Who is the simple-minded, Nadar-like liberal who is running around complaining about the fact that General Motors closed down a plant in a small town even though GM as a whole was profitable that same year. Does Mr. Stupid want GM to wait until an UNprofitable year before closing the plant? This often occurs during a recession, when new jobs are harder to find. How long does he want GM to subsidize a bad plant? 5-years, 10-years, forever?
When GM is not profitable they get bashed for not being globally competitive. When they are profitable, they get labeled as greedy because they don't subsidize their poorly performing plants.
Further, if GM spent its profits (when it had them) to keep an inefficient plant operating, GM would no longer be attractive to investors (who would not make returns on their stock), and thus GM would slowly shrink in size until it was too small to have ANY factories.
It is normal for profitability to go up and down over the years. If you suck "protection" money from companies when they are up, then you should in turn compensate them for their down years, otherwise their average profits would be negative. Mr. Stupid is in essence punishing companies for having wide swings in earnings.
That small town should be thankful GM put a factory there in the first place. I too feel sorry for the workers who lost their jobs, but Mr. Stupid's solution is not a general-purpose solution. It is not and should not be a company's job to guarantee life-time employment. It would have been a nice gesture by GM too leave the plant open longer, but I doubt anybody would have gave them credit if they did.
The best way to generate and keep jobs is find ways to make workers and companies for efficient and competitive, not protect them when they have difficulty keeping up.
Mr. Stupid cannot see the large picture. Before Mr. Stupid gets congress to pass laws protecting inefficient workers, he should think through the large-scale consequences. Perhaps we should be like most of Europe, which has double our unemployment rate because the governments there made their companies inefficient by meddling, controlling, and "correcting." Mr. Stupid should enjoy Europe because they have better "economic equality" than the U.S.: Everybody is equally poor and has an equal chance of becoming non-poor by doing a better job: none!
Europe taught us an important economic lesson: If keep bailing out losers, your supply of winners will dwindle. You also create new kinds of classes not based so much on economic success, which is a bit too easy to measure, but of influentially elite. Look at the formal Soviet Union: even though wage differences were small, there was a wide gap in political and bureaucratic influence. There were STILL classes. Since this type of influence is harder to control than money, it is also harder to tax and flatten.
Since there appears to be trade-off between money classes and influence classes, I prefer the money class option because it appears to produce better goods and services for most. If someone has a workable idea that will avoid this trade-off, they deserve 50 Nobel Prizes!
Come-on, Mr. Stupid, I challenge you to a debate!
In a related issue, most agree that Americans are working longer hours than past decades, yet our living standards remain the same or are shrinking. What we don't agree on is why. Mr. Stupid hints that it is a conspiracy by the rich to squeeze everything possible out of the middle class. But he cannot explain why it took the evil greed lords several decades to learn how to do this.
A much more plausible answer is that the U.S. now has more competition. We had a virtual monopoly on many technologies and management techniques in the 1950's and early 60's. We did so well that every one copied our techniques and often added their own variations that made them even more competitive.
It was an amazing phenomena when high-school drop-outs running a metal stamper could make more than a college graduate by using union influence. Back then we could pull this off because there was no non-union competition. When foreign competition hit, these people had real trouble on their hands.
Some proposed that we keep out the competition by using import quotas and import taxes. These had side-effects however. When the U.S. splapped quotas on them, they went and slapped quotas on us, which seems fair to me. This then hurt some of our cherished technology exports. We were thus faced with a trade-off between protecting our union-based low-tech workers and protecting our education-based high-technology segment.
In the end compromises were made. There is still a dream that some have of turning back the clock by isolating ourselves from the rest of the world. In this plan we would limit imports, which would eventually limit out exports when the other countries give us tit for tat.
Even though very few economists agree that this would work, some point to Japan as a country that limits its imports to protect its workers, yet still has many exports. However, from a consumers standpoint, Japan is not a great place to live. Prices for consumer goods are sky high there. Japan's wealth is mainly internal to businesses only. They are also getting beaten by Taiwan, Korea, China, and Singapore.
The bottom line is that government influence appears to have little effect on helping the so called working class of this country. There are two choices: follow in European footsteps and try to make everyone poor so that the poor don't feel so bad (the liberal agenda), or compete with the rest of the world (the conservative agenda) and have a higher average living standard. (At least people have choices and chances to control their income level.) Since the European model trades one kind of wealth for another, there appears to be only one choice left.
The problem is that people in this country want special treatment for their group that violates these general universal economic rules. They want exceptions for themselves but don't worry about what happens if you let all whiners violate these rules.
I liken it to J-walking. When you are driving you hate J-walkers who slow you down by crossing in the middle of the road. Yet when you want to J-walk, you plead to the cop, "It's just one little ticket. Why not scratch it from that little ticket book of yours. I have a family to raise and can't afford a ticket."
We had steel workers and auto workers who wanted foreign quotas, we then heard small farmers who wanted protection from more efficient large farming corporations. And now its ex-GM workers who want Robin Hood to save them from people who are finally getting returns on their GM stocks.
My favorite is the Aides patients who wanted the government to force pharmaceutical companies to charge less for the AZT medication. It is true that the company did charge a lot more than the cost of production, but what some don't realize is that finding new medications is kind of like the music business--the company has to live through hundreds of research dead-ends (duds) to find a few that work. Hits are rare.
The pharmaceutical companies have to charge high rates on the successful drugs to pay for the research for current and future drugs. What the selfish Aides protesters may actually be doing is reducing the chance of a future cancer cure or Alzheimer's cure in order to selfishly benefit them in the near term. Typical liberal thinking.
When the news cameras come around, don't forget to flash those big, sad, puppy-dog eyes. The squeaky wheel gets the oil.
(Copyrighted material) (Draft 1a)