Some musings from the ivory tower—
I have followed several interesting and informative threads about the economy, government, future of the machine trades, etc. and offer the following comments:
(1) While everyone would like to think that absolute "truth" exists, the actuality is that for humans "perception is reality"
(2) As F. Scott Fitzgerald observed in "The Great Gatsby," "The very rich are different than you or me." This follows from (1) because their experiences/perceptions are so different than everyone else.
This is a significant and growing danger to both the very rich (as their wealth and uniqueness intensifies) and everyone else because this leads to "helpful" suggestions by the very rich such as "let them eat cake" when such mundane items as a shortage of bread (or health care) intrudes into their world.
Thorsten Veblem (while a far-left writer) made a short and very insightful examination of this difference in his work “Theory of the Leisure Class. (Actually there are two leisure classes, the very rich and the very poor with the main difference being the amount of money available to them. Their perceptions about the world and the way it works appear to be very similar and totally different from the middle-class majority.) See
(3) An extremely dangerous illusion has been internalized by not only the very rich, but also by increasing numbers of "normal" Americans that the "things" they use/consume are not created by the hands of man, but rather are conjured up, replicated as in "Star Trek" or fall from the sky like manna.
Loss of the ability to domestically produce items may be a serious national security issue. While the absence of high-line perfume (France) or handbags (Italy) in the domestic economy in an emergency would not spell disaster, the non-availability of M2 steel, carbide, machine tools such as wing spar mills, and CNC controllers most definitely would. Even more critical is the existence of a cadre of qualified machine operators, technicians, engineers and designers.
(4) Whether it was first said by Hegel, Marx, or Gayatri Spivack, it is never-the-less true that "at some point, the quantitative be comes the qualitative. As organizations/institutions increase in absolute and relative size, there comes a time when the rules/conventions that apply to individuals and small groups are no longer operational. For example, it may become impossible to accumulate meaningful (cash) reserves. Consider the situation of Social Security. In order to avoid the need to abruptly and significantly increase payroll taxes to fund the “boomer” retirement bulge, congress slightly increased payroll taxes 25 years ago, with the additional funds generated being placed in trust and invested in the safest possible securities --U.S. government bonds. The result is that taxes will indeed not need to be abruptly and significantly increased to fund "boomer" retirement, but rather to redeem the US government bonds in the Social Security trust fund, hence the use of the word "operational"
(5) It would be far better for the nation if the politicians, business leaders, economists, etc. spoke totally different languages than the "common" people. It would then be apparent that careful interpretation/transliteration is required to adequately understand their statements. [To understand is not to agree with.] As a former president made clear "it all depends on what 'is' is." Not only does the exact meaning intended by the speaker depend on possibly baroque and esoteric sentence structure, it also depends on carefully nuanced words, possibly used with unique or out-of-the-ordinary meanings. An additional complication [for the general public] is that while a statement may appear to be simple and non-conditional, almost always tacit (possibly subliminal) conditions, understood by the “in-crowd” for whom the statement was intended, apply. An example of this is the famous statement by another former president "Read my lips – no new taxes"
As Rosabeth Moss Kanter made explicit in her work "Men and Women of the Corporation" learning to "read between the lines" or understanding the tacit conditions attached to all apparently simple declarative statements is an essential skill, required for admission to "management" in all organizations. Available at
(6) It is indeed true that millions of new, (relatively) high paying manufacturing and technical jobs have been created by the extensive restructuring of the US economy and the massive tax cuts. NAFTA/GATT/WTO, The Office of the US Trade Representative, and the other governmental agencies have more than met their goals in increasing the number of jobs and the amount of trade.
But, with credit to Paul Harvey, "now for the rest of the story" -- almost none of these jobs are located in the United States and/or filled by US citizens. It now appears that none of the people involved understood the (possibly tacit) requirement that the majority of the new jobs created and economic activity generated were to be within the United States, subject to US taxation.
(7) Short-term, expedient and opportunistic governmental economic policies at all levels have created serious systemic internal economic asymmetries. While general economic improvement expressed by John Kennedy’s famous phrase "a rising tide lifts all boats" is the ideal, it was frequent in the past that a policy or program improved only one or a few economic sector/class(s) without improving the rest. This was tolerable as long as the improvements were equitably distributed over time. This is considerably different than the current situation where an improvement for one group generally means a decline for all the other groups. In effect, a "zero-sum" economic game has displaced the former situation in the United States where economic/social improvement was generated for everyone by growing the entire economy.
It now appears that precisely such sectional/regional economic asymmetry was one of the major reasons for the sudden and unexpected dissolution of Czechoslovakia into Slovakia and the Czech Republic. See
(8) Examination of the historical record indicates that while their "life span" may be longer than the average human, nation states and governments are not immortal. The debts, treaty obligations, etc. of Rome, Byzantium, Babylonia and Assyria (among many others) will never be met.