Tech_Esq
Sic Semper Tyrannis!
I concur. Much of the industrialized world was in ruins. plus our allies were basically broke, and they owed the USA enormous debts, too
Ok
Good theory, not really supported by the trade numbers though.
For a VERY LIMITED number of industries, yes they did get stuff from us.
All I was talking about here was the 1950s and 1960s. This was a time when quite a lot of what we made was shipped overseas and our manufacturing base was still healthy.
Which ones?
Mostly our arms industries. But no real benefit came of that because we the US taxpayers (many of who were working in those antiquated US industries at the times) PAID for that hardware they were buying from our arms merchants, even while those same American Taxpayers were ALSO paying for those nations security, too.
That explains some, but not all by any stretch, of what was going on.
Nice for Japan and Germany but one that was terribly, expensive for us as a whole.
That depends on your perspective. If you grant that the Truman Doctrine was what we should have been engaged in at the time, then choices were to arm Germany and Japan to the extent that they represented a credible obstacle to a surging Soviet Union. A militarily strong Germany and Japan was not anything anyone was interested in in the 1950s and 1960s and maybe not now. Even if they were "within and international framework of collective security." Our other choices were, do it ourselves just occupying their country (an option close to what was done in Japan). Or, a half measure, where the country is rearmed to a point and occupied (like we did with Germany). Given our options, I'm not convinced we made the most expensive choice.
If you reject the Truman Doctrine, then we have a different discussion on our hands.
Inefficient? We had the most efficient industries on earth until we BOUGHT other nations their newer industries. We could have invested that money in the USA but that didn't jibe with our foreign policy.
I was using the term "efficient" in an economic sense. I wasn't talking about efficient industry, I was talking about labor. We pay an increasingly inefficient amount for our industrial labor force. While I'm all for people making as much as they can, it must comply with the laws of economics. I'm pretty convinced at this point that it is a fantasy to wish the rest of the world away. If we did isolate ourselves so we could continue the inefficiencies, our products would eventually suffer and we would suffer an equally hard landing as our fantasy castle fell down.
WE BOUGHT most of the so called allies we had during the cold war. We bought them by giving away our industrial base.
Pretty much, yep.
You mean EXACTLY like they did and STILL do to us, you mean?
It's a matter of degree.
Oh boo hoo hoo. Look at the balance of trade and get back to me would you?
LOL...settle down.
The percentage of industrial workers in America was 30% then. It's 6% now.
Yeah, apparently the brainiacs decided that we don't want industrial workers that why they want to send every fucking body to college.
Everything you say makes sense except it is not supported by the numbers, amigo. It's a grand theory, but its not true.
Where the fuck is it written that its the reponsibility of some machinist in Indiana to give up his job so that a machine in Yokohama can have it?
I believe that would be the "Invisible Hand" at work but on a global scale. This is the effect of increased communications and shortened distance in space and time between global locations. The fact that I can pick up a phone and get something to virtually any part of the globe within a week has had a huge impact on jobs.
You then get into your standard "highest and best use" analysis. Is it really the highest and best use of the American work force to be turning a single nut on a bolt 8 hours a day for $50 per hour? Is that really an economic argument you want to have?
The fact really is that we are being let down by our business and government leaders. (Or is it just being let down by ourselves?) At this point in our development, we need to be on to the next thing. Manufacturing was it for really about 150 years. It's over. We have spent untold riches to be far beyond any other country with our technological infrastructure. We practically have "last mile" fiber optic cable in every major city and suburb in the country. We have high speed multi-gigabit routers interconnecting the entire thing. To what end? So we can watch porn faster? Hopefully not. We need to take advantage of our assets and our differentiators and stop looking back at the past. We are no more going to have 30% of our workforce involved in manufacturing again than we will have 30% involved in agriculture. The family farm will never return. The days of masses of laborer going to steel mills and auto plants will not return either. It's just facts. We need to stop being nostalgic for a by-gone era and get on with our migration to new technologies or we will get our ass handed to us.
Didn't allow us to stay ahead, it merely give us still another industry to ship overseas after we'd perfected it.
How many computer chips or computers are actually made here, now?
I'm not sure, but I have a Micron chip plant 5 miles from my house sitting right in Manassas, VA. So, we're making some of them here.
Does it? No the profits return to a very very select number of Americans...who may or may not actually pay any taxes on it.
The average American gets diddlie-squat from those Tiwanese widgits
And then what? Does the money evaporate? Do these few people hold it in off-shore accounts? If it is held in US banks, (in normal times) it allows banks to lend capital at a 9-1 ratio of funds held to loans out. It is likely also spent in the US for R&D efforts and other non-manufacturing business efforts.
They don't huh? In most cases they own more than 50% of those industies, and now they OWN the skilled work force because their workers are doing the jobs instead of American workers.
It helps their industrial base, and the multiplier effect which an industrial base creates. The multiplier effect is even greater than the industrial base, and we don't get SHIT from that, do we?
Meanwhile their workers do NOT pay US taxes, our workers lose those VITAL SKILLS, and whole regions of our nation sit and rust.
Galling isn't it? Every argument you make here, you are making for the US position vis-a-vis Toyota, Honda and all the other overseas companies that manufacture in this country. So they chose to leave Michigan and Ohio and go to South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee etc. Even GM built their Saturn plant in Tennessee.
Where are the PARTS for their cars made, champ? In America? No. All that happens is their cars are ASSEMBLED here. They're STILL mostly making the parts in Japan and Germany and Korea, amigo.
Ok, well you have some wiggle words in there so it probably doesn't matter that Dana and Spicer are still producing parts in the US Plants in Jonesboro, AR But I'm not going to search out the production facilities of every parts manufacturer. There are some that are in the US and some that are overseas. Freund.
Why? Because their leaders are nationalists, that's why.
More like because we are pussies.
Good advise. Shame we bankrupted ourselves instead of investing in America, huh?
Yes
Why should they? They realize that American leadership is going to do that for them.
Doubt it, we'll be too broke. We may want to, but we will not be able to. The real problem is that nature abhors a vacuum. This will all a new power or several to rise. That will be to our peril no doubt.
Pal I fear we are all going to live long enough to see that happen.
How long do you suppose we can be a world power with no industrial base, bankrupted governments, Federal state and local, one of the the worst edcuational system in the first world, no health care for our people and so forth?
Pull up! Pull up!! LOL... you're in a death spiral. We do have some industrial base, but more importantly, we could have one if we needed one. It isn't like we don't know how to do it. If we had the need to create robotic assembly lines we could do it. For example, needed to create the capacity to manufacture the MRAP armored vehicle and deploy them to Iraq. It took about 6-8 months to put it together and ramp up, but by the time we hit 12 months we were exceeding production schedules. So, we can if we need to.
Yes, the government is bankrupt (not our state and not our local, so you must be speaking parochially) The other levels have financial challenges, but we are meeting them with cuts in services and layoffs in our state.
Education is our worst problem. As long as the NEA lives and breathes it will never improve either. All of the high schools in the county I'm in are in the top 5% nationally. Since I'm not overly impressed with our schools, the rest of them must just suck.
It's not that we don't have health care. There is a specious number of 47 million people that don't have health care, but like frictional unemployment, this is frictional uninsurance. I agree we need to do better but meet me on another channel for that discussion. I have a GREAT plan to fix it! It's a cool little bit of everything solution.
What many of us have been mistaking in some others of us here as socialism has really been our raging NATIONALISM.
I agree, that's why on trade issues the left ends up agreeing with Pat Bucannan. He's a nationalist and a populist first.
But many of us have been poisoned with a load of economic horseshit disguised as ADAM SMITH economic wisdom.
Likewise I not the enormous kneejerkly stupid anti-government, anti-democratic Randian blather still enthralls many of you as being great wisdom, too.
Many of our fellow American have not only bought into that horseshit, but they're absolutely THRILLED that MOST Americans are going broke, just because we're not (not yet at least)
Shadenfreuden much?
Your meds are over there ----->>>
LOL....so I'm guessing you aren't a big Ayn Rand fan, is that right? Most Americans are going broke????? Really? And yet 93% are paying their mortgages on time every month. That is a shocking statistic? They must have save a butt load to be able to do that while going broke. Kinda makes me feel like a slacker.
You bet your ass that's exactly the vile conceit that many of us right here on this board examplify every damned day.
And the masters play on these class traitors' childish conceit like a Strataverious, too don't they?
A lot of us have bought a very complex theory which is completely and totally WRONG.
We haven't read Adam Smith, yet we can quote a parced out sentence or two which supports something that ADAM SMITH did NOT support.
ADAM SMITH was an economic nationalist, folks.
ADAM SMITH no more believed in FREE TRADE than King GEORGE III did.
When he talks about free trade what he's REALLY talking about is not trying to make ENGLAND a nation which grows its own cork, or grows its own GRAPES.
But he was a member of the government of England.
The very same government which OUTLAWED INDUSTRY in Nother America.
Why?
Because he KNEW what apparently some of us do not...that a nation needs to foster its own industrial development.
Not ship it to another nation as we have been doing, but protect it for its own development.
I'll have to chew on this one for a while. My knee jerk reaction is that technological innovation creating shorter trade routes modifies some of what Smith wrote. But, it has been a while since I read the Wealth of Nations, so I might have to go home and dust it off and take another peek.
Enjoyed the post!