Products fade away, not American workers

"De Soto, Holder of Twenty-nine World Records, builds a new aero-dynamic car at popular prices ... This year De Soto does the unexpected again ... introduces not one new car ... but two! ... We can't describe the new Airflow model. You will have to see it yourself to know how truly beautiful it is."

Go to a public library or a used-books-and-periodicals store sometime, select at random an American magazine from decades ago, flip through the pages at your leisure. What may strike you is not the now-forgotten news stories, but the energy and effort expended, the enthusiasm displayed, in the advertisements extolling products that were prominent at the moment, and that today are nowhere to be seen.

"When your head is stuffed up! Nothing helps a cold more than rest and sleep but you can't sleep when your head is stuffed up, and you can't enjoy your food when you can't smell and taste. If you want to have your head clear, enjoy your food and sleep peacefully, just buy a bottle of Mistol, put a few drops in each nostril and see how much better you feel immediately."

Labor Day weekend is as good a time as any to reflect upon what endures -- what matters -- in the life of American commerce and industry. What lasts are not the specific products we desire and purchase. They come and go. People, for a while, decide they need or want them....

I agree with your general assessment regarding the connection with socialism. There are many very important principles here, IMHO.

1. What socialists/communists fail to acknowledge is that basic human nature pushes us to want to better ourselves, to achieve, to distinguish ourselves. If this weren't true, we would not have made the advances we've made as a species - especially in the time frame in which we've made them.

2. When the ability of individual human beings to better themselves is suppressed, demotivation occurs - often along with depression and a variety of self-destructive behaviors (e.g. alcoholism in the USSR as one of a large number of examples).

3. Ironically, socialism/communism are generally pushed forward by ‘leaders’ who are narcissistic and who are in essence distinguishing themselves apart from the rest of us by being ‘leaders’ of these movements. Progressives are very often identified by a ‘save the world’ mentality - that features them as the special few who are the chosen ones to ‘save the world’. In essence, they are exhibiting behaviors consistent with item number 1 above, while pushing a world construct that denies the rest of us the right to distinguish ourselves.

4. The Utopian concept that we can technologically advance to the point at which human input is no longer needed, and we can all just ‘chill’ and enjoy the fruits of utopia - while ‘automation’ etc. takes care of business for us is terribly flawed for an extensive number of reasons. Among them:

A. Someone needs to invent, perfect, build, and maintain the automation. It will not just come into being on its own.

B. Even if one evokes the ‘ultimate’ automated society, in which ‘smart machines’ invent the automation, build it, perfect it, and maintain it, someone will have to invent and fabricate these ‘smart machines’. You could argue that ‘smarter machines’ will invent the ‘smart machines’, but this begins to get a little ridiculous and way too futuristic to be considered seriously in the current or foreseeable future context. Yes, all things are possible, but if one believes this scenario of machine begets machine begets machine, then I have Escher drawings you'd probably love to have hanging on your wall.

To me, the part of the human spirit that led us to go into space, to walk on the moon, and for many to die trying to reach the summit of Everest, is so intrinsic, basic, and intensely human that to deny these things essentially is to deny our humanity. Interestingly, on another thread today there was reference to the behavior of Russian athletes - including rudeness and hypercompetitiveness. In my view, it was inevitable that Russian athletes would be hypercompetitive, since for years and years athletic competition was the only way one could legitimately distinguish oneself in the USSR.

Lots to think about, and I'd love to hear other opinions.

I guess what I'm saying is that society is like a rowboat heading toward a waterfall. A lot of people are rowing full speed ahead for Obama because they are convinced that paradise is just around the corner.

At some point, it becomes impossible to turn around, and it may be that there is no "Plan B". People might wake up and say "Socialism really doesn't work!" and they may say "Our factories are automated, but who can buy the goods?"

And the question is: What now? You've gone over the waterfall. People lack a work ethic. People lack an education. The school system is a wasteland that simply cannot turn out a decent product for at least a generation. Morals are shot. The entire culture is shot.

People need to REALLY think out of the box. The problem is here today, but the fix is (maybe) 20 years away. What do we do?

I don't pretend to have the answer, but voting for a better guy, or tweaking section 24B of the tax code is definitely not going to stop us from going over the waterfall.

As I see it, the Left has executed a long-term plan over the past 100+ years. Conservatives need to stop thinking "How can next quarter be better?" and start thinking "Where can we hope to be in 2050?" As I say, I have no answer, but I think quick fixes are not the way. If going over the waterfall is inevitable (and I think it is) then we better start planning what to do after the crash at the bottom.

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