Madan asks questions about injection molds.
Before I answer, let me point out what his questions illustrate: if you have
not worked in a particular business or profession or company, you CANNOT
really know the impact of any piece of legislation on it.
There are about 15 million businesses in this country, employing about 150
million people, and with trillions of dollars of physical assets. No person
can begin to even know what these businesses do, let alone how metric
mandates would affect them. In the first place, there is too much to know.
In the second place, much of that knowledge is diffuse, and does not exist
anywhere except in the minds of those who have to know it (owners, managers,
employees, etc.).
Onto his questions. With respect to a 2 to 3 year phase in: I have injection
molds that are 10 years old, and one of them will probably be good for at
least another ten. Some types of printers love old "letter presses" and the
price for such presses that are 50 years old keeps going up. I have
personally seen in use a letter press that was on a US Navy ship in WWII --
and the owner was mighty proud of it. I have seen old Bridgeport mills that
are going strong after 30 years.
In other words, there is no adequate phase-in period. Regardless of what you
pick, the value of some capital assets will be destroyed. Read into that
"lawsuits."
Madan mentions something about "selling" my injections molds. An injection
mold is an entirely custom piece of hardware. Who would I sell it to? Even
without metric mandates, it would be hard to find anyone who wanted it. If
metric mandates make it useless to me, it would useless to anyone else, and
thus its value would be destroyed.
I am not trying to say that metrication cannot happen. I believe it will
happen, as companies determine when it is best for them to move to metric.
What I am saying is that any mandate will destroy the value of some assets
(and no one can say how many), and that brings up the takings problem and
legal wrangling.
Jim Elwell
