Posted on 12/12/2010 3:55:10 AM PST by Scanian
Edited on 12/12/2010 4:06:21 AM PST by Admin Moderator. [history]
Among the number of plant closings announced in the United States this week: A printing plant in Greenburg, Ind., costing 220 jobs; a tomato processing plant in Westover, Md., with 103 people fired; an office-supply facility in Mattoon, Ill., with 129 jobs lost.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
Actually, none, to my knowledge . . . since your argument is a strawman.
Well, there was that one article that Rush mentions now and then about that writer who claimed that being unemployed was giving people free time to have "fun," or some such nonsense. But I know that's not what you are talking about . . . .
I have been told that TI and HP no longer make hand calculators in the US. Shame! Shame!
And our domestically-produced steel (which we have boatloads of) would be more expensive. Now, explain how you will remove steel from your life.
Lol, not a straw man at all. Just an appropriate response to your typical, inane and predictable 'contributions' to threads related to trade policy.
OSHA and the EPA would make sure that the steel would be so expensive that nobody could afford to buy anything made with it. An American made car would cost $60K. Not many would buy those.
If that was the case, you should have been able to come up with a better response. Are all protectionists stumped by “typical, inane and predictable” comments?
I am simply responding to the typical, inane and predictable line-of-reasoning that dictates: 1. if the government makes steel more expensive, more will be produced, and 2. if you don’t want to pay more for it, then don’t use it.
This is reasonably profound and interesting, in a big picture way, on the general topics of innovation, market disruption and how companies get their lunch eaten while being “smart businessmen” the whole way to insolvency and liquidation. By a Harvard Business School professor. 1 hour long talk, ~400M video download.
It speaks directly to your tales of outsourcing to Bangalore.
How the Principles of Good Management, as taught at the Harvard Business School, destroy companies
Video: Clayton (”Disruptive Innovation”) Christensen keynote at Supercomputing 2010
http://sc10.supercomputing.org/files/SC10-ChristensenPhone.m4v
If you find yourself losing interest, skip ahead to the Saga of Dell and ASUStek, starting at time 0:50:57.
Actually, little that you post is worth a response, as its intent is usually to dissemble and confuse the main points of a discussion rather than to add anything, or provide a a rational alternative opinion.
Look, I am not arguing that running trade deficits, "free trade" and buying goods today at artificially low prices is not economical beneficial for those of us living today. You and I will be dead when the true third world status hits the US. Future generations are going to curse you and me, me for letting it happen and you for being the short sighted greedy pig wallowing in selling our countries future prosperity. Get your head out of your ass, your an American G-damn it.
I sent you links a few days ago that will provide you with the exact figures. Instead of your usual broad and self-serving generalizations, maybe you'd like to provide the readers with the actual import/export totals, including the amount of imports that is made up of crude.
Steel is a small cost in manufacturing a car. about 5%.
So DOUBLING the cost of steel would increase the cost of a 20K car to 21K.
My people were famers. It worked out then because we had an exploding industrial revolution and the beginning of real mass production. The displaced farm hands were swallowed up by assembly lines, shipyards, machine shops, factories, and an auto industry that was beginning to take off. In 1910, we were beginning to get serious in aviation, and within four years, we had a World War.
"On January 13, 1910, the first public radio broadcast was an experimental transmission of a live Metropolitan Opera House performance of several famous opera singers." Now, there was a reason for still more assembly lines, as a sudden new insatiable demand was created.
All these began to create a middle class, an employed one, with money to spend. "Service Industries" were represented as..? A bell boy in a hotel, I guess, or a baggage handler at a railroad. station.
Bingo. That says with charts much the same thing as I was saying in #52.
I understand what you are saying, though technically, the Industrial Revolution occurred first, to allow the mechanization of agriculture. Really it was the burgeoning rise of assembly line mass production, not the Industrial Revolution.
I also bet that few foresaw that burgeoning rise at the time, and that we could find plenty of op-eds wondering what we were going to do with all the displaced farm hands.
My solution: Develop our energy resources to keep energy costs low, and devolve our government to reduce regulatory overhead. Let the free market take it’s course.
But they are not. Many of them are getting elected, and the rest are breeding like flies.
Not only that, but renorming the SAT scores all the time, and demanding that the illiterate have a "Right" to a college education (Have you seen the resumes?) assures an endless supply of them. These are the people who WOULD have been assembling widgets on assembly lines. But there are no assembly lines anymore. So they get a degree in Art Self Esteem, and then never work.
This is so, so important and can't be said enough. This must happen if America is to be saved, and soon.
You would think that free traders (me) and the protectionist alike would agree on this.
There is a major factor in those stats you don't mention. The manufacturing jobs that have been exported first were the more labor intensive jobs. For example, the sewing factory jobs were some of the first jobs to be exported to cheap labor nations, while the highly mechanized production of cloth and other textiles survived longer in the US. The same with many other labor intensive industries.
So those stats don't simply represent mechanization or improved productivity, but also the fact that the less productive, more labor intensive work has been largely exported to cheap labor nations, and are no longer in the computations.
I'd bet that is a bigger factor than real, improved productivity.
--and if we count everything we sell to foreigners it's equal to everything we buy from foreigners (balance of payments explained here). What politicians call the 'trade balance' is only goods and services and it's leaving out stuff like stocks, bonds, buildings, designs, patents, land, etc.
” My solution: Develop our energy resources to keep energy costs low, and devolve our government to reduce regulatory overhead. Let the free market take it’s course. “
Preaching to the choir, my FRiend —
The ‘Next Big Thing’ will only come about when impediments to the Free Market are removed....
(And I include, cheif among these ‘impediments’, Crony Capitalism, whereby entrenched businesses have co-opted Government to stifle innovation and competition)
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.