So for a while longer, we need the miner, the oil pumper, the farmer, the fabricator, the carpenter, the road-builder, the railroad guy, the cement layer, the chemist, the computer engineer — and the system that allows them all to create wealth unimpeded by government and in an environment in which the citizen who benefits from their labor appreciates their industry.
Finish the obvious thought, VDH. It's our moronic trade policies that have stripped away our real wealth, policies that have since WWII opened our markets to any and all comers while allowing competitors to keep their markets closed to US. Free trade, and the pretend free trade the US has practiced for decades, are nothing but formulas for averaging down the US standard of living and national wealth.
On the contrary: America is in trouble not because of Free Trade, but because it can't compete. Its industry is weighed down with taxation, over-regulation, unionization and an increasingly poorly educated or tax-demotivated workforce.
Shutting down Free Trade and forcing Americans to buy their stuff from feather-bedded internal suppliers would solve these problems how?
The only reason you guys have any standard of living at all is because other people make stuff well and cheaply.
Don't like it? Try reducing your internal barriers to wealth-production. Don't whine about the competition.
He does, in the next sentence beyond your selection.
So for a while longer, we need the miner, the oil pumper, the farmer, the fabricator, the carpenter, the road-builder, the railroad guy, the cement layer, the chemist, the computer engineer — and the system that allows them all to create wealth unimpeded by government and in an environment in which the citizen who benefits from their labor appreciates their industry. [emphasis added]If you think VDH is going to come out of the protectionist closet and say, "the road to prosperity is for the the government to randomly make stuff more expensive," then you are projecting Pat Buchanan.
The Greeks are in trouble because of too little government interference in their economy? Because their taxes are too low?
I think we're in trouble because of bad public schools and poor reading skills (ahem).
All of these guys with the possible exception of the last do physical work of some type with physical matter.
Is VDH saying that intellectual labor, the type he himself performs, does not create actual wealth? That development of internet systems such as Google, Youtube and Amazon do not create wealth? How about the entertainment industry? It generates things people desire and are willing to buy. Is it not "wealth" because it isn't physical?
This sounds a lot like the old physiocrats, who thought "real" wealth could only come from agriculture, while industry only moved already existing stuff around.
I'm not trying to be sarcastic, I really want to know. Does no part of the service industry produce real wealth?