A Tragic Hypocrisy

The manufacturing industry of the United States is widely regarded as the most important industry for jobs. We hear it from the politicians. We hear it from the media. We even start to hear it from ourselves. It's used as a reason for bailing out large automotive companies and as an argument for tariffs and quotas against countries such as China, that compete with our manufacturing industry. They're too big to fail, of course. What would happen to the workers and their families if General Motors closed down?

I don't know of many people who aspire to be factory workers, but in the U.S., we have a peculiar obsession with those types of jobs. Has anyone questioned the importance of the manufacturing industry? If someone in the media has, it has went unnoticed. Certainly no politicians have. With the Democratic Party being funded by labor unions, and the Republicans funded by corporate fat cats, they wouldn't dare.

I guess it will have to be me.

Let me first say that I will not refute that manufacturing does currently provide many jobs for our economy. What I do argue is that those jobs are not any more important than any other type of job, and they are very much replaceable with other industries. Consider another industry that was once considered the backbone of America - farming.

Until the mid 1900's, 70-80% of jobs in the United States were farming related. Today, that number is down to about 2%. Yes, those farming jobs were "lost." But how many people would like to go back to those days, for the sake of keeping so-called important jobs? We produce significantly more food, with less effort now. So what happened to the people who lost their farming job? They moved on to something else that there was demand for, namely manufacturing jobs.

Sounds like the transition went smoothly, right? Wrong. Just as there are people today arguing that the manufacturing industry should be kept afloat at the expense of the public, there were people making the same arguments for farming jobs then. Franklin Roosevelt went as far as to pay farmers to destroy their crops! The intention was to keep the farmers well off (remember, this was the "important" industry of the time) and raise the price of food, for the farmers benefits. Well, anyone with common sense would tell you that destroying a country's food supply during a depression could have some negative effects on consumers, and it did. Many went hungry. Our government propped up an industry that was trying to shrink. Who knows how much the country was held back due to policies preventing the economy from progressing. But it was all for the sake of the precious farming jobs.

This was a long time ago, in a very different era. So you may be wondering what FDR's food destruction policies have to do with current industrial protectionists. We would never be so foolish as to destroy resources for the sake of a certain industry, would we? It turns out, we're just as foolish now as we ever were. Consider what a tariff or quota truly does. It limits the availability and raises the prices of goods, in the name of job protection. Sounds familiar, doesn't it? I wonder which industry we are preventing from development now.

My Republican friends are the first to bash FDR, especially for his food destruction plan. He's considered one of the worst presidents ever, by some (and I would agree with that). Yet many of those same people clamor for quotas and tariffs against those job-killing Chinese. That, my friends, is a tragic hypocrisy.