Much is made by many of the decline in American manufacturing, a trend that hit the headlines when China surpassed the USA as the top manufacturing nation in the world a couple years ago. Yet many, including so many of those who lament and decry the decline, are also loudly and reflexively anti-corporation. Corporations are the source of all that’s wrong in the nation, if you believe those voices. They pollute, they exploit, they don’t pay their workers, they don’t care about their customers, they’re greedy, they’re ruthless, their behavior is bad for the nation. These beliefs, right or wrong, produce via the political system a long list of regulations from an alphabet soup of agencies. These beliefs produce the highest corporate tax rates in the industrialized world. These beliefs produce an environment where businesses, manufacturing and other, often feel they’re operating under a microscope of distrust and a presumption of bad intent. These beliefs make manufacturing more difficult, more expensive, less profitable and riskier.
Is it any wonder that there’s been a steady outsourcing of jobs from the USA? Is it a surprise that companies move their manufacturing to places where it’s less reviled, where it’s less expensive, and where it’s more welcome? Should we be shocked when companies look across borders when they’re planning growth and expansion? Are we to be astonished when corporations engage in inversion? When environmental conditions turn hostile, organisms and entities react by distancing themselves from those conditions. Yet some people are indeed surprised by these obvious and expectable reactions to hostility.
If your dog’s health suffers from what you feed it and how you treat it, your proper response should be to change your behaviors toward it. Not so with American industry. Demands are made that companies be good “corporate citizens,” that they behave in a fashion that’s contrary to their well-being and prosperity, that they accept the conditions an antagonistic society imposes on them without complaint and that they do the bidding of that society even if it harms them.
How does this make any sense?
The answer to that semi-rhetorical question is rooted in the infantilization of the nation and of what passes for political discourse nowadays. People simply want things to be they way they want, reality notwithstanding. They want the benefits of an advanced, technological, first-world society without comprehending that those benefits don’t magically appear out of thin air, wishes and good intentions. Santa brings toys made by elves at the North Pole and distributed by flying reindeer pulling a sleigh through the air. The elves and the reindeer shouldn’t have to work too hard, they should be unionized and their unions should be given whatever they want, and the raw materials for the toys should be made from the snow and ice outside the factory (but not so much that it gets depleted). Oh, and Santa and Mrs. Claus shouldn’t make any money, or at least any more money than the elves do.
Some children figure out that the Santa Claus story is implausible when their rational thought process mature enough to question the Ôphysics’ of Santa’s Christmas Eve rampage around the world. Others are told by their peers. And some have the truth explained by their parents when they start asking questions. Sadly, the same doesn’t always hold true for basic economic realities. Too many of those who set themselves up as the adults, the people who tell others how things are and can or should be, either hide the hard facts from the people or themselves remain attached to the delusions and myths.
Economic realities are not social constructs, they aren’t whims made up by people who set up a nation’s laws and rules. They are as inexorable as the tide and the rising of the sun. They can be danced around for a while, their paths can be altered, they can be obstructed, but they cannot be done away with. So it goes with manufacturing. When someone decides that a certain aspect of manufacturing industry in this nation doesn’t please him, and he chooses to use government force to alter that aspect, something else will change. Add weight to one side of a scale, and the balance changes. Action, reaction. Turning a blind eye to this or presuming that it can be legislated or regulated away only sets one up for an unpleasant surprise.
If we want America to remain a manufacturing nation, we have to stop chasing manufacturers away.
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