Ford overtakes toyota

[sealybobo]

So, in Michigan, do they keep you from advancing in prosperity? I mean, you are saying bye, bye middle class, like people can't do something else besides whatever they were doing.

Why can't all the auto workers become upper class? (Whatever that is)

Is it the right of all people in Michigan to make $40,000 + for turning one bolt to the right for 7 hours a day? I seriously don't get the mind set at all.

Of course you do not. Now tell us what you do and how much you make and I won't get the mindset of why you make as much as you do. And your job is next buddy.

And we can always find a Chinamen, Indian or Mexican to do that job better and for less.

The American middle class did not happen because of free markets. Free markets create a small rich ruling class and a huge working poor class.

You need to take a time trip back in time before unions came to be. And then tell me if that is the America you prefer or the America we had the past 50 years where it was possible for people to get ahead and succeed.

Today, people are going from middle class to poverty, not the other way around.

And people are going to college and finding out what was marketable 4 years ago isn't marketable today. Nothing is marketable. Not in this shitty economy.

So everyone should start their own business?

Bush said he was going to create an ownership society, meanwhile, everyone is losing their homes and going out of business.

It is too much to explain to you don't get it at this point. Way too much to explain.

And those factory workers kill themselves. They are broken after 30 years. What is that worth to you? $15 hr? Well we can get illegals to do it for $10 hr. Should we?

PS. If you are labor, you should be ashamed of yourself. Or, what about your kids? If your kids decide to not go to school and they want to just be labor, do you really want American unskilled labor to have to compete with illegals? I don't. So what paying them more will raise prices. Deal with it. That's what makes America great. I'm sure you think it is something else, but you are wrong, as usual.

Nobody should be competing against illegals. They need to be banned successfully.

Free markets create more jobs than are lost. But, it does create labor dislocations that occur much quicker than in a non-free market society. Thus, government needs to create training programs to reduce the length of those dislocations. But, the people need to be willing to accept and excel in their training.

I already have to compete against everyone you can imagine for my job. You have no concept of how many different cultures are represented in the DC area. Legal, illegal everything. Michigan is like a homogeneous island compared to here.

There is no such thing as a free market. The middle class is the creation of government intervention in the marketplace, and won't exist without it.

Markets are the creation of government.

Governments provide a stable currency to make markets possible. They provide a legal infrastructure and court systems to enforce the contracts that make markets possible. They provide educated workforces through public education, and those workers show up at their places of business after traveling on public roads, rails, or airways provided by government. Businesses that use the "free market" are protected by police and fire departments provided by government, and send their communications - from phone to fax to internet - over lines that follow public rights-of-way maintained and protected by government.

And, most important, the rules of the game of business are defined by government. Any sports fan can tell you that football, baseball, or hockey without rules and referees would be a mess. Similarly, business without rules won't work.

Which explains why conservative economics wiped out the middle class during the period from 1880 to 1932, and why, when Reagan again began applying conservative economics, the middle class again began to vanish in America in the 1980s - a process that has dramatically picked up steam under George W. Bush.

The conservative mantra is "let the market decide." But there is no market independent of government, so what they're really saying is, "Stop corporations from defending workers and building a middle class, and let the corporations decide how much to pay for labor and how to trade." This is, at best, destructive to national and international economies, and, at worst, destructive to democracy itself.

Markets are a creation of government, just as corporations exist only by authorization of government. Governments set the rules of the market. And, since our government is of, by, and for We The People, those rules have historically been set to first maximize the public good resulting from people doing business.

If you want to play the game of business, we've said in the US since 1784 (when Tench Coxe got the first tariffs passed "to protect domestic industries") then you have to play in a way that both makes you money AND serves the public interest.

Which requires us to puncture the second balloon of popular belief. The "middle class" is not the natural result of freeing business to do whatever it wants, of "free and open markets," or of "free trade." The "middle class" is not a normal result of "free markets." Those policies will produce a small but powerful wealthy class, a small "middle" mercantilist class, and a huge and terrified worker class which have traditionally been called "serfs."

The middle class is a new invention of liberal democracies, the direct result of governments defining the rules of the game of business. It is, quite simply, an artifact of government regulation of markets and tax laws.

When government sets the rules of the game of business in such a way that working people must receive a living wage, labor has the power to organize into unions just as capital can organize into corporations, and domestic industries are protected from overseas competition, a middle class will emerge. When government gives up these functions, the middle class vanishes and we return to the Dickens-era "normal" form of totally free market conservative economics where the rich get richer while the working poor are kept in a constant state of fear and anxiety so the cost of their labor will always be cheap.