I hope I’m not too late. This week I’d like to announce my candidacy for President of the United States.
I think I have an economic plan that will save the country from its impending doom. As president, my first act will be to outlaw bulldozers. Yes, bulldozers.
I’m not sure why bulldozers have been allowed in the United States for so long. But it’s time to put a stop to their destructive effects.
How do bulldozers hurt America? My guess is that a single bulldozer can do the work of at least one hundred people. So my plan is to replace every bulldozer with a hundred Americans with shovels.
Not only will this plan create thousands of shoveling jobs, it will also stimulate the demand for shovels, work gloves, massage therapy, and Band-Aids. I can’t believe no one else has thought of this.
So where did this brilliant plan come from? I was inspired by the other presidential candidates’ visits to South Carolina. When politicians visit South Carolina, they usually talk about the textile jobs that have moved overseas. They usually have some sort of plan to protect American jobs. Some politicians want to punish companies for moving jobs overseas.
These politicians are misguided, of course, because technological advances (like bulldozers, sewing machines, and computers) have taken many more American jobs than overseas relocation. So if we really want to save American jobs, we should focus on the biggest culprit and do everything we can to stifle innovation.
If you haven’t guessed by now, I don’t really believe that we should outlaw innovation. Instead, I think this argument refutes the idea that the government should protect American jobs by punishing companies who move jobs overseas.
This is a sensitive topic, especially in Cookeville. But we can’t really blame the companies. Companies that don’t increase efficiency will be shut down by companies (in the US or abroad) that do.
Personally, I’ve always thought that the US would be better off without the jobs that can be done by 12 year-old Sri Lankans. For every one of these jobs that America loses, that means that one more American brain becomes available to design, create, and innovate.
When I look back at my family’s history, they were all farmers until the early 1900s. In fact, about forty percent of Americans were farmers around the turn of the century. Now, because of technological innovations, less than two percent of the US working population is employed in farming. Thank God for innovation! Without these advances I would probably be following a team of donkeys with a plow this morning instead of enjoying my coffee and reading the Herald-Citizen.
Manufacturing may be following the same path as farming. Would that really be so bad? It sounds bad because most people (including me) are afraid of change and uncertainty.
But as our reliance on farming decreased, people learned new skills and ultimately increased their standard of living. It’s time once again for Americans to learn new skills. These new skills will likely require greater educational efforts in math, science, creativity, and entrepreneurship.
I’m guessing that neither banning bulldozers nor sending more jobs to Sri Lanka will help me get elected. But I’ve got as much chance of winning as Mike Gravel, so campaign donations will be happily accepted.
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2 comments:
Tom:
I don’t think you are really that blasé when you ask the question, “Would that really be so bad?” in reference to manufacturing taking the same path as farming. Actually, I’m not sure what you are implying, because we farm more today than in the 1900s, but the farm “factories” are bigger. The “garage shop” farms are fading away because of economies of scale.
But if you are implying that losing manufacturing to other countries may not be so bad, here we have a different situation. We have been losing our manufacturing base for a couple of decades. Today, anyone who wants to start a manufacturing company in the U.S. can still do so if they know their technology. Flexial Corporation is an example. We started fifteen years ago and are number two in our industry today. Manufacturing can still be sprouted and grown in this country. But that is rapidly changing. Our continued loss of manufacturing to foreign countries is causing the loss of something more fundamental that does not seem to be apparent to politicians and academicians. If you haven’t worked in manufacturing, you probably wouldn’t realize this loss or its significance. We losing our tool and die base. Well, what’s the big deal about that? Sounds like some greasy shop behind a gas station. Nope. The tool and die producers are at the core of manufacturing. This technology is as much art as it is engineering. In manufacturing, the tool and die maker has always been the prince of the industry—the person who excelled beyond all others to make the actual tools of industry. These tool and die companies were planted around every major manufacturing region in the country and populated with the best of the best—the tool and die makers—the individuals who had honed their skills to build this most complex component of manufacturing. These companies are folding at the rate of several a week. I see it in the auction notices I get each week: come get a good deal on a few machines! The vast majority of the tool and die shops were located in the Midwest. These auction notices are the scariest emails I receive each week. Do you get them?
What is the significance? Our manufacturing base is our defense base. Not the U.S. military, not DARPA, not Missile Defense Agency. We defend our country with our manufacturing base. When we got dragged into the Second World War, our entire manufacturing base retooled to build war materials. Robertshaw, a bellows company in Knoxville that we would consider a “dirty” industry today, retooled to build brass shell casings because they knew how to deep-draw brass. A Goodyear plant retooled to build Corsairs, other companies retooled to build the 19,000 B-24s needed to defeat Germany and Japan and so on. Factories (I hardly dare to use the word today) of every size retooled to take on some specific need. The point is, we had the manufacturing base to retool and the tool and die base to serve them.
Now, a good manufacturing company can retool in a couple of years, but a tool and die company takes a decade or more to develop. And no self-respecting high school counselor will recommend that a student aspire to tool and die maker. It’s just not cool. And there is no point, because the opportunity for a good job is on a steady decline.
Jayne and I went up to Three Rivers, Michigan, a couple of years ago to pick up a boat we bought on eBay. The man selling it was an out-of-work foreman from a 350 person tool and die shop. This is what he had done his entire life. The shop had to close because their customer base disappeared—mostly offshore. This is happening all over our formerly industrialized states.
We are steadily diminishing our capacity to defend ourselves militarily and our ability to retool if we needed to. We are okay in a war of the present scale where we are slapping mosquitoes, but what if we had to stand up to China? Which country could swamp the other with manufacturing output? Which country could retool faster?
The idea that we should move this old-fashioned work—“manufacturing”—overseas to make room for our brainpower to do new things is a serious misdirection. Ultimately, defense requires hardware. All our cyber technology and computer ingenuity is useless without it. All our “American brains that become available to design, create and innovate” are useless if the effort doesn’t connect with hardware—the output of a factory—the production of a manufacturing company somewhere. If the lion’s share of our manufacturing goes to an enemy nation or even a neutral nation, we will be hard-pressed to respond the way we did in the 1940s. We beat Germany not because we had better brainpower, but because we swamped them with our manufacturing capacity.
I ache to see jobs leave this country, but the ache is not as bad as the fear. The loss of manufacturing capacity and, worse, the loss of the ability to swiftly restore capacity is terrifying. Your children and my grandchildren may find themselves the unfortunate victims of these few greedy decades.
--Rick
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