Ethan thank you, I believe that is the first time you have ever agreed with a post of mine.

Tom, I have been puzzled by this phenomena myself. Corporate leaders have been allowed to adopt this attitude. And it is a shame that business leaders have chosen to turn their back on the very country that allowed them to succeed to such a level.

I am not saying that our businesses should be sheltered or coddled. But I firmly believe that American workers and companies could have made this adjustment to a larger and less expensive labor pool without the massive displacement that has taken place. And a good bit of it has come as the result of allowing other countries to set their rules and then not reacting in kind. One sided free trade resulted in an excruciating collapse in American manufacturing.

Will American engineers and manufacturing workers have to accept lower real wages? Probably. That adjustment should have been a fait accompli by this time. Instead we, and our government, instead tried to maintain a higher standard of living that was probably realistic through a massive increase in debt load. The entire system has gotten into very dire straits because of this.

But the adjustment should have been gradual. And it should have occurred naturally. And in the process we should have insisted that the other countries that were coming on line to compete against us were held to the same standard as we were. Instead we allowed other countries to impost strict tariffs on our goods and services by many different methods while we insisted on turning them loose in our marketplace.

What has resulted is a manufacturing base that instead of adapting and evolving into a sleeker more competitive sector that branched out into new and different products was simply allowed to collapse entirely. We wrote off manufacturing and production completely and allowed other countries to it over. What has resulted is that they have expanded their tax and employment base. They have become workers and savers like I mentioned a few posts back.

We decided to sell our houses to each other at increasingly high debt loads and call it the 'new economy'... bah! You see where that got us don't you Steve?

Will

Smellin' a lot of 'if' coming off this plan.