On Monday 25 September 2006 02:51 pm, Lan Barnes wrote: > On Mon, Sep 25, 2006 at 01:13:39PM -0700, Paul G. Allen wrote: > > How do we keep manufacturing jobs in this country when it's so damn cheap > > to mfg. elsewhere? People in general don't care how it's made or who gets > > exploited to make it as long as they have cheap goods to buy, not > > realizing that such practices just reduce the amount of jobs and income > > in our own economy. > > I don't know why everyone lionizes those "good manufacturing jobs" so > much.
Amen! > Before the unions extorted a fair share of the productive wealth > out of the manufacturing companies, those jobs were the shits ... or do > we have such a lousy collective sense of history that we've forgotten > the muckrakers like Upton Sinclair, investigative journalists like > Ida Tarbell, the Pullman strike, or armed Pinkerton men whacking > pregnant strikers in the belly with ax handles? > > Those were the worst jobs in the world before the unions[0], and will be > again if current political trends are allowed to continue. > The cost of distribution and sales of goods for many, many products already significantly exceeds the cost of manufacture. The value added to many products, if not most, is in fact in efficient distribution and sales. For all of their bad points, and I could go into a real rant, outfits like Walmart and Home Depot do a much better job of distribution than the smaller companies they replaced. I expect the US to become more of what it is, the leading distributor and middleman in the world. With our immigrant population we have a huge language advantage if we do not destroy it with some stupid English only law. For instance 30 miles south of here a population of well over a billion people begins, the vast majority of whom speak Spanish, and all of whom are a natural marketplace for goods from Asian and Europe distributed through efficient multinational corporations headquartered in the USA. Will these big companies be looking out for the USA, "Hell no." But they will continue to contribute to the US economy and offer good jobs here for along time to come. Enough, I am cross-posting this to the Kooler, where it belongs. Let's pick up there. BobLQ -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
