The Jobbing of Americans

Insight Magazine ^ | July 3, 2003 | Paul Craig Roberts

[Poohbah]

The question really is, how can the US compete on the world market.

Produce a better-quality product that makes up for the cost differential.

Of course, we COULD do things like get rid of the more asinine regulations and tax code pieces that do nothing to accomplish their stated goals but cost thousands of dollars per completed item for compliance.

But that would require repeal of some Democrats' favorite laws, and it would take a solid 60-vote majority of sane Republicans (i.e., no Olympia Snowe types) to get it through the Senate.

[PGalt]

Interesting.

[Nick Danger]

So it is with my words. You have pecked them apart like a buzzard rips through the carcass of a deer. Yet my words are no car-struck deer, enviscerated and rotting by the side of the highway.

I am able to think, observe, reason, model, predict, verify and correct. I gave reasons why I think you are wrong; to me you seem to have some religious-level mystery beliefs.

I trust you will recognize those as your words. If you want to dish it out, you have to take it, too.

[bvw]

What malice do you bear against me, what is its source?

[Nick Danger]

What malice do you bear against me

I have no malice against you. I have malice against bullsh*t, particularly bullsh*t that would lead people to perceive solutions in places where there aren't any.

"The corporations this, the corporations that, they're all crooks, and the ones who aren't are incomptent or fools" is of no utility. It tells us nothing that is generally true. We cannot use it to formulate any plan to fix anything. Collectively, "the corporations" are how we organize ourselves into groups to engage in economic activity. If all of them are full of crooks and fools, then we too are crooks and fools, and there is no solution anywhere because anywhere we turn there will just be another busload of crooks and fools.

So I hear this, and I get out my buzzsaw. Partly because it is a nihilistic rant, which I find annoying, but even more because none of this describes the thousands of people I have worked with in dozens of corporations over the years. Most people are good. Of course there's a crook here and an idiot there, but we did not become an economic superpower by assembling collections of fools and crooks to run everything. It pisses me off to hear people say that. Because it isn't true, and it can't be true or we wouldn't be where we are.

You just happened be the latest person to come by with a statue of the Virgin Mary that you had carefully made of dung. Trust me, I go after every one of those things I see, and I try my best to leave them in little shards along the roadside. Sometimes I break my chain on the damned things. But either way, it has nothing to do with you.

[bvw]

I strongly suggest you relearn how to read, for you have mischaracterized my remarks egregiously. The flaws your speak of are inventions of your own bad humor, and not one to a word of what I said.

[bvw]

"flaws you speak of" -- a typo

[Elliott Jackalope]

Great post. I'm wondering if this whole "third way" political/economic movement is a reaction to what you are describing.

I was under the impression that automation would not eliminate jobs, but would actually create more higher level jobs. People would lose their job assembling goods, but would instead get jobs installing or repairing robots. Some people would be displaced by this trend, but others would find even more opportunities made available by automation.

However, with outsourcing, I don't see the jobs being created that would be created with automation. An automated factory in America creates jobs for people who design/sell/install/maintain these machines. A cheap labor factory in China does not create these opportunities for American workers.

The other question that comes to mind is that if overseas labor is cheap enough, plentiful enough and good enough, what market forces remain to promote automation? I can see how automation eventually creates more and better jobs for Americans. I can't see how oursourcing all of our production to China and India creates more and better American jobs. Am I missing something?

Again, excellent post. You bring a lot of good ideas to this forum.

[Nick Danger]

you have mischaracterized my remarks egregiously

Tit-for-tat threads are the bane of on-line forums, and I refuse to get sucked into one. I will point to notes 228 and 240, say that I consider both to have been general-purpose slurs on corporaions-in-general, and end my participation on the subject of why I chopped up your stuff.

[kegler4]

Perhaps this has already been asked and answered in this thread, but explain exactly how Amercian companies will compete with Chinese companies that pay their workers pennies an hour. Will you work for that, and if so how will you survive? Would like to live like the average Chinese worker?

[bvw]

They were not. Private corporations, with protection from over scrutiny of the government but a high sense of fiduciary duty maintained by the courts of equity are a fundamental necessity. My point is that publicly traded corporations are by and large irresponsible, absent any significant sense of fiduiciary duty, have lost the legacy of how to be responsible, and are becoming wards and ESTATES of the state by means of overly intrusive regulation and reporting requirements. I believe it is exceedingly difficult to find books of such public stock companies that are not in many siginifcant ways, fantasy.

While the stock market and mutual stock funds are a great pride and money belt to so many, I fear it is a sham of the biggest sort. Bondholders come first. What is not bankrupted will be left alive on the drip for the delight of the Federal fascists.

[Nick Danger]

My point is that publicly traded corporations are by and large irresponsible, absent any significant sense of fiduiciary duty...

It does not seem to occur to you, as you write sentences like that, that a reasonable person could interpret those words as hurling needless abuse at tens of thousands of quite ordinary people, in thousands of organizations.

You are dealing with a set of people there that is so large that you might as well be criticizing people-in-general for being irresponsible louts. That's fine, there's room in the world for Calvinist preachers too, but you aren't telling us anything about corporations. You're just telling us that people do not meet your high standards. My view is, you're stuck on a planet that is full of them, so get used to the idea that things are going to be screwed up. People screw up; it's what we do best.

[bvw]

So it may be. In the late 1700's the abolishionists began to warn the tens of thousands in thousands of organizations of slaveowners. They were also mocked and derided. Took another 65 years for push come to shove and the result incredibly bloody. This end phase will not be as long, hard to imagine it could be.

[bvw]

In other words, your "that a reasonable person could interpret those words as hurling needless abuse at tens of thousands of quite ordinary people, in thousands of organizations" doen't mean much except for you invoking a mythical myriad .to be on your side and against mine. I'll see that mythical myriad, and raise it tens of myriads of myriads of people and organizations in some future that will remember our follies of "public corporations circa 2003" not so kindly.

[Nick Danger]

So now you are equating tens of thousands of people in publicly-traded corporations with slave owners, with yourself cast as one of the abolitionists. There's no shortage of moral high ground in your part of the country, is there. I bet you can raise really high horses there.

I think we are at the point here where you are attempting to transmit emotions through a textual Internet forum, and I'm just not very good at that. I see somebody casting people who happen to work in publicly-traded companies as slave owners, and I think, "That's frigging nuts." It's a limitation of my horribly crippled male brain. If I were one of them thar Metrosexuals I would know that all you're really saying is "those are horrible people and I just know it," but I can't be relied on to ever do that again.

In any case, "slave owners" is close enough to "Hitler" that we can now fairly invoke Godwin's Law. This law states that "if you mention Hitler or Nazis in a post, you've automatically ended whatever discussion you were taking part in." Hitler, slave owners, what's the difference? Let's call the whole thing off.

[TexasKamaAina]

The jobs being exported are NOT creating buggies. They are creating viable, state-of-the-art technology products. Otherwise, they wouldn't be shipped to the US, where we buy them and create a trade imbalance.

[eeriegeno]

duh, DH happens to be the ticker for Home Depot?

[Bob J]

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