sake of brevity. That is allowed here on Free Republic, although it is quite clearly lost on certain people. Since you mention the Constitution and seem to have a desire to split hairs as to the powers granted to the Federal gubmint under our Constitution you might want to skip over the preamble and instead read and ponder the 10th Amendment:
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
This Amendment is the law of the land and is commonly referred to and generalized as "enumerated powers" (for the sake of brevity), although to satisfy those who like to split hairs the exact phrase, "enumerated powers", is not contained in the Constitution or the Bill of Rights. In a nutshell, "enumerate" simply means to list, itemize or recite something. So, referring to the content of the 10th Amendment as "enumerated powers" simply is a shorthand way to refer to the list of powers that Congress and the Federal gubmint may exercise as granted to it by the Constitution. IOW, if it ain't in there, they can't legally do it. Everything else not specifically enumerated is left to the states or to the people.
We are a long, long, long way from that now and therein lies the root of the problems we face as a nation. That was my point and precisely what I was referring to in my previous comment. I thought it would be obvious, but I suppose not so obvious for some who may or may not understand the use and purpose of quotation marks in our language as it is written.
You need not lecture me about the Constitution. I have read the Constitution many times. Studied it in depth, in fact. I have also read and studied the Federalist Papers. In my studies I find the Founders made no mention whatsoever of a Department of Energy, Department of Education, Environmental Protection Agency, Housing and Urban Development, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Obamacare, NASA, Welfare, WIC, Farm Subsidies, or any of the other gubmint boondoggles that are destroying this nation. If your desire is to argue that the three words "insure domestic tranquility" contained in the preamble to the Constitution is a legal basis for any of the above programs, please, be my guest, but you might find a more receptive audience over at the DU.....my guess is that you just want to argue.....
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