Our country is founded on some pretty basic principals. Among those principals, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness round out my top three favorite. The best of the lot, though, is the pursuit of happiness. What this means, in effect, is that the government guarantees nothing to anyone, other than the OPPORTUNITY to find your place and be happy. What this means is that YOU are ultimately responsible for your happiness, because the opportunity is there for you to take. You are free to “pursue” it in any way you see fit, and if you don’t get it, you typically don’t have anyone to blame but yourself (with exceptions like health problems, etc.)
However, this opportunity for happiness is eroding away as quickly as our Congress passes bailout legislation to prop up failed enterprise.
The pursuit of happiness in business requires the ability to outperform the other guy; to do better than your competition and therefore, “beat” them out of your share of the pie. For years, this was allowed to happen, and for years, this resulted in the front-runners of any industry being the strongest, fastest, and best managed. It also resulted in the front runners of any industry constantly changing, as the businesses currently in the lead got comfortable in their success, stagnant in their management, and reactive in their processes, paving the way for the competition to leap ahead in innovation and ideas.
The government’s bailout plans have stifled this. Innovation and ideas no longer pay off. Being ahead of the game is no longer the way to success. As you innovate and adapt in order to beat your failing competitor, the government starts to feed him cash to keep him afloat, and you are no longer able to keep up. In their well-intentioned bailouts of these major banks, the government has guaranteed status quo, and the failure of innovative up-and-comers that may do things better, faster, and cheaper..
Now, we look at the auto industry. Years of bad, milquetoast management have allowed the auto unions to grab Detroit by the curleys*, and now they have to pay an unskilled worker who spends his entire day putting crank handles on wing windows an exorbitant amount of money and benefits, causing the prices of these vehicles to skyrocket. Consumers can no longer justify the purchase of an American car for twice the price they will pay for it’s Korean counterpart, and at lower perceived quality. Detroit tries to keep up by selling cars at break even or even by losing money on them temporarily, but they cannot keep up. As long as they are required to pay an unskilled high school graduate the same salary as most engineers make, they won’t be able to compete. In the old days, when a company was no longer able to compete, they went out of business. It was a healthy purge cycle; out with the old, in with the new. However, the “too big to fail” mentality has ensured that the old stays in, and are simply propped up by US tax dollars.
Let the banks fail. Let the auto industry tank. Someone else will come along, buy what is left, re-tool, re-organize, and get things running smoothly again. Chrysler would be a smoothly-running, well oiled machine if they had been allowed to fail back in the 70’s, and let the natural course of things take over. As it is now, they are a ponderous, confused dinosaur that has no clue how to compete in today’s market.
And yes, if these industries were to fail, it would hurt, and many would be out of jobs. However, there will not be a vacuum that they are losing their jobs into. Someone will come along, buy GM, and get them up and running again, and that person will probably get their job back. It is the way things are supposed to work. Gov. intervention is stifling the pursuit of happiness in business. It has turned it into the pursuit of handouts, and that is not healthy.
*Before anyone lights me up with the old flame thrower, I am not anti-union necessarily. What I am is anti-self-destruction. Many unions forget that the success of their people is tied directly to the success of the company. They focus so hard on draining the life out of the company for the benefit of the members, that they forget that the company signs the checks, which would disappear along with the company. I am all for a fair wage for a day’s work, but these unions have gone beyond fair, and into exorbitant. Unions used to serve a purpose, but I feel as though in many industries, that purpose has played out. People used to strike because of dangerous, unhealthy work conditions and slave wages. Now, they strike for a lower co-pay on their gold-plated health plan. It is simply the union trying to justify their existence in a world where I feel they are mostly becoming irrelevant, and I think it would do them some good for companies to start failing under their influence, and restart and reset without union interference.
11 comments:
All good points, Goob.
I agree. Let the inefficient companies die. Their skilled employees will probably be snapped up by the replacement enterprise.
American industry has, for the most part, stagnated. It's time for some new blood with new ideas to come in and replace them.
Unions suck.
Goob, i don't see why you should feel uncomfortable for knocking unions. They are responsible for a great deal of what's gone wrong with this country's industry and economy. I belonged to several unions when i was younger, and i don't recall them doing anything for me. For themselves, sure, but not me, nada!
As i said the other day, a look at the on-going success of the "non-union" Honda, Mercedes, and BMW plants down south is clear evidence that unions are no longer needed. BTW, these plants are non-union because "the workers" told the unions to F-off!
I find it unutterably ironic that the nationalization of the financial services industry, the commercial banking industry and the home mortgage lending industry and, as it would now appear the auto industry occurred on the watch of a Republican administration. We have no one to blame for the situation that now exists but ourselves. We, of the paleo-conservative persuasion willingly allowed neo-conservative ideologues to hijack the only safe political haven we had left.
I supported Republican presidential candidates from 1964 until 1992 at which time the monumentally distasteful alternatives of George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton drove me into the Libertarian Party. Yeah, yeah, I know that I "wasted my vote" and "helped to elect Bill Clinton." That said, when does it become time to vote according to the dictates of one's own conscience? I held my nose and voted for the McCain-Palin ticket although John McCain is little better on the issues of free speech and immigration reform than is Barack Obama. Moreover, Sarah Palin, though she passed the only true, twin litmus tests in the minds of some of us on the right side of the aisle: being pro-life and supporting gun rights, was not particularly well informed on foreign or domestic policy issues; nor was she [in my opinion] well suited to be the vice president.
If the conservative movement is to survive and be a viable option for voters in the American political arena we are going to have to take back from Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, et al, the reins of Party leadership and re-establish our dedication to sound fiscal and monetary policy as well as low taxes for all Americans. We are also going to have to stop engaging in meaningless wars that have little or nothing to do with protecting the national interests of the United States and only serve to encourage the Treasury to print more useless debt instruments for sale to foreign countries in order to finance such wars. We must also demand of the congress and the president a balanced budget, no deficit spending and maybe, just maybe the return to a gold or silver backed currency. With a gold or silver standard, congress could not print more money than we had precious metal to back it.
pant...pant...pant...Okay, I'm done now. Take me back to my room, nurse. Is it time for my Thorazine
?
I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around [the banks] will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs.
Thomas Jefferson, Letter to the Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin (1802)
3rd president of US (1743 - 1826)
I believe we should allow the automotive industry go into chap. 11. I don't think that the American producers will disappear completely. We did not get into this situation overnight and we will not get out of it overnight. There will be pain, but we must, for the sake of the nation and our children, allow them to reorganize and forfeit contracts with the unions. I know that the unions will fight it 'tooth and nail'.
Our government must share much of the blame for our problems today.
"Our country is founded on some pretty basic principals. Among those principals, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness "
Bill is dead
where da free cheese?
IMO, the Republican party is DOA! Cause of death? Suicide! And now that the Left has total control of the govt. and soon the SCOTUS, it'll stay dead. And i don't believe there's enough strength and will on the part of those on the right, (or even the center) to revive it. What's needed is a new party, one with real people running it. In other words, forget about it! We have been delivered into the hands of the Philistines, and there we'll stay for a long time!
As for Gov. Palin, i don't understand why people feel she should have been a foreign-policy expert, especially since most of the officials in the Federal govt. who are responsible for our foreign policy don't know what the hell they're doing! She's the gov. of a state. She needs to be knowledgeable about her state, and the state of the nation, and IMO, she is. It wasn't her fault that McLoser gave her a week to prepare. And even with that, she never sounded as dumb as Biden.
As for the financial crisis? The solution is easy. Simply find a cure for insatiable greed. That same cure will also fix our political system.
Governor Palin did not seem to particularly well informed on much of anything save gun rights and her opposition to abortion. In my opinion, the prospective vice president should be able to at least articulate a modicum of understanding about both domestic and foreign policy issues.
Annie
Unions are the reason I am a soldier and not the CFO or Jr VP of a large construction company in the NW. Along with the corporation holding a couple farms, ranches, restaraunts and a bowling alley......why you say, because we had to import union workers for several projects because there were not enough in the local area, and the "national" corporations we were doing work for were "obligated" to ensure that we had a 50/50 mix of union/non-union labor.
The end result, grand dad bankrupted and then nobody had a job. (and the "national" chains realized it just wasn't worth the hastle to expand into that area.
on the upside, I have a pretty cool career killing or training to kill extremist raghead sand- N@#$#@$'s.
In the case of the auto-makers' bailout, it's a relief to have a national issue that is so straightforward: American cars tend to break down and fall apart therefore people have stopped buying them. If GM and Ford don't want to go out of business, they should start making decent cars. To bail them out would be to reward their terrible manufacturing standards.
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