No, you incorrectly extrapolated my microeconomic argument into a macroeconomic prediction that I never made.
My point is simple: People who lack any marketable skill other than a high school degree and who refuse to retrain to meet market demand (which is just another way of saying “provide stuff people want”) are going to be poor. They will always be poor. Nothing the government does can change that in any sustainable long-term way. No one “owes” them a job. You aren’t entitled to make a living just because you are willing to work. You MUST provide something people want of their own free God-given will.
Your argument simply reinforces, rather than repudiates, my position. Society in the past progressed because the base population progressed forward WITH technology not against it. The generation that made automobiles and planes in domestic factories LEARNED THOSE SKILLS FROM SCRATCH because those industries didn’t exist in the prior century. They progressed to meet market demand. As I said before, the wise horse and buggy manufacturers retooled and become car plants. The ones that didn’t adapt probably bitched about their bygone glory days and wondered why they couldn’t feed their kids.
So I will say it again: Those who lack any discernible skills other than manual labor, which has become virtually free due to productivity gains in technology, will find themselves increasingly irrelevant and unable to survive because the wage a “free market” would set would be below a sufficient level necessary to feed oneself. That wage level is already artificially increased by the Federally mandated minimum wage.
To think that THOSE TYPES jobs are going to come back is delusional. But the free market presses on ... when the whalers died out, the kerosene market rose. When it fell, the crude oil market grew to power. Then came natural gas.
Society will be just fine. But the guy waiting for the steel mill to return? For the auto plant to start hiring again? Yeah, he’s out of his freaking mind. It isn’t going to happen. I’m sure there were old sea captains that were convinced the whaling days of blubber powered fat fuel were destined for a resurrection. They died hoping to see it with empty bank accounts.
OK, I think I understand your central point. You are saying that people need to train themselves to supply the skills the market needs and that politicians and the past are not necessarily good guides to that. I’ll agree.
I also agree regarding the person who is waiting for the plant to reopen. In many cases it is not likely to happen. BUT, I will disagree if you think we don’t have a comparative advantage in manufacture with a Constitutional government and a free market. The system itself is one of our major comparative advantages . . . and we are legislating that system away.
I believe that Chinese and other nations currency valuations are a form of tariff and trade policy. GATT has focused on tariffs and for all intents and purposes elimated them. To me this is bad . . . because tariffs are easily understood and generate revenue only on spending, not on income, and were a traditional way of funding the US government back when we were expanding in power relative to the rest of the world — back when we were more successful. It is also bad because currency markets are hard for voters and politicians to understand and control, at least in Democratic countries, and so make trade policy impenetrable.
My other point of disagreement is if you are going farther than your training point, and believe that those that are not intelligent or well trained will be unemployable in modern economies you are wrong. It’s just that these jobs are currently held by illegals in our particular economy.
If you want to extrapolate to a future with vacuum cleaning robots in place of hotel maids, I reserve the right to extrapolate to a free market economy in which such wealth is generated that the hotel maid’s salary gives her a better standard of living than today’s engineer (those that are employed and haven’t been replaced by an Indian or Chinese fellow because of our sell-out Congress’ allowing immigration at corporate request). Such things happen . . . I read a columnist once that compared a modern plumber on a cruise ship to Loius the 16th favorably in terms of his standard of living.