Tangential Comment from Bachman thread - gnashing of teeth over political polarity

[Mangano's Gold]

Free trade has winners and losers. This isn't hard to either understand or see.

The US, Britain, South Korea and others all became rich by protecting their growing industries. They didn't adopt free trade policies while they were growing into powers. That is a myth. China, Singapore, Germany, Japan, etc..all have industrial policies. The government may have a larger role to play than it currently does, despite 2011 consensus thinking.

[redfox]

Well, I don’t know how you measure happiness (gigglebytes?), but you’re wrong on the bank failure statement. Amagerbanken, failed in February. They were the eleventh to fail since the 2008 crisis.

The happiness survey I read about in Forbes -
http://www.forbes.com/2009/05/05/wor...-happiest.html

Thank you for the correction on the Danish bank failure.

[iris lily]

There are many ways to do & promote business. The Danes have the most stable economy around, have had no bank failures or mortgage defaults, and the highest indices of happiness on several surveys. It seems that there is a model for both providing for social well being and being profitable and stable in business.

Get me into a monoculture like Denmark, only made up of my fellow Scots Americans, and we'd have this ship turned right 'round pronto. It's easier to row in the in the same direction when you share core values and vision.

The big Melting Pot of the U.S and all of its cultures and geographic traditions make for a far more complex society that is harder to maneuver.

Scandoculture may be interesting but only somewhat relevant to the problems of the U.S.

[Mangano's Gold]

Get me into a monoculture like Denmark, only made up of my fellow Scots Americans, and we'd have this ship turned right 'round pronto. It's easier to row in the in the same direction when you share core values and vision.

The big Melting Pot of the U.S and all of its cultures and geographic traditions make for a far more complex society that is harder to maneuver.

Scandoculture may be interesting but only somewhat relevant to the problems of the U.S.

It pains me to say this and I debated keeping my mouth shut. I'm going to be blunt. You are right that it is harder here in the US than Scandanavia. Translation: Scandanavia doesn't have the blacks, or their version of blacks in the numbers that we do. Racial antipathy in the US isn't overblown. It is wildly understated. A whole lot of Americans don't want the blacks to get a f-n penny. So cut the programs. If it were just Anglos/Scotsmen, no problem, we'd find an accomodation. But not the f-n blacks. You (iris) may not feel this way. Your post may have just been poorly worded, but it illustrates a basic, uncomfortable, tribal truth.

[ApatheticNoMore]

I think government is very pro-business - otherwise 1000's of lobbyists have done nothing but bash their collective heads against walls for years and years, which I don't believe is true. What happens I think is government often ends up being pro-business by trying to hobble the businesses competing with business they are behind - which looks anti-business. Multiply by that by all the congressmen and all the lobbyists all pulling in their own directions and of course it's going to look like a mess.

That may be quite accurate. I also think that with the sheer complexity of all the hundreds of pages in bills NOBODY REALLY KNOWS what they are voting for anymore. Seriously.

The government nearly put one company I worked for recently out of business. And the threat there was real. It wasn't just a company complaining about tax increases, just because that's how companies propagandize. Nah I saw well enough from an insider perspective, it was laws that would have put them out of business. And no they weren't poisoning the water supply or anything, I wouldn't work for a company that was doing harm anyway, I just wouldn't, but that company was quite benign. Anyway, it was just unintended side effects of obscure portions of bad laws (see what I mean when I say noone entirely knows what they are even doing, not at the detailed level that can make or break a company anyway).

Things become easier if you become a huge national or multinational corporation. You suddenly have the ears of congressmen and can prevent this being put out of business by bad laws thing that smaller companies often can't. In fact you can even write the laws to your favor. In fact I think entanglement with government kind of almost automatically comes when a company reaches a certain size. It may start courting government as a customer and pretty soon be getting even a decent chunk of it's revenue that way. I seldom think you can be a huge corporation without being involved with the government.

[LDAHL]

For the American worker, I don't think think the "death of manufacturing" is a political legend. The idea of a secure job in manufacturing with wages and benefits that can comfortably support a family and provide for a nice retirement is gone. It is indeed dead. This may mean that you and I can get cheaper salad spinners, book cases, and furnaces, but a large segment of the middle class got taken behind the woodshed and beaten for it. IMO, that the US still produces 20% of world "output" should be little consolation for the former industrial worker. Output doesn't mean output in the tangible sense. It more and more means the output of service workers, like call center workers and nurses aids.

It's not so much the death of manufacturing as the decline of the highly paid semi-skilled manufacturing job. The 20% is manufacturing output excluding services. We simply are producing more per worker, often replacing labor with technology. That, coupled with a half-century trend of competitors recovering from a global war and in some cases from brutally stupid socialist policies, has meant fewer jobs in that sector.

We can look for scapegoats, subsidize failure and erect self-destructive trade barriers, or we can compete. There is no conspiracy against the US middle class. History and technology have moved on. The great majority of us used to work on farms, but we adapted, however painfully, to new realities. That will have to happen again.

[LDAHL]

The happiness survey I read about in Forbes -
http://www.forbes.com/2009/05/05/wor...-happiest.html

Thank you for the correction on the Danish bank failure.

So what they're really measuring are the numbers of people who feel the need to tell surveyors that they're happy.