Hmmm….Republicans have held the presidency 28 out of the last 40 years. They have been in charge the last eight. And it is somehow Obama’s fault?

Most of the policies I criticizes are the policies of states not the federal government. The Great Lakes states have been mostly solidly Democrat since the 1930. Even when Republicans were elected in the area they choose to avoid to the suicidal course of taking on the unions.

Of course Obama is not to blame. Indeed, his resume so thin he is not to blame for much of anything. My entire point in the parent was that Obama seeks to extend the failed policies of the Great Lake states to the rest of the country. In few short years, the rest of the country could experience the same economic devastation.

The Republicans have been in charge most of the last 40 years. Take some responsibility instead of making excuses.

A short recon of whatÂ’s out there that might draw your attention, updated throughout the day…so check back often….

The uninformed and naive voting for inexperience and potential.

Thank you for turning our presidential election into American Idol.

Now grab your ankles and brace yourself for “Change”…

Thanx, D

The top article seems to assume the United States could somehow have stayed in a dominant position of producing 50% of the world GNP if only there were no unions or taxes.

I asserted no such thing. The point about the dominance of the area in the 1950 merely showed how great an advantage was squandered. From such significant head start, the regionsshould have been able to adapt easily to the reconstruction and development of the rest of the world.

Your focus on the automotive industry misses the broader picture. All the manufacturing in the area collapsed, in every industry. Steel, plastics, electronics, consumer durables, you name-it, all experienced a major downturn in the area in the late 60’s early 70’s. Do you mean to argue that every single major American manufacture of that era was incompetently managed? Don’t you think that just by sheer randomness some of them would have figured out how to adapt?

Most damningly to your argument, companies that relocated outside the region to other parts of the U.S. usually prospered. If bad management and foreign competition were the main culprits, why can manufactures Right-to-Work states prosper? Bad managers in Michigan are bad managers in Texas. Unfair practices overseas hurt Texas companies as much as they hurt companies in Michigan.

Remember also, that unions represent only the most visible manifestation of a political culture hostile to change and economic adaptation. A vast array of laws in many different areas seek to force corporations to remain highly static and to prevent adaptations that might produce dislocations in the workforce or the taxbase. It’s much harder to get permission to build a factory in Michigan than it is in Texas. The factory will pay higher taxes and poorer state services.

We can’t force the rest of the world to go by our standards and laws. We can’t lock them out of our markets without locking ourselves out of theirs. We need to focus on what we can control internally instead of trying to lash out at foreigners. We need to set wages based on the free-market value of people’s labor, not by how much they can violently extort.

That’s ridiculous. If that were the case then companies like BMW, Mercedes and VW would have failed years ago due to epically stronger unions and higher taxes.

One could argue that because the US didn’t protect it’s workers with outrageous policies like in China or Japan where they basically subsidize their industry with government, the US firms couldn’t compete because of the diluted labor and auto costs coming out of those countries. The world doesn’t always play fair even though the US wants them to.

Shannon, it is tempting to attribute all of the RustBelt’s problems to one problem, unionism and a cosy political arrangement between Democrats and unions etc, but surely you don’t support such simplistic arguments.

I didn’t. Read the parent.

Others have pointed to additional factors, like the US being in the fortunate position after the end of WWII that much of the industrial capacity of the rest of the world had been destroyed.

That was me, in the parent. I pointed out that unions were only the most egregious of a slew of anti-production, semi-socialist policies that crippled business in the region.

Under those circumstances, why should management resist union demands for a large slice of the pie if they believed they would forever be the premier industrial country in the world and could always charge a premium for their products.

I don’t think management deserves any blame for bowing to union demands. Union get what they want through violence. In the beginning, unions simply killed people themselves but eventually the government stepped in and took over the threatening function. The government would fine and imprison business people that did not deal with the union.

Managements types back in the 50’s and 60’s did warn against the expansive pensions and health benefits. What exactly do you think their detailed arguments were about during the negotiations? The recognized that the union’s compensation demands and work rules where bad for the long term health of the company but in the end they had no choice but to capitulate. They couldn’t fight the government.

A really good read from Shannon Love over at Chicago Boyz: One really has to ask the obvious question: If Obama’s economic policies work so well, why isn’t Detroit a paradise? In 1950, America produced 51% of the GNP for……

If I recall correctly, the original “conservatives” were trying to conserve the radical changes that took place during the then-immediate past. Possible the revolution, or the civil war. They weren’t trying to prevent change – they were trying to prevent backsliding.

Wish I had a source for this.