Trying to create manufacturing industry in the USA

Well I didn't need you breaking out insults to tell I'm more mature then you, you can't even respect someone younger than you.

Well anyway what I've done to help the USA is prepare to help it by educating myself to become a high school chemistry teacher, no doubt a much less selfish career than being a mutli-millionaire that you no doubt are, like the latest number of jerks I met on the internet.

 

Carrry on. No offense intended. You are on a rational path. Don't become a Walter White.

 

Up to 2005:


http://www.cato.org/testimony/ct-dg06132007.html

And a blog from the WSJ

Your both wrong and uninformed.

We're a country of people from other "outside" countries. Your silly, nationalistic and xenophobic issues are undermining your reason.

I sure hope your not a home owner, otherwise you're crying about the price of your asset increasing, at least it'd be consistent with the rest of your irrational mantra.

We do produce more AND things are more expensive. Trying to advertise your ignorance on trade and inflation?

 

A country of 300 million people cannot base the bulk of their economy on just developing new innovative products.

"New innovation", "technology","creative industry", it may all sound wonderful but it cannot be the primary solution to serious economic problems. Especially when the country will not even reap the benefits of manufacturing the technology they developed.

Those graphs you presented are meaningless unless we really know what the "manufacturing index" is, and how it is calculated.

The type of statistics that would be more revealing would be something more concrete, for example, the number of tractors produced in the USA by year, or the number of tons of steel produced.

"Industrial output" can be a very misleading figure. Are we talking about total price, or what is actually being produced?

 

A country of 300 million people, in a mature economy, will find that its innovation that drives growth. Your position is based on constructing red herring. Deindustrialisation, given productivity and income growth, is a positive phenomenon.

 

Gross, net, adjusted for inflation, nominal. No matter how you want to parse, the fact remains we produce more now than we ever have. Period.

Go for it, look at Catepillar. I know for a fact their up, and their the worlds largest manufacturer of heavy equipment. Steel is a bad choice because it's being replaced by carbon fiber and is a commodity. The anecdotal and empirical evidence aren't on your side. US manufacturing is up, we just require far fewer people to accomplish the same amount.

Total production in GDP adjusted dollars. Like I keep saying though, the evidence is pretty lopsided and it doesn't favor you.

 

Aside from the fallacy of appeal to numbers, can you name a country that has not grown and thrived on the basis of anything but innovation? Change is inevitable and resisting it with laws and controls only creates suffering, bureaucracy, and further collapse.

Then there's the moral argument. What moral obligation does a person who creates things have to other Americans? As a Californian, why am I obligated to support a Louisianian by buying his more expensive products? My neighbors in Mexico are far more likely to do business with me, and me with them, than Americans in Maine or Pennsylvania. What about an arbitrary line on a map that creates a tax and justice jurisdiction also creates a moral obligation? Be objective here. Nationalists love sophistry and rhetoric, but I want an objective, logical argument.

If I was really to buy into the protectionist argument, then, for a Californian, the only moral choice is to purchase Toyota, as they are made in this state.

What objective moral reason is there why a country should "reap the benefits" of the technology that individuals developed? Countries don't develop technology, individuals do. Behind all of your collectivist rhetoric is a firm belief that the government that has jurisdiction over a piece of soil rightfully imposes a moral obligation on those who toil on it. Using your logic, I can show that welfare for those who refuse to work is just as moral as welfare for businesses that refuse to innovate.

 

American workers cannot and should not have to compete with Chinese workers being paid 70 cents an hour. Forcing American workers to compete with the third world will drive down wages. Then there is the issue of unfair trade. American companies, with all the environmental regulations, cannot compete with China. All these misguided attempts to reduce pollution in the United States just drive more production to China, resulting in even more pollution: http://www.politicalforum.com/envir...ricans-outsourcing-their-pollution-china.html

And perhaps you forgot that China is a communist country with agressive regional ambitions?
How much American taxpayer money is being spent to counter potential Chinese military expansionism?
Last time I checked, the USA just spent 2 billion dollars building a new military base in Australia for this very reason.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/17/w...s-australia-military-ties.html?pagewanted=all
http://theconversation.edu.au/memo-...ases-in-australia-and-they-are-expanding-8622

 

A cretinous comment. Competition is through productivity differences. Innovation will also lead to real wage growth, making your previous comments look decidedly ill-thought

 

So why are so many Americans unemployed? Why have real wages continued to go down over the years?

 

Nothing to do with your feeble economic nationalistic prance. If anything the US has been guilty of an over-abudance of low skilled labour

 

A childish argument! Understanding the labour market is going to be beyond both Georgist and Austrian internet wannabes

 

Plenty of historical empires. You fail to make the distinction between past innovation and continueing new innovations. I find it completely illogical for you to suppose that a country must constantly continue to develop new technologies and products to maintain a productive economy.

This type of overgeneralisation is completely illogical. "Change is inevitable"? Well, then what is the point of any government, or even trying to do anything for that matter? Perhaps what you really meant to say is that you believe the government should leave free markets alone. But then again, selective laws can potentially be worse than more comprehensive laws. And these selective laws I am talking about are the minimum wage and worker protections and environmental regulations in the USA that are not found in China.

 

That's because the whole concept of dynamic comparative advantage is beyond economic nationalism.

 

How is it nationalism to hold Chinese companies to the same standards/obligations that American companies have to meet?
Chinese companies should have to have similar environmental regulations, worker protections, taxes, and wages as American companies, or there should be tariffs to compensate for the difference.

 

See all that immigration, during wars on drugs and Islam? See the war, on common sense?

See how the US has to pay, for 450,000 elected officials, who don't do anything valuable? See how we have to pay for a ton of media, including people who are slogging along, for office? See how we have to pay, for appointed bureaucrats?

See how all that administration has a huge load of hidden costs, including a carbon footprint, for its own corruption?

The heart and soul of the US economy is polluted dirt and poo, badly mixed and spread, over a gigantic bubble, which will pop or leak, someday soon.

 

The standards and obligations are actually reductions in market failures and provision of public goods.

Nonsense! The reference to wages illustrates that you're making ignorant comment alien to the concept of comparative advantage. As you've already been informed, we'd expect wage differentials to reflect comparative advantage and we'd expect a narrowing of those differentials with specialisation.

 

And I find it completely illogical of you to suppose that a country can thrive and grow on anything but innovation. In order for there to be real economic growth, there must be increases in productivity. That comes about through innovation.

An economy may remain productive absent innovation, but it will not grow and will stagnate without innovation.

Why does change prevent you from doing anything? You're not making sense.

I will agree that it is useless for government, which is just a tool of violence, to prevent change. That just creates misery within the populace and leads to brain drain as entrepreneurs and innovators seek more accommodating jurisdictions. Of course, you can imposes rules similar to those in North Korea or Cuba, where those who attempt to leave are punished severely and, if they do manage to get out, their families are put into prison labor camps.


If you want a more western example of what happens when innovation is stifled, look to the French wine industry. Once *the* center of fine wines in the world, it is now behind California. Ask any California wine maker who has gone to France (where it is cheaper to buy a winery and vineyards) his experience, and he'll tell you that the regulations make it all but impossible to make any changes that would improve quality or appeal to modern consumer tastes. France will eventually lose to places like Chile and Argentina and Australia as those nations lead in new innovations in wine making and wine quality. France is still known as the best in extremely fine wines, but most people aren't willing to pay for, nor have the palate for, a $300+ bottle of wine. Their industry is slowly stagnating and while that makes it cheap to setup a winery there, the regulations makes it near impossible to improve.

Governments should not interfere in the economic decisions that peaceful people make. That is correct. I do not believe violence is a solution to perceived problems unless the problem involves force or fraud.

The Chinese are more interested in accumulating capital and building industry than being concerned with the environment. It is not laws that change things. Usually regulations make things worse. I bet you can't find any statistically significant evidence that the creation of OSHA changed the already dropping rate of worker injury and death. However, you will find that 75% of OSHA violations, in which fines are imposed, are due to errors in paperwork.

 

A rather simplistic way of looking at it. We have two issues. First, regulation can control quality and therefore generate positive repercussions for brand reputation. Second, we have to factor in the impact of the regulation for size of the enterprise. The system of 'appellations controlees' has encouraged an environment of micro-businesses. So France can boast of 190,000 producers with vineyards- on average- between 2.7 and 6 hectares. Its an environment that ensures quality does pay!

 

Or it can lead to regulatory capture, like what occurred in the US financial industry. Basel 1 & 2 allowed for firms to be highly leveraged on AAA rated securities, so what happened? They "created" more AAA rated securities!

Regulation has a time and a place, but that it'll always or even usually lead to better outcomes depends greatly on who is involved in crafting it. Unfortunately the state typically has no skin in the game and as a result no incentive to get it right.

 

Innovation and increased productivity work to increase the demand for land, while at the same time reducing the demand for labor. For the landless, innovation is more of a curse than a blessing. Henry George pointed this relationship out over a hundred years ago:

The regulations are a small expense when compared to the price of buying the land. The real reason that it is near impossible to improve is that the landowners take such a large chunk of start-up capital that there is little to nothing left for improvement; then add taxation on production and trade to the mix and you have a situation where it is near impossible to improve. As far as the regulations, those are primarily an attempt by government to capture some of the land rents, and if those regulations were abolished the landowners would simply take more of the production. If, on the other hand, France would shift all taxation onto land rents, the land required to start a winery would be cheap to buy, this would leave the new owner with loads of cash with which to make improvements. And furthermore, with the government of France already receiving the land rent, the incentive to try and capture it through costly regulation would be gone. The government would soon learn that frivolous regulation would decrease the revenue they received, and abolish such regulation.

It all comes down to creating the proper incentives … and nothing aligns the incentives of producers, consumers and government better than land value taxation.

 

Innovation reduces the demand for labour? What a stupid comment! You'd have to see it in the context of a static supply and demand approaxh (which would make zero sense when referring to technical progress). The best you have is the notion of positive deindustrialisation where productivity gains creates economic opportunities and shifts the focus of employment away from manufacturing or the primary sector.

Georgists are clueless about the labour market

 

make taxes n regulations 0 for manufacturing for 1 year

 

And maximise negative externalities? That seems a little foolish!