Who Killed Detroit?
Who killed the U.S. auto industry?
To hear the media tell it, arrogant corporate chiefs failed to foresee the demand for small, fuel-efficient cars and made gas-guzzling road-hog SUVs no one wanted, while the clever, far-sighted Japanese, Germans and Koreans prepared and built for the future.
I dissent. What killed Detroit was Washington, the government of the United States, politicians, journalists and muckrakers who have long harbored a deep animus against the manufacturing class that ran the smokestack industries that won World War II.
As far back as the 1950s, an intellectual elite that produces mostly methane had its knives out for the auto industry of which Ike's treasury secretary, ex-GM chief Charles Wilson, had boasted, "What's good for America is good for General Motors, and vice versa."
"Engine Charlie" was relentlessly mocked, even in Al Capp's L'il Abner cartoon strip, where a bloviating "General Bullmoose" had as his motto, "What's good for Bullmoose is good for America!"
How did Big Government do in the U.S. auto industry?
Washington imposed a minimum wage higher than the average wage in war-devastated Germany and Japan. The Feds ordered that U.S. plants be made the healthiest and safest worksites in the world, creating OSHA to see to it. It enacted civil rights laws to ensure the labor force reflected our diversity. Environmental laws came next, to ensure U.S. factories became the most pollution-free on earth.
It then clamped fuel efficiency standards on the entire U.S. car fleet.
Next, Washington imposed a corporate tax rate of 35 percent, raking off another 15 percent of autoworkers' wages in Social Security payroll taxes
State governments imposed income and sales taxes, and local governments property taxes to subsidize services and schools.
The United Auto Workers struck repeatedly to win the highest wages and most generous benefits on earth—vacations, holidays, work breaks, health care, pensions—for workers and their families, and retirees.
Now there is nothing wrong with making U.S. plants the cleanest and safest on earth or having U.S. autoworkers the highest-paid wage earners.
That is the dream, what we all wanted for America.
And under the 14th Amendment, GM, Ford and Chrysler had to obey the same U.S. laws and pay at the same tax rates. Outside the United States, however, there was and is no equality of standards or taxes.
Thus when America was thrust into the Global Economy, GM and Ford had to compete with cars made overseas in factories in postwar Japan and Germany, then Korea, where health and safety standards were much lower, wages were a fraction of those paid U.S. workers, and taxes were and are often forgiven on exports to the United States.
All three nations built "export-driven" economies.
The Beetle and early Japanese imports were made in factories where wages were far beneath U.S. wages and working conditions would have gotten U.S. auto executives sent to prison.
The competition was manifestly unfair, like forcing Secretariat to carry 100 pounds in his saddlebags in the Derby.
Japan, China and South Korea do not believe in free trade as we understand it. To us, they are our "trading partners." To them, the relationship is not like that of Evans & Novak or Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. It is not even like the Redskins and Cowboys. For the Cowboys only want to defeat the Redskins. They do not want to put their franchise out of business and end the competition—as the Japanese did to our TV industry by dumping Sonys here until they killed it.
While we think the Global Economy is about what is best for the consumer, they think about what is best for the nation.
Like Alexander Hamilton, they understand that manufacturing is the key to national power. And they manipulate currencies, grant tax rebates to their exporters and thieve our technology to win. Last year, as trade expert Bill Hawkins writes, South Korea exported 700,000 cars to us, while importing 5,000 cars from us.
That's Asia's idea of free trade.
How has this Global Economy profited or prospered America?
In the 1950s, we made all our own toys, clothes, shoes, bikes, furniture, motorcycles, cars, cameras, telephones, TVs, etc. You name it. We made it.
Are we better off now that these things are made by foreigners? Are we better off now that we have ceased to be self-sufficient? Are we better off now that the real wages of our workers and median income of our families no longer grow as they once did? Are we better off now that manufacturing, for the first time in U.S. history, employs fewer workers than government?
We no longer build commercial ships. We have but one airplane company, and it outsources. China produces our computers. And if GM goes Chapter 11, America will soon be out of the auto business.
Our politicians and pundits may not understand what is going on. Historians will have no problem explaining the decline and fall of the Americans.
COPYRIGHT 2008 CREATORS SYNDICATE INC.
Entries(RSS)
It's a strange, though increasingly common form of "conservatism" which considers a highly centralized and industrialized economy the ideal, which sees the automobile as an unmitigated good, and has such a high regard for national power. What does national power have to do with the virtuous and free society we should all strive for? Pat Buchanan praises the industries which enabled the US to win World War II, a war which in his saner moments he doesn't even think the US should have been involved in. I try to imagine what the late Frederick D. Wilhelmsen, a profoundly reactionary and anti-modernist philosopher, would have thought of this worship of industrialism and the automobile.
Mr. Higdon:
Attempting to explain this phenomenon was the point of my piece "Giving the Devil His Due," both when I published it five years ago and when I republished it on this site a week ago. It may not do it well (or even adequately), but I think it at least helps make the phenomenon seem less "strange."
One need not be comfortable with a bail-out to feel a profound sense of loss for America in the impending dismantling of the U.S. auto industry. Though it was Herr Benz who got the ball rolling, the automobile took hold in this country like no other and became a part of our national character. Nearly all of us have at one time or another owned American cars, most of us having, I daresay, fond memories of them. Some entered our folklore, such as the Corvette, Cadillac, Pontiac GTO, and whatever it was that was powered by the "409" ("saved my nickels and I saved my dimes"). Yes, it carried an albatross around its neck in the form of the United Auto Workers
Union, but its greatness transcended that. It's been the leading engine of our economy and the creator of the city of Detroit, a fact which in retrospect perhaps tellingly indicates its future. It played a significant role in World War II. And now, in a globalized economy and highly partisan domestic political environment, some would have us pretend that what's going on amounts to nothing more than a model of the free-market working its wonders. Even if Pat Buchanan was unable to point to the massive influence of government in this saga, it would be difficult for me not to experience a loss of national pride (yes, there's still some left) if it was simply the case that the Japanese had outcompeted us in our most significant industry, but of course it's not merely that. The armchair generals--I'm thinking Reid and Pelosi--attempting to dictate to Detroit how their industry must be run are those same people who saddled the industry with regulations, and a union, which are on the verge of toppling it. And Republicans, led by a president who insisted we had to immediately bail out the financial industry, to the tune of $700 billion, can now pose as guardians of the free market by withholding $25 billion of that amount--though no one doubts it will ultimately be more, admittedly adding to the complications of the issue. Call it what you will, but I wonder if this event, more than any other, will not eventually come to signify the day our consciousness as a sovereign nation ended and our membership in the global order began in earnest. Citizens of the world, indeed.
Another great column from a rarity--a national figure who actually cares about America and Americans.
Best line of the column: “an intellectual elite that produces mostly methane.”
Kirt @ 1
"What does national power have to do with the virtuous and free society we should all strive for?"
Good question. Our once more-powerful (and freer) nation has achieved a pervasive level of personal, political and societal corruption not seen since ancient times--maybe not even then. In those times, the Church--whose members were anything but free, and often lost their lives for the exercise of their holy beliefs--flourished.
Perhaps the restoration of our virtue lies in the complete loss of our freedom. Our government is working diligently on that, with the apparent consent of most of the governed.
A year or two ago, there was an article on the website worldtribune.com that the Japanese auto companies were going to go for the American Auto Companies throates. They have evidently succeeded. They also have senator Shelby from Alabama in their pockets as well. We should start calling men like him what they are - industrial traitors.
Hey Mr. Buchanon - you say Hitler did not want war with the west, what about his second book that said that America was his ultimate target? This book was on BookTV which you watch. Did you see it and what did you think? Also remember that when Hitler invaded Poland, the name of his railroad car was Amerika.
Great post Pat! The real culprits are the government (servants of the corporations), the corporations themselves and the big time investors.
The government is bought by bribes, excuse me, they are lobbied by the 'rich and famous'. Corporations want to maximize their profits for their investors at all cost, including the best interests of America. And of course the investors think only of themselves. Hence work is sent overseas and what is imported back to the US is not subject to tariffs. Pretty good. Corporations and investors looked for a way and were granted that way to fleece this economy on behalf of a handful of greedy investors. This is why Capitalism as we know it will be dead in a no more than a year or two. And who is to blame? The theee culprits mentioned above!
Although most of what Pat Buchanan writes is true, you can't sweep the deficiencies of Detroit under the rug. American automobile companies put out a generally poor product for about two decades that helped lose its hold on the buying habits of the American public. The Big Three has also allowed themselves to be held hostage by the irresonsible, short-sighted United Auto Workers union, an institution that deserves much of the blame for the current situation. Lastly, the Big Three have been poorly served by an absurdly incompetent city government in Detroit, a Michigan state government not much better, and a national government that has alternated hyper-regulations with benign neglect and a religious devotion to absolute free trade.
Detroit has improved its product to a great degree since the 70s and 80s. As an owner of a Ford 350 van and a Chevy Silverado truck, I will attest to that. It would be a national shame to jettison the Big Three into oblivion just to prove Milton Friedman's theories.
For us to be in favor of "free trade" while the rest of the world is surreptitiously protectionist is suicidal. To hell with free trade! We should have high tariffs to protect our home industries and develop them, and we should strive for strict economic autarky, producing whatever we can on our own. And what's wrong with propagandizing our people to "buy American" solely? That's what the German government does with its people, urging them to "buy German."
I know that the free-market types among us will immediately think that the above paragraph is presented ironically. It isn't.
It's time for us to take the gloves off, both with the rest of the world and with the stupid Friedmanites.
I know what our business types will say: "We won't be able to sell abroad!"
Well then, don't sell abroad. Sell here at home or die.
Here in auto country I am not alone in bashing many of the UAW workers and their overloaded compensation packages. I feel at many times they were too greedy in their bargaining stances over the years.
The one thing that I can see from their standpoint is the even more egregious compensations for executives and the golden parachutes they receive for terrible mismanagement.
Who did more damage to the industry? Just asking.
Mr. Leaberry,
Actually, even the things you mentioned were brought on by the government's stupidity and corruption.
Consider if the federal government had enforced anti-trust laws well and not allowed overconsolidation. A domestic industry with more than three players was economically feasible (i.e., not beyond "scale" arguments) and would have been favorable to stimulating the kind of competition that does not exist in an oligopoly. With more competition would have come more innovation and better products.
The emergence of unions with strengths beyond those necessary to "protect workers" was also a result of federal regulation. Decades after the government had looked the other way when industry had indeed abused workers, government decided to strangle industry with insane work regulations.
The local governments' roles in the downfall have stemmed from their inability to create more livable urban cities that draw more of the creative class. But, this has not been as damaging as other factors, in my opinion. The bigger economic culture factor has been that the "best and brightest" get lured into banking and consulting. Even many of the best engineers and scientists end up here and not in organizations that make things. This has hurt the auto companies a great deal more than anything the clownish Detroit city government has done.
#3 - It may reflect to a large extent my alienation from American and modern culture in general but I am unable to join michigander in his nostalgia for a vanishing American auto industry. To me a car was never more than an unhappily necessary means of transportation. I always bought the model (in all cases but one American) which would get me from point A to point B most economically. It was never a romantic decision and I greatly regretted the fact that our social and economic structure made private individual auto ownership virtually an absolute necessity.
I've been in cities in other countries where private car ownership is not necessary and in the US city where I currently live, I don't need to do much driving. Indeed if there was even the least effort made to make the streets bike friendly, I could probably get along without my own car.
At the time of the bank bailout, I argued that the banks needed to be cut down to size and the economy based on debt-financed consumerism allowed to die a well deserved death. The same can be said for the car culture. It is not that either banks or automobiles are intrinsically evil but both have long since reached the stage of enslaving rather than serving human beings. And the two are not unrelated. I have seen instances of people who have gone into debt to buy more cars than they have drivers in their families.
If we are fortunate, both these industries will go down. Banks and autos will survive, but in a properly diminished role.
To Kurt Higdon: we're on different pages insofar as how we relate to American car culture, but I do agree generally on the insane consumerism you make note of. America was a car culture even in the 1950s and 1960s, when I was growing up, but it was unusual to see more than one car per household. Obviously much has changed since then--foremost, I believe, the exodus of women from the home and into the workforce, and all of its ramifications. As Buchanan himself has noted on many occasions, we're a different country now, and for most of us who lived through the 1950s and 1960s it's mostly a painful thing to observe New America.
P.S. KIRT--Sorry for the misspelling.
Mssrs. Higdon,
Unfortunately, your visions are a bit utopian. We are not currently a trolley-car, small town, agrarian, no need for cars country. The point here is that if the Big 3 die off, the car culture and industrialism will not - the car industry will become run by the Japanese and Koreans for the most part, and by the Chinese and Germans to a lesser extent. This will be to the American economy's detriment and will erode American economic liberty. This is not a question of whether your wishes for better planned cities or a less consumerist society are laudable - they are - but they are beside the point.
#13 - I too grew up in the 50s and 60s, michigander, so I suppose we must be about the same age. It is a differnet country now but only insofar as the evil trends of those years are now much more advanced. And the exodus of women into the workforce was certainly not unrelated to the proliferation of automobiles. Cars first enabled the exodus, then compelled it as women "needed" an extra car for work and "needed" a job to make their car payments (and meet the cost of child care).
One of the advantages of the new technology (computers and the internet) is that it makes it much easier for both men and women to work from home and to have more flexible hours. It also works against industrial giantism by making it easier to start and run small businesses. Cheap and fast movement of information can make it less necessary to move people and eventually goods as well. The internet is also helping the rapid spread of home schooling and undermining the public school system which was designed for the industrial age.
As far as the financial crisis is concerned, I'm inclined to agree with Peter Schiff when he writes that it's not a problem, it's the solution. The next few years and perhaps decades will have some wrenching dislocations, but will also open unprecedented opportunities for those who want a virtuous and free society with decentralized political and economic power. But we won't be able to recognize and take these opportunities if our main concern is Korean and Japanese cars (#15 eagle), if our main objective is just to restore the status quo ante the fall of Bear-Stearns, or even just to restore the 50s and 60s.
Kirt Higdon (@16):
Absolutely. I've just written 1,500 words or so over the past couple days, largely on the relationship between these two phenomena. They track each other quite closely.
That said, however, I think you're a little too optimistic about the "advantages of the new technology." The work that is accomplished with computers and the internet at home is of a very different type from that accomplished by manual laborers. For one thing, it usually has a very low multiplier effect, compared with industry.
There are exceptions, of course, but they illustrate the rule. When we use computers here to create Chronicles, the multiplier effect should be obvious; and it should be equally obvious that, when we use them to create and maintain this website, the multiplier effect is much lower. The difference has everything to do with the fact that, in the former case, the end result is a physical product.
Individuals and even families may be able to make a decent living working primarily from home using technology, but such jobs tend not to create much wealth in society at large. By that, of course, I mean real wealth, not stock value. Manufacturing, even in its attenuated state in the United States today, still does.
Mr. Richert--a serious question from someone looking for education, not a fight.
What is wrong with a service-based economy?
Many so called services create many new products (chemical engineering, bio-engineering, drug development etc.)
Can't America be the leader in these higher value services, in developing the industrialized systems for producing products out them, and, then, once they become commodities as cars have let other countries with lower costs produce them?
It would seem this would provide lots of skilled and semi-skilled technician and technologist jobs.
Mr. Higdon,
I believe you are being purposely disinegnuous. Clearly my post indicated that my concern was not merely Korean and Japanese cars.
How do you think wonderful advancements happen within the world of information technology? Have you some idea of how much the productive part of the economy influences these other advancements?
My concern is with a sound, stable, and innovative economy. You can belittle that concern, but wishing for small town America to return won't solve the issue at hand and the potential negative effects of a collapsed domestic auto industry.
It's as if you are arguing for the energy companies to go out of business so we can de-industrialize and bring focus back to chopping ur own wood for fires.
Silliness.
#17 - Home based and partially home based businesses can involve manufacturing. I know one couple who have a small manufacturing business with about 6 or so employees and who market their product internationally. The wife handles the finances and keeps the books at home. They have 10 or 11 kids (I've lost track of the exact number) and some of the older of these have gone through a very high quality Catholic liberal arts college.
My son-in-law, with my daughter's help, has a home based internet business to supplement his regular job. He buys items from estate sales and sells them on e-bay. This isn't manufacturing but it does involve trade in a physical product. And I agree with #18 that service should also play a major role in the economy, but services can also be small scale and personal. I know several service people of various types who work out of their homes.
As far as #19's mention of energy companies is concerned, many of these should go out of business or at least be drastically down-sized. This need not lead to de-industrialization although there is nothing wrong with chopping wood and people who live in northern and wooded areas of our country still do that a lot. The key is in making not the nation as a whole, but small areas and even families where possible energy independent. Again, there are very hopeful recent developments. A controversy going on in several states and among several public utilities is whether or not individual householders who use solar panels should be compensated for power they put into the system in excess of what they use. The fact that this is even being discussed is a very hopeful sign for the future. And we do need to look forward to the future. Conserving giantism in finance, autos, or energy (with the inevitable accompanying giantism in government) is not what we should be about.
They do not want to put their franchise out of business and end the competition—as the Japanese did to our TV industry by dumping Sonys here until they killed it.
Pat, the Japanese are exporting their manufacturing jobs too. Mikasa dinnerware is now manufactured in Indonesia. Sony TVs are being assembled in China -- at least the ones sold at Wal-Mart.
But you are absolutely right about the excessive regulation, it's usually called fascism. Mussolini's regulations are still in effect, but the resourceful Italians simply do piecework off the clock for cash. I hope the same thing happens here.
Competing giants also use the government to kill off their competition; think Tucker. But in the early 1960s Mercedes and Audi colluded with the city of Hamburg to drive Carl Borgward out of business. Borgward moved his car plant to Mexico where it failed due to endemic corruption. If you've never seen a Borgward, do a Google image search, you'll see that his cars were impressively designed even by today's standards. Thousands of them are still lovingly cared for all around the world.
Pat Buchanan has put his finger on one of the great cultural divides in American History---the dichotomy between those who make things and those who think about them. Roughly this can be seen as the difference between industry and commerce. Anecdotly, one can see throughout our history a kind of conflict between manufacturers on the one hand, and bankers, insurance, or, more broadly service companies on the other. This as Pat has remarked, has a geographic component also, usually a divide between the "left" coast elites and those of us in the "hinterland." It may really go back all the way to the foundation of our civilization: the Greeks, the Romans, their European successors all had a kind of disdain for people who did things. TJF could validate I'm sure.
It seems that elementary logical abilities are greatly attenuated in this discussion. Whenever we say that A is less competitive than B in the marketplace because of a certain factor, it would behoove us to stop and ask if the factor we are citing affects both A and B.
Pat Buchanan and many others are prone to making statements such as:
1) American auto makers are struggling because of OSHA regulations. American car plants owned and managed by Japanese companies are profitable, and are also subject to exactly the same OSHA regulations.
2) American auto makers are struggling because of 30 years of CAFE standards imposed by Washington. Japanese auto makers are subject to the same regulations.
3) American auto makers pay onerous federal, state, and local taxes. So do foreign plants operating in the USA. These plants are profitable on their own and do not need to be subsidized by profits from back in Japan.
We need to face the factors that are different between American and Japanese plants in the USA. For example:
A) Japanese plants are mostly located in states that are more friendly to business than Michigan. Should we subsidize the relative inefficiencies of uncompetitive states? Why?
B) Japanese plants are mostly located in states that do not permit totalitarian control over workers by unions. As a result, their wages are lower. Should we subsidize union totalitarianism, by which I mean, e.g., legal compulsion to join an organization that the individual does not wish to join?
C) Japanese plants are newer. American auto makers have had decades to respond to this with capital equipment investment. To the extent that they have done so, no more problem. To the extent that they have not done so, management is to blame.
D) Japanese plants were established more recently. In addition to having lower wage and benefit costs, they do not have accumulated obligations to retired workers, which drive up labor costs per car.
E) Japanese companies have a leaner dealer network. State laws make it hard for American companies to consolidate dealerships. These laws are a clearly unconstitutional restraint on interstate commerce and should have been challenged ages ago by the Big Three. Instead, they bitch a little and do nothing. Should we continue to subsidize their inefficiency?
F) General Motors, during its heyday, was more worried about idiotic anti-trust enforcement than about improving. When GM had 50% of the American market, we had a federal government that thought A&P had a supermarket monopoly. It has been documented that GM management in the early 1960s had, as a primary concern, NOT growing their market share, being careful NOT to drive the other American makers out of business. This bred an atmosphere of inefficiency and sloth that left them ill prepared for the coming foreign car competition. Here is one example where it really was the fault of the US government.
G) American makers have more labor hours per car, on top of the hidden labor costs from retirees. They have known this for decades and have never caught up.
I am happy to hear about the bailout plans that do not leave me subsidizing inefficient management, unions, and state and local governments. There seems to be much resistance to addressing the union issue from Messrs. Buchanan, Roberts, Piatak and Richert and many others here.
I also suggest reading the old book, "The Decline and Fall of the American Automobile Industry," by Brock Yates. Still full of insight after more than 20 years.
According to the Heritage Foundation, a typical big three auto worker earns about $75 an hour or about $130000 per year. that also includes a paid 4-7 week vacation and health coverage for about $10 a month + opportunity to retire after 30 years + huge pension benefits that include his family. Also if there is no work he gets paid not to wrk close to what his salary is while the benefits continue. As a business model such labor costs are unsustainable while it makes perfect sense why Michigan never votes Republican any more.
@24 Jack
When my parents retired to Florida, they lived next door to a retired auto worker. While he seemed nice, he had never read a book since leaving school. He had a large electric train set in the house and the television was on all the time. Trying to engage him in any sort of interesting conversation was next to impossible. He had survived a lifetime of prosperous ignorance while the union did his thinking for him.
But I grew up in Middlesbrough England and knew many steelworkers who worked for Dorman Long. They might have been alcoholics with an eighth grade (fifth form) education but they read a lot, and despite their left leaning politics they were aware of what was going on in the world.
I suppose the moral is, don't be stupid anymore,
Etienne Gervaise @ 25
The difference is that in England everyone who goes to school is expected to learn something, and to become literate to some degree, regardless of his station in life. This includes working-class people.
In America, the liberal-left is jackrabbit-terrified of the political potential of the white working class. (They've been this way since the Reagan years, the George Wallace candidacy of 1968, and even further back, to the days of the rise of fascism.) This is why schooling in America is managed in such a way as to exclude the white working class from levels of literacy and articulation that might make them troublemakers. Left-liberal teachers save their time and energy and encouragement for our little black and brown brothers, our Chosen Few, and for anyone who seems to show promise as a bootlicker for the reigning pieties.
I have taught in many schools for over forty years, and I have seen this insidious process at work.
That's why you retired auto worker in Florida has never picked up a book, and can't partake in an argument. The liberal-left wants him that way. And it's willing to make sure he has enough distracting material comforts to keep him in oblivion.
@27 Joseph
I left England at age 15 in the late 1960s, and the steelworkers were my grandmother's age -- their late 50s. Things have declined quite considerably since then. I can only imagine how thick the current graduates of Motor City's high schools are today. It's a good thing, I suppose, becuase such appalling levels of ignorance cannot be tolerated much longer, and will probably lead us into a new Dark Age.
Watch Mike Judge's latest movie, Idiocracy for what the future holds.
Pat, you make some great points and said them so much more eloquently than I could have.
I graduated with a degree in Business Administration from George Mason U in 1984. The last course was BUAD 498 Strategy and Policy. It required a subscription to Business Week in addition to the textbook. It was taught by a brilliant professor Henri Bailey. The class was divided up into 7 or 8 groups of 4, President, VP, Secretary and Treasurer. Each firm was staked a million phoney dollars, which would be allocated to increasing plant size, advertising, hiring more employees etc. All of the data was entered into a computer and with the use sophisticated linear programming, the stock prices for each team would be announced. The goal was to end the semester with the highest stock price.
About the middle of the semester some near-last place team would take out a loan and buy back their shares, thus driving up the price. There seemed to be no penalty for debt. At the time in the real world, junk bonds were the instrument of choice in financing things like satellite television. Nobody seemed really concerned with default, but some called it voodoo economics. The final class period featured stockholders meetings which occasionally turned into shouting matches and people throwing wadded up paper at snarky female presidents. Dr Bailey encouraged such outbursts.
Fast forward to 2001 and thethe Enron debacle where 45 year old "executives" were among the guilty, and then MCI Worldcom, which flat-out juggled the books in order to dupe investors. I realized that driving up the stock price, rather than producing something tangible, had become the name of the game. At the root was stockholder greed.
At a reunion last year I talked to a recent grad and he said the game is now played nationwide. Until graduates are taught morality rather than business ethics, every manufacturer will be driven into the dirt in the pursuit of worthless paper. The charade cannot exist forever, and the gravy train should be allowed to burn. Government help at this stage will only take the nation down.
This "hollowing out" of the US manufacturing base is, according to Berkeley economist Chalmers Johnson, a deliberate strategy by US government.: Giving access to the US market in exchange for influence and permission for military bases...
In the future, the only industry that will be left in the US will be the military industrial complex.
389.... 302..... 327.... 351....
The "divide" is between those for whom these are merely numbers and those for whom these "numbers" evoke romance like that of symphony titles.
Mr. Higdon,
If you have been reading my postings here on Chronicles, you will know that I argued that one of the ills in the auto industry was caused by overconsolidation. I have called for breaking up the behemoths (over the course of time, in an orderly manner). I too am against "giantism" in industry, but for a variety of reasons, not least of which is that oligopolies kill innovation.
I am also against the giant bureaucratized big businesses because they are in human. But this does not mean I will adopt a "pie in the sky" dream of a Jeffersonian agricultural paradise where we all chop our own wood. Relatively big organizations are a necessity of modern technology. This has philosophical problems and may lead us to lament. But I, for one, will not abdicate our technological future at your urging.
I sympathize with the philosophy of the southern agrarians and with the type of conservatism that it birthed in the twentieth century. But this does not mean that I agree with shutting industry down. Nor, I confidently suspect, would the "I will take my stand" fellowship call for that either.
While you may not need a second car, my wife does. Not for work, but to drive our children to a parochial school to escape the corrosive propoganda of the public schools. You may no longer need work, but I need my car to drive to my work. And so on.
I am for the loans to the industry because I want to see an important sector saved in the US (that does not mean that it does not require some re-structuring, such as a break-up, or that its executives are good ones, they most certainly are not).
@32 Eagle
Amen to that!
I'll wager that if I could get 2 billion of that bailout money, I could open a factory that produces reproductions of classic cars, '57 Chevy convertibles, Borgward Isabellas, Corvairs, Chrysler Imperials, etc. and sell everything my Mississippi-based plant could assemble at a profit.
Eagle has a point when he says that we can't re-create "a Jeffersonial agricultural paradise." But I don't think that anyone in these discussions is seriously suggesting such a thing. Technology and massive industry are here to stay.
But what we CAN do is keep these monsters chained up tightly, like vicious guard dogs that are kept on a short leash. And that has to be accomplished primarily on the individual and family level. We have to train ourselves to see all things sub specie aeternitatis, and to act accordingly.
Like it or not, that's going tor require a certain degree of withdrawal and disengagement from modern life. I've suggested limiting the majority of one's purchases to antique (or at least used) items, and to the avoidance of all major debt. However, even more important than this is the nurturing of a complete and thoroughgoing oppositional mindset to the world, almost on the model of the contemplative monastic orders. We have to realize that nearly everyone and everything around is the enemy.
As the late Frederick D. Wilhelmsen once said, "We live inside the Secular City, but as secret traitors within her walls."
Who did? I did. My last 4 cars have been Toyota, Volvo, Honda, Honda. Great c ars all. At the same time Detroit has been making variable-quality gas guzzlers. I can't think of a reason I'd buy a Big-3 product.
Pat makes some good points about how government killed the auto industry. What he may some day come to realize is that the "national greatness" he admires comes only at the price of having the sort of overly powerful government which can kill off industries and create the sort of micromanaged international trade between governments which have taken the place of actual free international trade.
We must not be willing to allow a government to control our trade to the point that our own industries are prohibited from producing in the fashion they have to produce in order to compete with all comers or to fail on their own and at their own expense.