I agree - sort of ;)
My point to posting was not to forestall debate, but to point out that there's an upside to the loss of manufacturing jobs. Capitalism is all about "creative destruction", as it's phrased - old industries die off and make room for new ones. Less profitable manufacturing jobs disappear and are replaced by more profitable service jobs.
None of this should be taken to mean that these transitions are easy or painless - simply that in the long run, we are better off letting the market seek its own solutions, rather than trying to preserve a particular way of life for a subset of the population, at the expense of everyone else.
My concern is family enterprise (farm, business) and the communities they support. We are not faceless consumers as in Econ 101. We are people, who live and work in families and communities. For communities to be effective, money has to stay in the community, for charities, ads in high school yearbooks, etc. etc.
I agree - more than anything else, small business is the engine of growth in this country. And I think that small business will continue to be just that. I only predict that businesses of the heavy/light manufacturing type will continue to be increasingly endangered. And while that's going to be difficult for some in the short-term, in the long run, we'll all be better off for it.
The world's changed, and this country has changed. The days when a person could get a high-school diploma, head down to the local steel mill or auto parts plant the day after graduation, and get a job that lasted an entire lifetime and paid enough to comfortably support a middle-class family on, are gone. Those days are gone forever. And rather than talking about how to bring them back, I think we're better served by preparing for the future, rather than the past.
There is still more to it. Freedom includes the freedom to freely make a living; this includes a reasonable access to productive assets for the people as a whole, not only oligarchists and mega-capitalists.
Well, you should have access to productive assets in the "your money is as good as anyone else's" sense, but I draw the line at anyone arguing they have a right to a particular standard of living. Everyone should have the same opportunities to provide for themselves, but that doesn't mean that some choices aren't better than others. We don't argue that minimum-wage burger-flippers have a "right" to make more money because they feel they should have a higher standard of living (well, okay - the libs do, but we don't make that argument much around here), so why should that argument be valid for anyone else? Opportunities are rights belonging to everyone - a particular outcome is not.
If economic efficiency were the only consideration, maybe we should all be wage-slaves for an international mega-copropration.
Economic efficiency may not be what concerns us as individuals, but that's what markets do. They move resources to their most productive uses. You can fight the market, and try to sweep back the tide; or, you can try to figure out how to ride the wave and profit from it. I would point out, however, that the fate of nations that try to preserve a particular way of life in the face of a world changing around them is generally not good. Move ahead or die, is the general lesson of history in this respect. Ask the Imperial Chinese. Ask the pre-Meiji Japanese. Ask the Native Americans. Heck, ask the Taliban, who want to pretend that it's still 1350 AD.
And I should point out that slaves are not as productive as free men. Slaves have little vested interest in maximizing productivity - their incentive is to do the absolute minimum amount of work possible. That's not the point you were making, I know, but there it is ;)
In addition, as has been pointed out on this thread, government tax and regulatory policies do not create a level-playing field. So "economic efficiency" is distorted.
Again, I don't mean to defend the current tax and regulatory scheme, but if you go through the CPUSA (still can't get used to that) site, they aren't talking about lowering taxes and reducing regulations. They want to increase tariffs - bottom line. They aren't arguing that they're overtaxed and over-regulated, but that wages elsewhere are "unfairly" low, and thus that they need protection.
Sorry, that's a non-starter for me. I see no need to pay twice as much as the rest of the world for shoes simply because these folks feel that they deserve it so much that they feel justified in forcing me to pay it. If they have a product worth buying, price- and quality-wise, I'll take a look, and if they don't, I won't. But either way, nobody has a "right" to force me to pay more than I otherwise should. That's simple theft, and I won't stand for it. Appeals to patriotism are simply shameful - I don't "owe" textile workers my money, any more than they "owe" me a shirt. And that's the bottom line for me.
On the other hand, I see nothing wrong with my deciding to buy their shoes, even if they are more expensive than those made in China. I don't want to buy shoes made in China, for a variery of reasons. I do want to buy shoes made in the USA if I can. I want my fellow Americans to be able to earn a decent living. I don't want them to sink to the wage levels of the Chinese.
Re: the efficiency of the market and driving out old inefficient industries in favor of new industries, etc., and not artificially proping up an old way of life . . .
I agree with you that that is what the market does. However, the market is the collective of individual decisions. So if we want to preserve a way of life in America, there is nothing wrong with using our purchasing decisions to do so. The market is using cold economic calculus. So we have to reflect our preferences for certain American ways of life in our purchasing decisions, or the market will not reflect those preferences.
The grand American experiment is an amalgamation of many things, certain freedoms and ways of life along with capitalism. Since we don't disagree on a lot of the basic issues, maybe the debate should be about which ways of American life are important and even vital to our uniqueness and promise as a nation, and thus worth preserving? I think small manufacturing fits into that. You would probably argue, I am dreaming, and only trying to postpone the inevitable. I am hoping technology will help in the revival. E.G. shoes again: many people in my family cannot find shoes off the shelf. Technology should permit making individual shoes to fit based upon measurements. Just in time manufacturing to the person. Etc. . . .
Unless we are going to do away with the nation state, there is also some logic to the national security argument. . . .
Thanks for your thoughtful response . . .
I thought of something recently, and thought it important enough to bug you about it. Hope you don't mind the late addition. ;)
This: there are three recognized ways to create wealth: natural resources (timber, mining, etc.), manufacturing, and agriculture. (This was hammered home to me in my MBA and IE education.) Services, etc., transfer around wealth that was already created via enterprises of those three types. E.G., for retail, restaurants, health clubs, hair salons, stock brokers, etc. to survive, people have to have money; and no matter how many times it changed hands, money had to come from wealth created from natural resources, manufacturing, or agriculture . . .
So a nation that chooses to or allows those wealth-creating enterprises to wither, is saying it will not be a creator of wealth, but will survive by providing services to people in other countries who do create wealth. So that nation's economic health is tied to the economies of those other countries to a much greater extent than if it retained a viable wealth-creating capacity for itself, as well as relying on providing services to others. It could provide services to itself (from the wealth created within its borders) even if other economies were in trouble.
This seems a very sensible strategy to me. It seems shortsighted not to maintain natural resources, manufacturing, and agriculture at a viable/healthy level . . . It is in the national interest to do so . . . How can be debated . . .