Decline of US Manufacturing
By Russell Cole
This essay is a response to John Browne’s article, Socialism is Coming Back to Haunt the US, published by the Populist Party of America, (www.populistamerica.com).
This argument has some interesting points. However, the crux of the argument appears to rest entirely upon the validity of the proposition, entitlements were the cause of the decline of US manufacturing. This is a prodigious claim that the author fails to support with any empirical, or, for that matter, speculative armchair theoretical justifications. In fact, it is presented as though it is a truism.
I suppose he is claiming that the welfare state, somehow, precipitated the moral decay of the American population, which resulted in the collapse of American manufacturing. Nevertheless, even if we are to entertain the remote possibility that appendages to Social Security led to a kind of popular moral demise, I fail to recognize any clear, compelling association between this alleged moral degeneration and the deindustrialization of America.
I would compare the claim made by Browne to something resembling the following: A South Asian Indian woman with leprosy prayed to an idol representing Mother Teresa. In subsequent events, the Indian woman’s disease subsided. Therefore, Mother Teresa performed a miracle. This kind of explanation is, of course, satisfactory for the Catholic Church. It had political motivations for ensuring that Mother Teresa, the good work that she performed, and the positive and reverent emotions that her identity connoted for so many people would be associated with the Church and an extension of it. Taking over the symbology attributable to heroes among the people is a necessary form of imperialism for an institution that claims to possess a monopoly on human religiosity.
If anything has contributed to the decline of American manufacturing, it has been the freer market fundamentalism that has been dogmatically adhered to in all instances of foreign policy deliberations involving economic trade; a Laissez-faire fanaticism that has been embraced by Washington wise men since the end of the Second World War.
We were told that the increased productivity that is fostered through the exploitation of cheaper, foreign labor markets would free capital allowing for reinvestment in the US economy. This injection of capital into the US economy would, in turn, create higher paying, higher-skilled occupations for the American workforce.
This all, of course, was based upon the assumption that the corporations, which were increasingly becoming multi-national – due to the fact that they were no longer geographical constrained; a transformation propelled by trade policy as well as technological advancements in communications and distributions – would actually reinvest in the American economy.
Unfortunately, what the freer trade group-think failed to foresee was that these now global corporations could simply reinvested in the same foreign economies while continuing to target the American consumer market, because the implementation of freer trade policies had dismantled the necessary tariffs and other protectionist measures needed to create an incentive for corporations to base their manufacturing inside the United States.The argument made by this author appears to be a last desperate attempt to vindicate the policies responsible for the very state of the US economy that the author, ironically, decries.
