Manufacturing!

October 27th, 2010

Manufacturing creates value to pay for schools.

Manufacturing creates value to pay for healthcare.

Manufacturing creates value to build and maintain infrastructure.

Manufacturing creates value to pay mortgages.

Manufacturing creates jobs.

Posted in Manufacturing Competitiveness, Recession, Robust Economy

4 Responses to “Manufacturing!”

David Vranson:

October 28, 2010 at 10:56 am

…And we simply need to keep hammering on this. When we look around at the community and the state of the economy, it seems that most of the country isn’t quite getting it. Our economy is fed by sustainable manufacturing. That pretty-much hasn’t changed since the days of the Neanderthal. Revenue from servicing goods isn’t naturally sustainable and when you can no longer afford to pay for durable goods, what is there going to be to service? Just a thought.
Silvia Leahu-Aluas:

November 1, 2010 at 2:09 pm

I see one major problem for our society and economy: the confusion between work, value and wealth. There is no connection anymore between work, its consequences, its value creation and its monetary valuation. How do we restore that? How do we redefine work?

Exxon just reported a 55% increase in quarterly income. Nobody in manufacturing can do that and given investors’ obsession with high returns, irrespective of activity and its sustainability, where will the money flow?

The American is also at fault for never asking or caring where are things he buys being made and if there are of any value and quality, not only how cheap they are. They are cheap exactly because they are not good, manufactured in some hole in the wall by exploited labor with no protection and no dignity.

As for regulations, taxes and unions, that is absolutely a non-issue. Germany and all the other first-world countries with strong manufacturing make most of the best goods in the world, despite dealing with all three “problems”. Why? Because they are driven by quality and pride in making things, the best there can be, and because they still value and respect work.

Buy Made in America!
Silvia Leahu-Aluas:

November 9, 2010 at 2:29 pm

One very good, if sad, argument on why manufacturing will have to return to the US and to localize, all of the world. I agree with the argument, as it has been my ironic observation for a long time that, after island-hoping all possible LCC’s, we will become the one to return to.

“it’s not like we are going to stop using steel in America, and it is certainly not like we are going to stop eating. What we are going to have to do is make our own steel. What we are going to have to do is grow more of our own food. Unfortunately, much of our agricultural land has been paved over with suburban sprawl. Just as triple digit oil prices will breathe new life into our hollowed out Rust Belt, triple digit oil prices will turn those far-flung suburbs and exurbs back into the farmland they were, thirty to forty years ago. The very same economic forces that gutted our manufacturing sector, that paved over our farm land, when oil was cheap and abundant, and transport costs were incidental, those same economic forces will do the opposite in a world of triple digit oil prices. And that is not determined by government, and that is not determined by ideological preference, and that is not determined by our willingness or unwillingness to reduce our carbon trail. That is just Economics 100.”

Read the whole analysis, one the best explanations of the causes of the current recession/depression and of the failure of globalization, practiced as an one-way flow of cheap goods transported at maximum distances with finite sources of energy.

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/7095#more
Reed Smedberg:

March 28, 2011 at 11:08 am

Inevitably the jobs will return to America. The politicians are working on it already. After all the schools are decimated, healthcare is socialized, the infrastructure has fallen apart from lack of maintenance, and middle class mortgages no longer exist because the wealthy own their multiple homes and the rest of us live in government housing….yes, then jobs will return to America because by then we will work for next to nothing. By then China will own manufacturing, but will have to outsource because their own labor costs are too high.

Shipulski On Design

Manufacturing!

4 Responses to “Manufacturing!”

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