Posted on 07/12/2018 10:45:18 AM PDT by Hojczyk
The city of Danville, Virginia sits in the bellybutton of the Blue Ridge Mountains, a hat-toss over the North Carolina border and about 85 miles northwest of Raleigh. It’s low hill country and Danville straddles the frothy, chocolate-milk waters of the Dan River. Downtown, once a booming trade district, today is a decomposed industrial husk, a tidy cluster of silent rectangles ensnared by broad, ghostly thoroughfares built for a time in the not-so-distant past when people and goods poured in and out of town. Those days are gone, perhaps never to return.
The story of Danville is one echoed in countless communities across the country, a gutted middle class left for dead in the wake of sweeping international trade deals in Washington, applauded by liberal economists and a lockstep media portraying such policies as inevitable, ultimately good, and a win for the American consumer–a narrative usually coupled with condescending and disdainful attitudes toward displaced workers for a perceived inability to sprint ahead with the times.
(Excerpt) Read more at breitbart.com ...
The factory credited with *starting* the industrial revolution was a textile mill around 1769 in Cromford (IIRC), England.
What are the ‘residual problems’?
Peach
For any given location, a small town will always be at a disadvantage against a large town or small city when it comes to things where economies of scale are critically important: infrastructure, schools (to a certain extent), municipal services, any business or amenity that requires access to local customers or labor, etc.
As automation has increased over time, the "need" for more and more small towns has declined. Instead of having a family farm on 160 acres, you now have large spreads with thousands of acres. When 16,000 acres are farmed by four families instead of 400, the other 396 families slowly migrate away ... and the businesses in that town lose almost all their customers.
For many of these towns, the only way to survive is to do one or both of the following: (1) attract an industry that sells products over a large region (nationally, or even globally), or (2) give outsiders a reason to visit and spend money there.
Option (1) is increasingly difficult because these types of industries usually need infrastructure, amenities and workers that a small town can't provide ... and because it's hard for any given small town to differentiate itself from other towns as THE best place for a business or industry.
Right. My point is that New England went through the same disruption in the textile industry 100 years before North Carolina did. The only difference was that New England lost their industry to North Carolina ... while North Carolina lost theirs to Mexico and Asia.
Nonsense! Generally the free trade argument has been a straw man for the globalists, in the form of a collection of lies about how it would open up vast new foreign markets for US products, when in reality what it did was remove tariffs on US imports and make it highly attractive for US manufacturers to move production to cheap labor nations and export back to US virtually tariff free..
All that was foreseen by many in the early '90s including Ross Perot and a few members of Congress, and many in the American public.
NAFTA created the inevitable "giant sucking sound".
Further:
In the 1780s, American textile companies offered rewards to English mill workers to bring knowledge of textile mills to America. Samuel Slater was one of these Englishmen. Since it was illegal to export textile technology from Britain, Slater memorized the construction plans of a textile factory. Slater built the machinery for a textile mill from memory. His factory produced cotton of great quality. In the 1790s, Slater and his partners opened many other textile mills. He is considered the founder of the American textile industry because his bringing of English technology to the United States began the Industrial Revolution.
Areas tend to recover that have a plentiful supply of high quality housing.
It’s not a surefire guarantee though, New Orleans, is an example.
It also takes an educational establishment (think UofTexas Austin, Stanford) and an entrepreneurial mindset (Seattle, Silicon Valley).
High-quality housing normally attracts high-quality businesspeople (think Greenwich, CT).
This article does not discribe things that happen because of free trade. WE DON’T HAVE AND NEVER HAD FREE TRADE. Some of these negatives might be in some part due to GOVERNMENT MANAGED TRADE, not free trade.
It is instructive on several points:
communities are playing with fire when they are based almost entirely on one big industry rather than many small ones;
people need to GtFO of places like this and go where the jobs are. N. Dakota, SD, Montana etc.
Looks like a lot of Upstate NY and for the same reasons.
Wish Trump would hold a rally here to talk about this.
He’s got a lot of support Upstate, Pubbies AND Dems. And we surely could use the influx of cash.
I am against Welfare, especially hidden welfare.
In 2017, U.S. exports to Mexico were $243 billion, and imports from Mexico were $314 billion -- for a trade deficit of about $71 billion.
There are plenty of smart people here on FreeRepublic, and in all the times I've been posting numbers like this I have yet to hear from a single one of them who can make an objective case that the U.S. was better off in 1992 than in 2017 on the basis of these figures alone.
I will get there one day.
More nonsense. That infrastructure had existed in small towns for generations and even centuries in same cases, and had been upgraded as needed over those periods of time.
And there is still opportunity in small towns for many. Many small towns still have industries and there are manufacturing jobs, jobs in the skilled trades, and there are doctors, lawyers, school teachers and often hospitals and local government jobs.
I grew up in one that continues to thrive due to a locally grown business that supplies near 1,000 jobs. All small towns are not dying and the ones that are were mostly killed by government policies.
State managed trade is not Free Trade, why can’t you understand that?
Free trade is a theory not a reality. Given the enormous growth in government we will never see Free Trade but trade terms determined by governments and the international oligopolies which dominate modern capitalism.
You Communist, how dare you insert rationality into a farrago of nonsense?
“In HS, we drove from Greensboro to Danville to buy Stroh’s beer.”
Ironic being it was brewed in Winston.
“Wasn’t Danville the last capital of the Confederacy?”
FWIW, the last Cabinet meeting of the Confederate Government occurred 45 miles to the South in Greensboro, NC.
Problems got worse with cable TV when they started emulating their city cousins, and turned into rural versions of "Superfly".
Where I lived, in the late night stillness, I could lie in bed, and hear them from miles away as they roamed the county in their cars blasting rap music, looking for another burglary or home invasion. In my corner of this very rural area, women would not work in their kitchen gardens unless they were carrying.
More than one town merchant told me that that there is no use revitalizing the historic district when after eating at a cafe someone is waiting behind the building to mug you.
You may recall in recent months the story of the minister and his wife who were robbed in an home invasion near Lake Gaston. The minister's wife was tied up inside the house, the minster abducted, and the wife was left to die inside their torched home, burned alive.
Maybe you need to dig deeper. Articles have been posted here is the past year or so that now in 20% of US families, no one has a job. Another story posted about how 20% of US heads of household are on one or more government anti-poverty programs.
Our real unemployment rate, including the able bodied of working age on various poverty programs, is near 20%. We now spend more than $1 trillion per year on those programs with about $800 billion at the federal level.
You could also check what has happened to the national debt. Hint: we are not paying for all those poverty programs as we go. Our current society is being propped up with our growing Mount Everest of debt.
And all those trends and other negative trends have been on the upswing since 1992 and before. We are seeing some decrease in some poverty programs under Trump with his rejection of these policies you seem so satisfied with.
What are you even talking about? I've certainly never said that our government policies equal free trade. Free does not exist on an international basis and likely never will. There are too many nations that will always look after certain national interests and I hope the US will become one of them and remain one of them.
Free trade is nothing a set of lies used by globalists to sell the trade policies they wanted to the US Congress and as much as they public as possible. And it is also a theory espoused by econ professors and believed by all too many gullible students.
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