derryl

Just How Sensitive Is the Economy to the Auto Industry?

Fcountry has laid out the real underlying reasons for Detroit's troubles. Alexander Hamilton and the Friedrich List school understand that national power and security depend on a solid manufacturing base and a substantial degree of national economic self-sufficiency. Henry Ford understood that if Ford was to prosper the people who built the cars had to be able to afford to buy them. McJobs in a service economy are not a workable replacement for decent paying jobs in high value added industries.

We are seeing the consequences in America of a one-world globalist vision of economics. Moving manufacturing out of the US may be better for "the world" but it destroys the US. America can no longer produce and trade. America now borrows and consumes. Subprime mortgages made McMansions available to people with McJobs, but that was a fantasy that is now crashing down to reality.

The truth is, people with McJobs earn peasant level incomes. A service economy is a peasant economy. Readily available credit disguised this fact for a long time, but now the piper is calling for his loans to be repaid and the peasants have no money. There are not enough good paying jobs to employ all these people because those jobs have been exported to Asia by the globalists.

If consumers can buy a Chinese product at Walmart for 1/2 the price of a competing US product, they will buy Chinese. For awhile, as long as these consumers can keep getting deeper into debt to buy all this cheap Chinese stuff, America will enjoy a higher standard of living measured by the goods people possess. But without good paying jobs earned by producing products that America can sell to China, this debt-fueled prosperity is an illusion.

I don't know what the globalists' plans are for America in the future. With Detroit's needs and Obama's willingness to borrow and stimulate there is a historic opportunity for America to develop next-generation auto technologies that can be sold to the world. American preeminence came from inventing, perfecting and manufacturing things that the world wanted. I think the opportunity exists to get back this position with energy and auto technologies. The question is, will America be allowed to do this?