Previous item repeated Carver’s answer to Machiavelli. Now repeat Henry Ford’s answer.
This 1935 Ford promotional film starts with a long florid speech by a pompous grandiose announcer, introducing an important address by Henry Ford himself! Mr Ford will announce the company’s way of countering the Depression. After the long highly “grammatical” intro, we hear a long florid verbose oration by Henry himself:
The answer is work.
Well, verbose by Ford standards. There are three unnecessary words.
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It’s clear by now that Trump is NOT really working on fentanyl. His tariffs on Canada and Mexico are just a standard Wall Street gangster tactic. He’s running an LBO. Bankrupting the takeover target so he can move in and sell the assets. If you really want to bring industry home, you use tariffs as the stick and subsidies or looser regulation as the carrot. That’s how industrial policy works. Trump wants to turn off the subsidy of the ‘Chips Act’, so he’s only using tariffs as an LBO extortion tool.
Nobody is solving the most serious problem in this country and Canada. Crime, homelessness, drug overdoses. The cause is extremely simple. Globalism. The WEFtern countries handed their industry to China so our corporations could focus exclusively on fun stuff like LBOs and stock buybacks and bitcoin trading.
In 1889 JM Graybill wrote:
The people of Free-Trade countries are therefore driven into the few occupations which are left, by reason of the destruction of their formerly more varied pursuits. Hence those diversified talents with which men are endowed are not developed but remain latent and unused, an incalculable detriment to the prosperity of their respective countries.
I’ve said something similar many times, and I’ve read something similar many times, but never said it or read it so COMPLETELY AND POWERFULLY as Graybill’s version.
Thinking again about the mature Soviet system. On the Graybill parameter of using talents, a comparison of 1968 Soviet to 1968 USA would narrowly favor USA. In the specific areas of engineering and science, ’68 Soviet would defeat ’68 US easily. Soviets gave special consideration to engineers, and we had already offshored much of our electronics industry to Japan.
Comparing either ’68 system to 2016 USA dramatically favors both ’68 systems. We have severely restricted the range of paid and usable skills.
In other words, the major variable between economic systems is NOT central control vs “free” market. It’s protectionist vs free-trade, closed vs open borders, profit vs share value. USA and USSR in 1968 were both relatively closed systems with restricted imports and minimal offshoring of labor. Both operated with profit as the goal of business.
Modern US/UK/EU economics demands Ebola-style open borders above all, and operates with a goal variable of SHARE VALUE. We are collapsing.
FDR paid close attention to Graybill’s Law when he was repairing the damage done by previous share-value collapses. His farm subsidy program preserved the skills of farm families, which would take several generations to rebuild otherwise. WPA took special care to keep all sorts of talents working and learning, from housewives to masons to cooks to writers to musicians. At that time the industrial range of skills didn’t need as much help, so WPA didn’t focus on industrial skills. The auto industry slowed down but continued running at a reasonable level.
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The real cure is eliminating the stock market or SEVERELY curtailing its reach and power. The Soviet system eliminated it, FDR curtailed it effectively, allowing real business to function well for 50 years until Nixon opened the bomb bay again and resumed destroying the country.
Even without halting the basic cause, there are a few obvious steps that states and cities COULD take if they wanted to. Controlling crime is not a difficult concept. Separate professional criminals from lawbreakers, keep pro criminals in jail for a LONG time or execute them. Before the 1970s we did it. “Inmate rights” and “equality” eliminated the obvious distinction and prevented prisons from doing anything effective to IMPROVE behavior. The recipe for improvement is the same as WPA’s recipe for the overall economy. USEFUL WORK for inmates.
We also did a better job of handling mentally incompetent people, whether congenital or resulting from drugs. Involuntary commitment worked, and the older form of sanitariums also worked. Instead of replacing one psychoactive drug with other psychoactive drugs, asylums gave the inmates USEFUL WORK, farming or cooking or sewing for the institution. This cured most problems effectively. Replacing one drug with another only creates MORE addiction, not less.
Again this changed in the ’70s. Teddy Kennedy and Ronald Reagan worked both ends of the political game to “deinstitutionalize” and “get rid of abusive asylums.” They were pretending to argue for more “inmate rights”, but the result was vastly less freedom and security for the inmates as well as the general population.
The answer is USEFUL work, with decent working conditions and decent pay. That was Ford’s answer and FDR’s answer, and it was our most common answer to crime and drugs and mental problems until we restarted Wall Street’s bombers.
Polistra's Mill 