How America Lost Its Industrial Edge

Insight on the News - Issue: 06/24/03 ^ | 11/9/03 | cp124

[cp124]

How America Lost Its Industrial Edge -- comments by Eamonn Fingleton

How America Lost Its Industrial Edge By Paula R. Kaufman

Economic commentator Eamonn Fingleton speaks bluntly about what he sees as the frittering away of the United States' manufacturing base and what he regards as the consequent stagnation of the American standard of living. For those who believe in the superiority of the current U.S. postindustrial strategy, a reading of the OECD Economic Yearbook makes for a distinctly chastening study. As Fingleton puts it: "The United States trails no fewer than eight other nations, all of which devote a larger share of their labor force to manufacturing."

Fingleton, who distinguishes between high-end and low-end jobs, insists that the former, advanced manufacturing, must be reconstituted if the United States wants to remain a superpower. And what are these eroded industries? Semiconductor materials, ceramic packaging for semiconductors, charge-coupled devices (CCD), industrial robotics, numerically controlled machine tools, laser diodes and carbon fibers, to name only a few.

Where did the manufacturing of these items go? In most cases, Japan now dominates the more advanced areas of these industries, says Fingleton, who lives in Tokyo. Moreover, he argues, by dint of superior know-how and large capital investments Japan now enjoys a global lock on key manufacturing processes.

Fingleton recalls an America where men and women went to work and made the nation great, the old-fashioned way, by producing products people wanted and needed. And he juxtaposes the loss of advanced manufacturing jobs in this country with what he regards as the overvalued dollar, America's compulsion to borrow huge sums of money to fund its deficits and an illusionary U.S. prosperity based on unsustainable debt. For now Japan and China, both running huge trade surpluses, pay the United States' bills, he says. Where does this leave the American worker? He puts the answer simply: Out of work!

It is not true that Japan is in dire economic straits, Fingleton maintains. In a recent article in the London journal Prospect entitled "Japan's Fake Funk," he writes: "The Western consensus is that Japan is a basket case: It is not. That is a misreading by the West."

Meanwhile, he says, ill-conceived U.S. policies have failed to protect home-based American industries, leading to the transference of the most advanced technologies known to mankind. Fingleton says flatly that Japan has built up its industrial base at the expense of the United States, and that China now is chomping at the bit to do the same.

Insight: You speak of the transference of hard industries. What do you mean by that?

Eamonn Fingleton: I mean those engaged in advanced manufacturing. Specifically, industries that are both highly capital intensive and highly know-how intensive. They typically are many orders of magnitude more capital-intensive and know-how intensive than the most advanced of "New Economy" services, such as computer software developed in the last three decades.

Although Japan is known in the West for its leadership in certain consumer products such as cars and television sets, its area of greatest leadership is in much more advanced industries that largely are invisible to the consumer. Specifically, Japan leads almost right across the board in the sort of advanced materials, high-tech components and production machinery that are driving the electronic revolution. Some products may be assembled in the United States, but their key manufacture - the manufacture of the advanced components and materials - is done in Japan.

Q: Do U.S. manufacturers hide from the American people how dependent they are on foreign suppliers?

A: The impression given is that outsourcing is done within the U.S. and that available components come from many sources. But it is clear that most advanced components and materials now are outsourced from Japan. Corporate America is very guarded about its dependence on foreign suppliers, and this applies in spades to outsourcing by American defense contractors.

Q: So the United States has lost its edge in advanced manufacturing?

A: It is absolutely gone. The U.S. started losing its edge about 30 to 40 years ago. By the early eighties, America was already in serious trouble.

The sad truth is that advanced manufacturing accounts for only a very small part of the total U.S. economy and much of it merely is customizing equipment for the needs of the American market. Final assembly of manufactured products often is carried out in the United States and, to the extent that it is the sort of manufacturing that requires close proximity to customers, it likely will stay in the United States.

Meanwhile, high-tech manufacturing here largely has disappeared, particularly mass-production manufacturing. American companies can make almost anything if price is no object, and thus they can produce in small batches, for instance, for defense purposes. But they no longer master the mass-production techniques that are necessary to be cost-efficient in serving world markets.

Q: How vulnerable are Americans to job dislocation and unemployment because of what's happened to advanced manufacturing in this country?

A: I believe most of the job loss already has taken place. The blue-collar worker we all knew some 30 to 40 years ago was the backbone of the American economy. He or she was the best-paid worker in the world. But more and more Americans of average ability now are employed in "Mac-jobs" within the service industries. Typically they are not as well paid as in manufacturing.

The manufacturing jobs are gone, and the U.S. standard of living has been impacted badly by this. When I first came to the United States in the 1970s, I was stunned at how wealthy Americans then seemed. Since then, Western Europe largely has closed the wealth gap with the United States, so that living standards even in a country like Ireland that seemed poor a few decades ago are not far behind American levels.

Q: You describe significant job loss to Japan at the high end of the industrial food chain. Are low-end jobs endangered, too?

A: At the higher end of the food chain, Japan already has taken its bite: The jobs are gone. There now is a serious threat emanating from China, which is vying for the lower end of American manufacturing. Beijing is moving very fast and threatening what remains of the job base in the United States.

Q: What lies ahead for the American worker given this grim scenario?

A: Blue-collar workers have been hit hard and the erosion of their jobs will continue. But America is of course now overwhelmingly a service-based economy, and jobs in services largely are insulated from international competition. America as a whole is therefore feeling relatively little pain, even in currency markets.

East Asian economies are supporting the U.S. dollar as well as funding the U.S. trade deficit. As a result the dollar has not shown the effects of the hollowing out of American manufacturing, but we are about to see the free market play itself out in the currency markets.

Q: Why are East Asian nations supporting the dollar?

A: It is obvious to many in the U.S. financial sector that Japan, China and, to a lesser extent, Taiwan are supporting the dollar in an organized effort to benefit their own industrial policies. These nations want to promote their manufactured exports, and the lower their exchange rates are vis-à-vis the dollar the more profitable it is for their manufacturers to export.

The dollar now is vastly overvalued vis-à-vis the East Asian currencies. The best way to look at this is to ask yourself a question: How low would the dollar have to fall to enable the United States now to balance its trade deficit? To answer that, you have to look at both the state of American export industries and the extent to which the United States now is dependent on imports for goods that it no longer can make - at least cannot make in mass-production volumes.

The numbers are shocking. In the late 1980s the U.S. dollar traded above Y140 [yen]. Today, the dollar trades at Y117. So we have seen some depreciation even since the Japanese bubble collapsed in 1990. But, for the United States to begin to win back export markets, we probably would have to see the dollar fall to Y60 or lower. A 50 percent devaluation against the Chinese currency also is necessary.

Q: Why did this "hollowing out" of the U.S. manufacturing base take place?

A: It began in the 1960s and became really serious from the mid-1970s onward. One key factor early on had been a U.S. government policy of transferring technology to Japan. There was an American tendency to underestimate the Japanese competitors. This was particularly apparent in the electronics industry, where American companies that won contracts to supply semiconductors to IBM, for instance, would be required by IBM to license a "second source" - a company that could continue to supply if the primary contractor were hit by an act of God.

American companies like Motorola and Intel invariably chose to license Japanese companies to do such second sourcing, on the theory that the Japanese were incapable of eating America's lunch.

Also, there existed a very powerful Japanese plan to extract technology from this country. By the early 1970s, Japan was the second-largest economy in the world, a market that could not be ignored. Firms such as IBM and others were eager to sell their products in Japan. But the Japanese insisted on a quid pro quo. If an American company wanted to sell in Japan, it would have to manufacture there. Then, when the company moved to the next stage of the technology, it often closed down its American factory and served the entire world market from its Japanese operation. Sometimes technology transferred to the Japanese subsidiary leaked to the company's major Japanese competitors.

It all adds up, and now America imports much of its manufactured goods, with the current account deficit at 4.7 percent of GDP [gross domestic product] and almost all of it related to manufacturing. By comparison, the worst trade deficit in the early 1970s when [Richard] Nixon took the U.S. off the gold standard was just 0.5 percent of GDP.

Q: And as a result Americans lost jobs?

A: Many jobs indeed. But there was also the myth known as the "New Economy," which for 20 years had been growing in fashion.

I was working then at Forbes magazine in New York and I recall how struck I was by the large number of sophisticated people I met who exclaimed that "the future is in services! Manufacturing is a commodity business! We need to get out of it!"

Indeed, America did get out of it. Having allowed its manufacturing base to disappear, the U.S. now is in possession of almost an entirely service-based economy - beating all standards of economic history. The manufacturing sector exports, on average, 11 times more, based on per unit of output, than do service industries. Herein lies the problem: The United States no longer produces the goods to pay for its imports. You have to fund the gap.

For 30 years the United States has run these trade deficits. In the early days, they were relatively small and explained away as a temporary phenomenon. They long since have ceased to be considered temporary even by the most trenchant advocates of laissez-faire.

They have major negative consequences for the United States, particularly in undermining America's ability to project economic power abroad.

Don't get me wrong: I am not saying imports are necessarily a bad thing. But when the United States must go to foreign central banks with its hand extended to fund huge trade deficits for decades on end, something is desperately wrong.

Q: How dependent is the United States on foreign capital?

A: Highly dependent. Two countries now are serious capital exporters: Japan and China. There is one huge capital importer: the United States.

The U.S. Treasury is more and more beholden to the Japanese Ministry of Finance, which is a power-driven organization. One doesn't want to be an alarmist, but there is the matter of sovereignty here. It is inappropriate that the world's superpower is dependent on government agencies in other nations to get it through the day.

Q: You argue that the information economy is not the key to future prosperity. Why isn't it?

A: You are referring to the subtitle of my book In Praise of Hard Industries: Why Manufacturing, Not the Information Economy, Is the Key to Future Prosperity. The point I was making is that the prospects for the information economy, meaning the all-digital service economy that the American press was then talking about, were vastly overblown. Many of the services being created were basically worthless, a point that has been resoundingly vindicated by subsequent events.

I should make clear, however, that my argument carried no Luddite content. I pointed out that the Internet and many other manifestations of the information economy that were so hyped at the time were indeed great advances for the world in general. But the idea that America could somehow establish a hammerlock on such services and thus graduate to some ineffably higher level of prosperity by providing them to the world was the purest nonsense.

In reality, many of those services are highly labor-intensive and, to the extent that international trade can be conducted in them, they should be located in places such as India, Russia, Latvia and so on, where labor is much cheaper than it is in the United States.

Meanwhile, the United States would be well-advised to follow the lead of the Japanese, the Germans and the Swiss by maintaining and enhancing its position in advanced-manufacturing industries.

Paula R. Kaufman is a free-lance writer for Insight magazine.

[Torie]

There most certainly is, with various interlocking gears. Your last paragraph in context or out makes no sense to me. Sorry.

[Euro-American Scum]

Post #21.

That was excellent.

[MissAmericanPie]

Thank you kind Sir.

[Fledermaus]

Yawn...whine, lies and stupidity. Yawn even more. We lost our industrial edge because, like the transition from agriculture to industry, we change.

Oh, I guess it would be better to force all those third world countries that are trying to move up to abandon those efforts because mostly unionized Americans want job security to make wooden rulers! Yawn.

The textile and steel industries have been the most protected in the history of our country for decades. And they are still declining. You'd think these geniuses would have modernized, they didn't, or try doing something else.

What's next? Banning digital cameras because Kodak is too stupid to get away from film processing and losing jobs?

I thought free markets, freedom and changing totalitarian countries into budding democracies through trade was our goal. I thought these people would then be less of a security risk if they had jobs. If Mexico cared about jobs as much as the WHINERS in these threads, their wouldn't be millions of them coming over the border to create Mexican restaurants and clip the lawns of lazy white idiots that won't force their spoiled rotten bratty teenagers to do it.

Do you people really think these third world laborers are sewing underwear by hand for Wal-Mart? That's how the arguments sound. Modern technology is set up in other countries because unions have driven the cost of hiring people to a point it's not feasible when trying to make a cloth napkin. These companies control the manufacture and quality of these products. They send managers to oversee the plants. They use modern technology to make the products. If you think they do this because they exploit others you might consider how they are exploited with the regulations and taxation and unfunded laws our own government imposes on them. Idiot's in our country will strike because, god forbid, they are asked to contribute SOMETHING to their own healthcare plan.

But of course, I'll get the usual hate-post replies from whiney midwestern morons that don't understand the concept of moving, changing, learning something new (if they ever bothered to learn anything in high school to begin with) or maybe spending less on beer and cigarettes and $300 pairs of Nike shoes because your tatooed, pierced brat wants them.

Like I said, the industries whining the most have been protected with tariffs and such for decades and did nothing to help their own cause. How many plants making steel and textiles modernized? Hardly any. And why is it so important to protect the jobs of a bunch of steel workers in Pennsylvania that actually pat themselves on the back for creating generations of morons that can do nothing but work in the plant (remember the movie "Rudy"?) instead of educating their kids? They sure don't mind taking government help and want the education grants that help them move ahead into the next sector or jobs that pay even more if you bother to crack a book that, of course, they demand others pay for.

But our education system has been reduced more to indoctrination and not teaching. Thus we can't even replace the workers we need with Americans and have a vast pool of immigrants, legal and illegal, willing and wanting to work for less without fat benefits. Which brings up another point - why are the left wing liberals complaining about US jobs being lost when it's they that attack anyone that tries to control illegal immigration? Oh yeah, they are MORONS!

Idiots whine about the high tech jobs going to foreign immigrants or being out-sourced to India. Yeah? So what? The same whiners do NOTHING...absolutely NOTHING to help educate more Americans to do these jobs. So they blame evil capitalist that want to make a profit, as usual. God knows they won't blame the fact they can't teach anyone to think, use math, read, write or even care about science. I started college in 1977 and most of the students, even back then, in engineering and computers were foriegn students while most good Americans majored in getting drunk and having sex. In 1979 they even waved the requirement of algebra in business school since so many couldn't fathom the concept. I took Calculus II with 6 other students. Sad for the Univ. of Arkansas.

But even more imporant, as usual, the whiners can't see the reality in front of them. As freedom, democracy, common sense, well being, and the rule of law increase across this planet there will be more and more and more developing countries vying for manufacturing jobs in America. Whiners and idiots think all of them, and I mean ALL of them, are slave labor and that's just not true. Their economic reality is much different than ours and they would never grow, change, improve and become democracies with socialists ideas the WTO, World Bank and American unions believe in.

And when presented with this reality, the whiners would rather export their unionized regulations and government meddling in their business to them rather than shaking off the ideas of the 1930's and grow up and realize you can't keep overinflating the cost of production and stay in business.

My goodness, why would anyone think it's fair to pay $20 an hour plus benefits to people that sit and put gromments into holes? I could train circus monkeys to do that. And after working at Whirlpool in the summers of 1978 and 1979 and watching the union workers lie, steal, sabotage and spend their working time high and drunk, circus monkeys would have been an improvement.

Last comment...every single white, redneck, biker type, drug dealer (you could buy anything at Whirlpool) HATED the Vietnamese that we brought over and were stationed at Ft. Chaffee, Arkansas because they got jobs at Whirlpool and worked harder. One guy told me he never would have contempleted working 40-45 hours a week and having his own home, a car, etc. and got to bring his family over. This was compared to the white trash idiots that had been working there for 10 years and were still popping out babies from different fathers, ignoring safety rules (I saw more than one lose a finger, hand, etc. and then try to sue the company even though they were wasted) and pretending they were still studying in community college.

So you have a choice. Keep the rest of the world under tyrants so you can earn $40K a year and whine about the price of soft drinks in the cafeteria (one reason the Peterbilt idiots went on strike in Nashville and lost their jobs forever) or you can realize there is nothing you can do to stop emerging markets and workers.

And unless you yourselves are willing to pay twice as much for gasoline, merchandise, homes, etc. to support the higher cost of heavily regulated US business and cost of unionized control, then stop whining and quit going to Wal-Mart yourself.

[cp124]

"We lost our industrial edge because, like the transition from agriculture to industry, we change."

We lost our industrial edge because, our political leaders create tax policies, unfair trade policies, and enable our legal system to run out of control.
----
"Oh, I guess it would be better to force all those third world countries that are trying to"

prop up dictators while thier people remain poor and stupi
----
"If Mexico cared about jobs as much as the WHINERS in these threads, their wouldn't be millions of them coming over the border to"

collect welfare and free healthcare while our taxes increase.
----
"Like I said, the industries whining the most have been protected with tariffs and such for decades and did nothing to help their own cause."

Most=BS....Free Traitor rant.
----
"And unless you yourselves are willing to pay twice as much for gasoline, merchandise, homes, etc. to support the higher cost of heavily regulated US business and cost of unionized control, then stop whining and quit going to Wal-Mart yourself."

Or you can enable dictators, pay for illegal immigrants healthcare and all the babies they pop out in the US, give away our technology to our enemys, eliminate the middle class, and not be able to buy the cheap shoes and CD players because you are earning half of what you use to while federal and state taxes sky rocket.
----
Your rant is well....Yawn. You try to say everyone in manufacturing is a no good lazy uneducated fool. Your elite, know it all attitude is a slap in the face to everyone in manufacturing who created these ideas and products. Without us your turd world friends would always be living in mud huts eating dirt.

[cp124]

Grand Opening Sale in Fledermaus, PA

Traitor Jacks Factory Outlet
Direct From the Chicom Great Wall Mart Factory

And as always...no tarrifs....no regulations.....no import fees.

*CD Players --- 2 for $5
*Bootleg CD's, Videos, Software --- 2 for $2
*American Flags --- $1
*New Chicom Economy Car "The Chia Pet" --- $575
*In the US Army/Navy Section --- Factory Reconditioned Missles (have only been disassemble and reassembled once)
*US Monetary $20 Bill Reproductions --- $10
*FREE- Posters signed by Chicom pilots that forced US Aircraft to land.

We take US Food Stamps. No questions Asked.

[bvw]

There is no system. You describe "interlocking gears". Sorry, although a most powerful force, as a *system* International Trade doesn't even rise to the jellyfish level of organs on the loose floating around in some gel sac.

The engaging of gears you perceive is actually the interplay of powerful adversaries. Unlike the interplay of business within a hardformed and durable National framework of courts, laws, and a Constitution for a backbone .. the very laws and courts resorted to in international trade are in control of the more potent actors.

There is no international body, AFAIK, that signs out International Coporate Charters that have the force of law in our nation. Coporations are a construct of a State, of a formed Goverment. Individuals are of the Creator, Corporations are of the State. Just as it would be a foul God who did not assert sovereignity over his creations -- that is, us, Individuals; it is a foul and slacker Government that does assert Sovereignity of the Corporations it Charters. As the Creator has expectations and rules for us, so we, in aggregate, through the Government our agent, hold the Corporations to account.

And such an account must include checking Corporate infidelity. A firmer demand that the cornucopia opened up by the construct of limited-liability Corporations result in benefits to us that include jobs here.

[Torie]

it is a foul and slacker Government that does assert Sovereignity of the Corporations it Charters. As the Creator has expectations and rules for us, so we, in aggregate, through the Government our agent, hold the Corporations to account.

And there you have it. That's why I prefer LLC's.

[lelio]

Idiots whine about the high tech jobs going to foreign immigrants or being out-sourced to India. Yeah? So what? The same whiners do NOTHING...absolutely NOTHING to help educate more Americans to do these jobs.

What education is needed? They work for 1/3rd to 1/10th of what we make.

So you have a choice. Keep the rest of the world under tyrants so you can earn $40K a year and whine about the price of soft drinks in the cafeteria (one reason the Peterbilt idiots went on strike in Nashville and lost their jobs forever) or you can realize there is nothing you can do to stop emerging markets and workers.

Why do you continiously harp on the evil lower cultured union worker (tongue in cheek)? How many formerlly middle and upper middle class high tech workers are out of work now? What does your union bashing have to say about that?

[bvw]

That limited liability is what is charted for, whether its a corporation or partnership. Individuals are held to ful account for their actions, thus by prudence and common sense avoid the risks that progress requires. Under grants by the sovereign (that is us, through our government) that legal construct of limited liability is created, fostering the kind of risk-taking progress requires.

A marvelous invention!

But an invention, a machinery, that like any other operating machine, requires regular maintenance and occassioned repair.

Today, corporations and other limited liability constructs, due to a slacker, lazy, indulgent operator .are machines running amuck, out of spec, endangering the rest of us, and the Foundations of the Nation -- any nation. Bad and lazy habits of being the master of the machine, and not its toady, have run rampant like a contagion throughout the world.

(Maybe I'll except Russia of recent on that.)

There is no such beast as an "International Company", for by definition that is one free from a State's bindings and manacles. Yet it is those leashes and bindings that are necessary to keep proper and healthy -- tame -- corporations. It is for us to re-cage those beasts, and train them to the right tune -- played from our pipes! And should their ears fail, let them heed a stout whip, if not a heavy cudgel.

If WE fail to tame those beasts, the whole world will fall to darkness and terror.

[bert]

Thje article presupposes that the course of history could be changed and the status quo of industry could be maintained. It can not. The problem is not political, it is historical.

The only constant is change. There might be some control over the rate of change, but the inexorable forces of change will prevail.

There is a great desire to maintain the inflated cost structure of American industry as it existed for many years. This is possible only in a static world.There are lots of folks in the world who are willing and capable of doing the work at a lower cost. They are the driving force of change. Like heat flowing to a cooler area, industry will flow to the area of low cost. To do otherwise is to produce but not sell.

Managers know this to be the case and to survive are restructuring the way things are done. To sit idly by is suicide.

Producing is easy. Selling is hard. There is no benefit from producing warehouses of goods that can't be sold because the cost is too high.


The onbly solution is education. Americans must forget what was and learn what is going to be and then reeducate themselves.

[bert]

....feeling guilty with name calling....

Not guilty, piteous is more like it. Those who aren't paying attention deserve pity.

[GOP_1900AD]

At last, a courageous and correct truly conservative perspective regarding the relationship between corporations and the sovereign nation state. Sad thing is, 90% of the USA don't know how to understand this, let alone even have the capability to reason like this.

[Protagoras]

The only thing super sized is the ignorance of people who think the lack of a trade war and not high taxes and smothering regulations are the problem.

People who think that are filthy traitors.

[1rudeboy]

. . . as I have been issuing this challenge for quite a while now

[yawn] Maybe folks have grown tired of jumping through your sophistic hoops?

[harpseal]

[yawn] Maybe folks have grown tired of jumping through your sophistic hoops?

There challenge is to deal with hard data ie. quantative aanalysis. That is we take measured reality and compare it to theory. This is what got rid of the Ptolomeic view of the universe in astronomy. This is what led to Kepler's laws of planetary motion. This is what takes economics out of the realm of speculation and into the realm of science.

As to thoe who seek to distort reality to conform to their ideaology then they are merely propoagandists when it is internationalist propaganda tehn it is by definition Marxist.

If it is poromulgated by one falsely claiming the appelation fo conservative that just adds another lie.

I note that I happen to believe in Adam's Smith's views and I also note there is evidence to support at least one time wherew a tariff was not in America's best interest.

[Fledermaus]

My wife sure would like some of those middle and higher up tech workers to lose their jobs at her company. They are idiots. They, and most IT people, like to use the words "can't" or "impossible".

Like, "sorry, we CAN'T stop the program from spitting out a blank piece of paper before every job". Translation: I'm too lazy to change code since I'm not held accountable.

Or, "no, that program couldn't possibly do what you described, that's IMPOSSIBLE". Translation: How dare you find out I'm too stupid to fully test my programs and you, a peon manager, found my glitch. Remember, no one is going to hold our department accountable.

And her favorite, changing horses in the middle of the stream while she gets clients on the phone screaming at her for technical problems. From the IT people, "ah, you have to understand we have HP, Dell, IBM and other different servers and as we moved your product from one to another it didn't go as planned". Translation: We don't give a hoot to communicate to you were are rewriting your products code and instead of testing it ourselves, we just implemented it without consulting you in the middle of the day because, as you know, I get paid too much money to have to work past 7 pm.

Yeah, our hearts bleed for them! ;-)

[lelio]

Like, "sorry, we CAN'T stop the program from spitting out a blank piece of paper before every job". Translation: I'm too lazy to change code since I'm not held accountable.

Just wait until the IT work is outsourced to India. You'll get a better answer in "We can do it" but will have to fill out dozens of forms, it comes back poorly done, you have to communicate through 3 layers of management to explain what needs to be done, and it will only cost 5x more than talking to a decent developer that was in the next cube over.

Course it still doesn't make up for that she might have idiots in their IT department. Unfortunately in seperateing the wheat from the chaf in IT people what tends to stay are the people that will take low salaries.

[Fledermaus]

Yeah, I'm elite. I grew up very poor. I worked in crap jobs at $3.15 an hour but was happy to get it.

I also spent two summers working at Whirlpool in Ft. Smith, Ark making refrigerators. The union crap I saw was amazing. Fraud, waste, lies, cheating, stealing, etc. And half of them were drunk and stoned most of the time. The plant even had a two hour lunch hour on Friday, payday, because they knew everyone was out drinking. I saw a drunk bimbo get her fingers cut off and she and the union got attacked the company.

I even saw what I'd call sabotage.

Many of your points I'd agree with. Yes, many, many illegal aliens come to get free services but most come just to find a job. I don't want them here either. And if you paid more attention to what I posted, I said Mexico should be responsible to create a country that has jobs for their citizens without forcing them on us.

I knew I get a few post like yours. You need to get that knee checked, it's jerking so much it's gotta hurt.

And not all third world countries that our companies utilize for labor aren't run by dictators. Talking in absolutes only weakens your argument.

And why the heck would I want to still pay $150 for a crappy VCR that I can buy at $30? That would be insane.

And I noticed you weren't willing to speak to the issue of higher prices if you have such protectionism. You think this is okay because of higher wages. Talk about economic ignorance. Incomes are up and prices are down. I can see you 100 years ago whining about the coming of trains and cities and other mechanical machines that would eventually reduce the number of farmers needed as we moved from an agriculturial based society to manufacturing. Now our manufacturing is more on the high tech level on chips, computers, cars, etc. It would be insane to pay someone $20 an hour plus benefits to put a grommet in a hole. Even in the automobile plants they use robots to do many jobs people once did. And I'm sure you whined about that too.

Where do think the word sabotage comes from? Workers in some Euro hell were worried about their jobs with the advance of machines and threw their shoes, sabots, into the machinery to destroy them.

And most average Americans are earning more and more every year because they offer ever increasing productivity and value for their pay.

Companies like Nissan and BMW make cars on the south in non-unionized companies. But if they cost of the employment increases to the point they can't compete, they'll shift to even less costly places like Canada. But they won't go to Mexico to make the car fully since the Mexican worker isn't smart enough to do the work.

So putting together remote controls - Mexico. Putting together cars and computers - United States. Now, which job do you think pays more?

I suggest you read Dr. Walter Williams more. You're thick.

[Fledermaus]

In her company, they get paid big time! She knows, she files the companies IRS taxes (they are a payroll processing company).