On Fri, 14 Nov 2003 19:21:40 -0800, "Harold & Susan Vordos" wrote:
It's high time all of us start taking a realistic look at the money we make.
Don't lose site of the fact that regardless of how much a worker gets paid,
it is you, the consumer, that pays the salary. Business will continue to
raise prices to compensate for their increased overhead. They must, or
they go out of business. In the end, we all lose.

Or at best we stay the same. When there was no effective foreign
competition, we could afford to stay on the treadmill, chasing goods
with ever increasing costs by making ever increasing wage demands
(which, of course, insured goods would have ever increasing costs).
But that day has about come to an end.

Now we have less expensive alternatives to US made products.
If we continue to make ever increasing wage demands, there won't
be any jobs, because the ever increasing prices of the goods we
make won't find any market. The jobs will go overseas, and with
them the wages those jobs paid. To keep our jobs, we're going to
have to learn to accept less money for doing them.

There's no other real way to stop this movement of manufacturing
offshore, short of nuking the rest of the world to eliminate the
competition. So to maintain the excessive lifestyles to which we've
become accustomed, we need to find other lines of work, service
jobs, that the world needs done, but only we can do.

One such job is policeman. We're in a position to become policeman
for the world. No one is in a position to stop us, and the world does
need a policeman. The trick will be to get the world to pay for it.

Like policemen everywhere, we can resort to strongarm tactics,
protection rackets, extortion and theft, graft and corruption to
sustain us if other nations won't voluntarily pay for our services.
As the only remaining superpower, we can play that role, using
the blood of our young to sustain our lifestyles. It is called empire.

But it would be better if we could get the world to accept us in this
new role more willingly. To do that, we have to be better politicians.
We have to convince the world we're looking out for their interests
by filling this role. We're not currently doing a good job of that.

Gary