Thus Spake Alan Sewell
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This is part of a review by one Alan F. Sewell of Alan Greenspan's book, Capitalism in America. I decided against buying the book, not because of this review, but because I've already got too much heavy stuff weighing down my Kindle as it is. (Although since it's on deep drastic sale, I might change my mind and just tuck it away for the cold winter months.)
Anyway, I liked Mr. Sewell's thoughts, and thought they were worth sharing.
"This book thoroughly covers the range of economic debates we are confronting as we try to understand why the economy collapsed in 2008 and why it grew so sluggishly until the recent upturn starting with Trump’s election. Was it because:
• Labor unions made our workforce lazy and overpaid
• Our corporation managements became complacent, lazy, self-serving, and frankly stupid
• Our corporations became inefficient conglomerates, then fired too many employees when they “re-engineered.”
• Our “entrepreneurism” has declined
• Government-imposed regulations and taxes are stifling business
• We spend too much on social welfare programs
• We dis-invested in our industries in order to create in a financial economy driven by Wall Street stock jobbers who engaged in “financial chicanery to dupe investors.”
• George W. Bush and the Republican Congress of 2001-2006 mismanaged the government by enacting tax cuts while increasing government spending
• Too many jobs were moved out of the country to Mexico and China
• Globalization harmed us because
• …..other countries make things better than we do
• …..other countries steal our technologies and don’t allow American products to be sold in their countries.
• Our brick-and-mortar industries were disrupted by the internet
• We let more immigrants into the country that we had jobs to employ them.
• We allowed corporations to revoke the “social contract” of keeping their American workers employed."Then a little later:
"I question the productivity argument, because we’ve off-shored so much of our manufacturing, that we’ve become a “service economy.” It’s difficult to measure productivity in services, because many services are intangible. How do we measure productivity in healthcare, now the largest sector of our economy, when the value of human life can’t be measured in economic terms? How do we measure the productivity of financial advisers when we don’t even know if their advice is sound?
"I’m also not sure that Americans enjoyed all that “creative destruction” Greenspan says we relished in the past. Our social welfare state exists in its present form because Americans did not like being put out of their jobs every few years and watching their children starve . . . Mr. Greenspan was in his youthful prime during the 1960’. He should be able to remember that a primary civil mission of the national government in those days was to maintain full employment.
"And what about the trade deficit? We've never before handed off so much of our economy to Mexico and China in any prior period of our history. We are breaking new ground on the type of “destruction” that is not creative, but merely the removal of American workers from employment, and their replacement by foreigners who produce product that we import into the USA.
"Perhaps our first effort at “restoring American dynamism” should be to bring the jobs back from Mexico and China, and then balance the trade by tariffs with countries that run chronic trade deficits with us in manufactured products. Alexander Hamilton taught us way back in 1790 that we cannot be a strong country without manufacturing most of what we consume or use as capital equipment. We are going to have to buckle down and relearn a lesson we never should have forgotten.
"Again, I wonder how we are going to invest in improving productivity when our companies are moving manufacturing to cheap-labor countries in order to AVOID spending money automating their American factories? Our corporation managements have hundreds of billions of dollars to spend buying back their companies' stock at inflated prices, and they DON'T have money to invest in improving the productivity of their businesses?"
