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Another free trade argument-WE DESERVED to lose the manufacturing
AND, it was inevitable, in which the National Review falls into line with Hillary Clinton and Bill Kristol
William French:
This hegemony could never last. The great industrial powers weren’t going to remain rubble forever. China wasn’t going to remain a poor, agrarian society forever. Neither was India. And when they revived, Germans and Japanese and Chinese were going to be just as ambitious as Americans.
Compounding the inevitable challenges, we tend to forget how much America squandered its advantages — how we gave other countries a competitive edge through our own failures. Take the car industry. By the 1970s, the Big Three automakers were making terrible cars. Poorly designed by white-collar workers, shoddily manufactured by blue-collar workers, they were failing the American people at an unacceptable rate.
I’m old enough to remember those cars. How could I forget? I remember my dad buying a brand-new Dodge that stalled whenever it rained. The upholstery literally fell off the roof of our Chevrolet. A Ford somehow leaked antifreeze onto our feet. And it’s no wonder: In many plants, the culture was completely broken. Here’s how one researcher, Jeffrey Liker, described the environment in a General Motors plant in Fremont, Calif.: One of the expressions was, you can buy anything you want in the GM plant in Fremont. If you want sex, if you want drugs, if you want alcohol, it’s there. During breaks, during lunch time, if you want to gamble illegally — any illegal activity was available for the asking within that plant. The high-paying job for life produces perverse incentives: Because the workers were stuck there, because they could not find anything close to that level of job, and pay, and benefits, at their level of education and skill. So they were trapped there. And they also felt like, we have a job for life, and the union will always protect us. So we’re stuck here, and it’s long term, and then all these illegal things crop up so we can entertain ourselves while we’re stuck here.
Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/432920/free-trade-donald-trump-american-manufacturing-stop-playing-victim
Nice try.
Let’ stipulate that for a moment (I am 66+ and I remember those cars, and it was NOTHING like that..I bought a ‘62 Volvo 544 in 1968 because it was cheaper than a Mustang, not because it was better, same for my 2 more well to do roomates who had a Dodge Dart, a Barracuda, and another like me who got an inexpensive Datsun 510), but let’s say or the sake of this argument, French is 100% accurate.
So explain why we deserve to lose the expertise in ASIC manufacturing?
The expertise in motherboard manufacturing?
Explain why the inevitability of of R&D, and engineering expertise, and TEACHING of thee things finally fleeing to the lowest cost labor is good or the American people?
Explain to me how pushing WELL TO DO KIDS into schools which ensure their entry in to STEM (STEM is an acronym for Science, Technology, Engineering and Math education), as one free trader snarkily told me, benefits the nation as a whole compared to MAKING WHAT WE NEED HERE, and the disposable income benefits that result from that. To stop free trade in a targetd fashion is NOT Smoot-Hawley, nor is this the 1930′s
Then along came Honda and Toyota. For American families, an inexpensive car that runs, reliably, for sometimes 200,000 miles or more is an enormous economic and psychological blessing. There’s no need to worry about breakdowns. The family budget isn’t strained by expensive repairs. Free trade helped American families. Competition proved healthy for the vast majority of Americans. American cars are better. Foreign cars are better, and many “foreign” vehicles are now American-made. Indeed, the list of the top seven most “American-made” cars (parts and assembly) includes two Toyotas and a Honda. The Toyota Camry tops the list.
And GP goes where?
Here is your real attitude of these free traders, these ultimate conservative PATRIOTS:
The glory days of American manufacturing were but a blip on the historical radar screen, the product of unique conditions that — we pray — will never exist again. Critically, we cannot forget that change can be painful. People suffer.
I will say this again. It is as unrealistic to expect pure conservatism to be successful as any other utopian system.
We have only to look at those employment charts from the Bureau of Labor stats I keep posting, or consider the reluctance of Alan Greenspan to impose regulation on the free market of Credit Default Swaps, and Collateralized Debt Obligations from 2004-8 to know this is observable fact.
The USA is in an unsustainable situation and yelling at the American workers displaced by (example) Indonesians working for Nike just emerging from living in cardboard boxes because they are not adapting fast enough to fit the pure economic models of free markets is an ICE COLD FARCE which achieves nothing.
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