"Tom Gardner" wrote in message
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"Ed Huntress" wrote in message
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wrote in message

snip
But the workers in those areas are happy just to have jobs.

--
Ed Huntress


I wonder if people in Michigan would be happy just to have jobs...oh,
never mind.

I think the people in Michigan, having seen what enterprise *can* do for a
society, recognize that the current scheme is a complete ripoff, partly
engineered by business interests and globalization ideology, and partly an
inevitable consequence of historical development. They may not know how it
happened, but they know the difference between the lives they once lived and
the lives they live now.

When you think about this subject, Tom, you should keep a couple of things
in perspective. One is that the old system was working for everyone
involved: workers were well-paid, and the businesses were getting loaded.
Another one is that this all changed when the world finally recovered from
WWII and became competitive with the US. Nothing much happened in the US to
put a crimp in our economy -- excepting a few sinkholes like the war in
Vietnam -- but everything changed in the world around us. Another issue that
looms pretty large, but which is exceedingly hard to measure, is that a lot
of the wind has gone out of our sails as we've run out of common goals to
work for. Frankly, we already achieved a reasonable approximation of
post-WWII goals by the mid- to late '60s. We've been floundering ever since,
while the developed world is just getting fired up about their own
possibilities.

I think you know I've spent over 20 years studying this and writing about
it, interviewing dozens of economists, government officials, corporate
executives, and so on. They can make the situation sound immensely
complicated an indecipherable, but it's really not. The usual excuses simply
don't add up. At every point in trying to unravel this, you need to look at
numbers. You have to make a balance sheet and P&L out of the whole thing to
see the big picture. The economic externalities, such as the unaccounted-for
costs of degrading the environment, DO NOT explain it. Our reversed trade
balance DOES NOT explain it. Deficit spending DOES NOT explain it, because
there was relatively little of it accumulated throughout that period, until
the mid-'80s. Even now, when you take out our deficits and re-calculate
where we would be without our current rates of deficit spending, it DOES NOT
explain it. Higher wages DO NOT explain it.

Only one thing involves numbers large enough to largely explain it, and that
is the effects of world competition. That's NOT to say it's explained by our
trade balance. What it is to say is that we are in a race to the bottom,
with competition shaving the margins off of wages and savings, directly and
indirectly, while business simultaneously has maneuvered to avoid the line
of fire, maintaining their profits in any way possible. We're winding up
with an economically divided society, and that makes us much weaker as an
economic force.

Even simplified, it's not something we could credibly discuss here, or in a
book, or in ten books. But you get a sense of it after spending a decade or
two tracking it down, digging up the numbers and seeing what's real and
what's an excuse. I don't pretend to have the answers to it but I think I do
have a sense of where the big numbers are, and what the forces are that are
at work. It's nothing like the trivialities usually discussed here; your
comments about unions and wages sound to me (with all due respect) like the
thoughts of a man floundering around for answers and scapegoats. Your
numbers simply don't add up, as I sometimes point out and as you always
ignore. g

I'm not going to try to change your thinking. You're comfortable with your
understandings and I rarely try to upset applecarts these days; those days
are over for me. Instead, you and your thinking becomes the object of
interest. MY interest has gravitated from understanding the economy to
understanding the people in it. And you and the people who agree with you
are an interesting object of study, to say the least. d8-)

--
Ed Huntress