Posted on 07/13/2003 7:09:50 AM PDT by cp124
Buggy whips were a tiny part of the nation's output back then. The present destruction of American manufacturing is cutting such a wide swath through this country, we won't even be able to build critical, strategic defense items to protect ourselves.
A country that makes nothing is nothing.
So you want free market capitalism? So do I but it doesn't exist because countries such as China will not let Americans sell our products there.
If you textbook capitalists put money ahead of your country, you are traitors. Here are the priorities: God, family and country, in that order.
I think our problem is currency related. Truly. I explained why on another thread.
Oracle to double staff in India to 6,000
I cut and paste the response here:
To anyone who will listen:
Labor is (relatively) cheap in India and expensive here because we are exporting inflation (paper dollars) to them and they are exporting deflation to us.
The reason we CAN export inflation is because the government is creating it.
Get the government to stop creating inflation and then we will stop exporting it and the foreigners will stop exporting deflation to us.
It really is about that simple. These problem with jobs leaving the US are currency related.
Expect these problems to continue as long as the government creates inflation and we export inflation.
The only way to stop the inflation spiral is to return to sound money, and that is understood to be gold and silver coinage and money substitutes (paper dollars, computer bits) that are redeemable and not in excess of the gold and silver coin on deposit somewhere.
DO THIS---and suddenly (because money becomes relatively scarce compared to when it was credit manufactured at zero cost) foreign labor will not look so cheap, and the temptation to send it out of the country will be gone. It will stay at home and only enough will leave (or come in) to balance small international trade imbalances. Foreign goods will again be paid for by local goods going the other way, not credit. Americans will be back at work and it will be done without "protectionist" trade barriers. The national debt will no longer be necessary because nearly all currency will be real instead of credit (except for some bills of exchange sort of credit). There might be some slight 1-2%/yr deflation in prices over time but it would be benign compared to the massive wage, salary, deflation felt by workers whose services in America are no longer needed because foreigners will work for 10% of what Americans will work for in paper dollars terms---as we export inflation to them and they export deflation to us.
If you found the above the least bit thought provoking, please read post 42 of this thread.
Hey, that's being an organic supremacist, Nick. Don't you realize that superintelligent, sentient programs like SkyNet are only doing the jobs that humans won't or can't do, like producing robots that hunt people?
You touched on something, which is the increasing adoption of Marxist terminology or sentiment by many that consider themselves free market. In fact, we just had some people whining about rolling conditions back to the 1890s, as if even people in Vietnam making sneakers are working under such circumstances(THEY'RE NOT.) We may be on a road to a great transition but with people even on this forum embracing autarky or some soft-facsism I don't see much hope for a solution that appeals to FREE people.
Just a bunch of slaves begging for their jobs programs around here.
Perhaps the $20 million dollars that Pres/CEO Robert Nardelli collects from HD every year keeps HD's costs down too? And the next 4 execs in HD's chain also extract a cool $15 million from the profits.
"And this has been happening intentionally for 35 years."
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ES, With the government subsidizing corporations {welfare incentives via tax breaks and actual grants} that move the jobs offshore. As in education, I see NO WAY that the policy makers didn't KNOW the destruction they would bring to the U.S. of A. AND, as a result, the destruction of any hope of freedom for the peoples of the world.
What really gets me is those "conservatives" who say and write that "It will be a good thing. Just wait and see." Dupes, or traitors???? I no longer can tell the difference. Henry Kissinger????? This is bad. Peace and love, George.
There are several problems with burger flipping jobs as the primary sustenance of our economy. Unless there is a very broad middle class to purchase meals out (even burgers) there simply will not be enough of those jobs. In short an economy needs a market able to purchase its goods and services. Unless an economy is producing enough goods and services in a world trade envirornment to eventually balance out the imports then the value of the currency used to purchase the imports will fall until the costs associated with those imports is so high that no one can afford them.
Of course long before we hit the total collapse of the dollar and unemployment at 50% of the work force we will find the USA has degenerated into a state of civil warfare. The people of the USA will only put up with the outsourcing of their jobs subsidized with their tax dfollars for so long before there is blood shed and a lot of blood shed.
Not only that, but those displaced buggy whip workers moved into the many other manufacturing jobs that became available. Now, with so many jobs being sent overseas, workers don't have that option. Now, an unemployed blue-collar worker has little hope of finding a new job that will pay him even a fraction of his old wages. Heck, even white-collar workers are finding that they are being displaced from, not only their jobs, but the middle-class. This is a recipe for disaster.
I doubt that the Author of our universe will be as willing to create such a facile way out.
Yeah, I noticed a lot of that going on during the Clinton years. The rich got a whole lot richer, and the poor got a whole lot poorer.
I don't have a problem with that in general. The rich generally get richer because they invest their money and work hard. The poor get poorer because of continuing to make poor choices in life. The Dems sure hate when this happens though, at least when a Republican is in office.
LOL Gettin' a little ahead of yourself there, Chicken Little.
Coolie(sp?) is a chinese word for 'hard laborer'. Nothing racist about it. Don't be so thin skinned.
But Harley Davidson only exists still because Ronald Reagan imposed a big fat tarrif on over 700cc Jap bikes, when HD was headed for extinction.
Bob Nardelli and gazillions of clownish Harley riders must be thanking their lucky stars for that thing, that dirty word, that nationalist practice that the randian purists deride, what do they call it....? "Protectionism", yeah that's it!
From this, and other things, I have learned, directly, just how invasive Federal Bureaucracy has become, that our economy is already a oligarchic fascism, and the cement on that model is hardening.
I can also be pessimistic as too what such beautiful blooms of intelect mean -- for I have grown tomatoes, and I now that to force the fruit, you slaughter the roots.
Yet great ideas are like the finest seeds -- they will survive even if we do not.
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