Filed under: Economy
Pat Buchanan has had some excellent pieces on protecting the American auto industry andthe impact the bailouts have had on the GOP, but none better than his most recent. I would make the case for protecting the industry, but he has done a far better job than I could ever do, as has Tom Piatak. Mr. Piatak on the oft-repeated lie that foreign companies will continue to employ American workers into the future:
The major reason foreign car makers have plants in the United States is political, to hedge against the possibility of American protectionism. Once the threat of American protectionism is dead, because the American auto industry is dead, why would foreign car manufactuers keep building plants here, or even keep operating the plants they’ve built? Last summer, the Wall Street Journal quoted an unnamed Toyota executive as saying, “It’s much, much more profitable to produce cars in Japan and ship them all to the U. S. right now, if it wasn’t for the political problems that might cause.” Once there is no possibility of “political problems,” what would restrain Toyota from pulling all its production back to Japan, or shifting it to such low wage countries as Mexico?
Nor is the Japanese investment in the US at all comparable to the Big Three’s, even setting aside the nearly million retired Americans who depend on the Big Three for their retirement benefits and health care. General Motors alone employs more Americans than all the foreign automakers put together, and Ford runs nearly as many assembly lines in the United States as do Toyota, Honda, Nissan, Hyundai, and VW put together. The Big Three buy 80% of the car parts manufactured in the United States, and their cars average 79% domestic content, compared to 35% domestic content for foreign cars sold here. And the Big Three employ the vast bulk of their engineers, designers, and managers in the United States, unlike their foreign competitors, which keep most such work in Japan or Germany, which is also where the profits they make from selling cars here wind up. In fact, the Big Three spend more each year in America on R & D than does the pharmaceutical industry, employing 65,000 skilled workers on research and development in Michigan alone.
Mr. Buchanan correctly points out that the auto bailout is just 2 percent of the massive Wall Street bailout, and far more important to the American economy and the American people than the Wall Street one was. But more important than this is his rebuttal of the also-oft-repeated lie that Japanese companies succeed simply because their products are better, devoid of economic aid form both their own governments and our own:
Is the Republican Party so fanatic in its ideology that, rather than sin against a commandment of Milton Friedman, it is willing to see America written forever out of this fantastic market, let millions of jobs vanish and write off the industrial Midwest?
So it would seem. “Companies fail every day, and others take their place,” said Sen. Richard Shelby on “Face the Nation.”
Presumably, the companies that will “take their place,” when GM, Ford and Chrysler die, are German, Japanese or Korean, like the ones lured into Shelby’s state of Alabama, with the bait of subsidies free-market Republicans are supposed to abhor.
In 1993, Alabama put together a $258 million package to bring a Mercedes plant in. In 1999, Honda was offered $158 million to build a plant there. In 2002, Alabama won a Hyundai plant by offering a $252 million subsidy.
“We have a number of profitable automakers in America, and they should not be disadvantaged for making wise business decisions while failure is rewarded,” says Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina.
DeMint is referring to “profitable automakers” like BMW, which sited a plant in Spartanburg, after South Carolina offered the Germans a $150 million subsidy and $80 million to expand.
…
Do these Southern senators understand why the foreign automakers suddenly up and decided to build plants in the United States?
It was the economic nationalism of Ronald Reagan.
When an icon of American industry, Harley-Davidson, was being run out of business by cutthroat Japanese dumping of big bikes to kill the “Harley Hog,” Reagan slapped 50 percent tariffs on their motorcycles and imposed quotas on imported Japanese cars. Message to Tokyo. If you folks want to keep selling cars here, start building them here.
Fear of Reaganism brought those foreign automakers, lickety-split, to America’s shores, not any love of Southern cooking.
…
In today’s world, America faces nationalistic trade rivals who manipulate currencies, employ nontariff barriers, subsidize their manufacturers, rebate value-added taxes on exports to us and impose value-added taxes on imports from us, all to capture our markets and kill our great companies. And we have a Republican Party blissfully ignorant that we live in a world of us or them. It doesn’t even know who “us” is.
Both of these men have done us all a service. The choice before us is between blind free-trade ideology and a prudent case that the auto bailout is what is best for the country. Conservatives are supposed to oppose ideology. But here we sit, a country willing to dump hundreds of billions on the financial district, much of the money simply allowing some banks to buy others, and yet unwilling to pay a fraction of that to save millions of Americans now and millions in the future.
America became great by being the world’s manufacturer. We will follow Europe into the second-world by becoming the world’s debtor.
Filed under: Uncategorized
Many friends, colleagues, and acquaintances of mine bit the bullet and voted for Obama this past election. These folks, mostly conservative in temperament, felt that Obama’s stances on the Iraq War and on torture and other civil liberties issues made him the far more preferable candidate to John McCain. I felt Obama was a political opportunist, and cast my vote. rather scandalously, for a principled war opponent on the left.
As the election unfolded and Obama has pieced his administration together, I am feeling better and better about my decision to opt out of the Obamacon trend. With Hillary Clinton–former public enemy number 1 of the Right until she bared her kitty-claws at Iran–as Secretary of State, Obamacons had to give pause. Now, with ranking democrats suggesting that Obama keep the Bush Administration’s Director of National Intelligence, Mike McConnell, and CIA Director, Michael Hayden, two men intimately connected to “enhanced interrogation techniques”, neoconservatives seem to have a friend in Barack the Hawk.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, Dick Cheney recently appeared on ABC news and, among other things, heaped praise on Obama’s national security team:
“I must say, I think it’s a pretty good team,” Cheney said. “I’m not close to Barack Obama, obviously, nor do I identify with him politically. He’s a liberal. I’m a conservative. But I think the idea of keeping Gates at Defense is excellent. I think Jim Jones will be very, very effective as the national security adviser.”
Cheney likewise weighed in on Sen. Hillary Clinton, who Obama has tapped to be the next secretary of state.
“While I would not have hired Sen. Clinton, I think she’s tough,” the vice president added. “She’s smart, she works very hard and she may turn out to be just what President Obama needs.”
The only possible positive I can see coming out of this is that neoconservative policy-makers, once again finding a home on the left, will leave the conservative movement for good. This is highly doubtful, though, especially in light of Michael Brendan Dougherty’s superb recent TAC piece.
At any rate, Barack the Hawk is here to stay. Sorry, Obamacons. It appears you wasted your vote even more than I did.
Filed under: Introductions
My very good friend David Earl has some very kind words for yours truly as well as a more in-depth examination of the pressures men still feel in a more progressive society over at his new blog “Softer Power.” An excerpt:
I have always been a firm believer in capitalism, but with perhaps impossible caveats. With the development of social networking, Yelp, Twitter, blogs, Facebook, etc., we as a society should be able to contribute to a more just system by identifying injustice, mistreatment, and rewarding those who do well by their employees with our business. I believe that a more responsible capitalism, enforced by the consumer and combined with equal access to education for citizens, can move the human race to a safer, more comfortable, happier existence for all.
However, in instances like these, I confess I am afraid. Recent conversations with friends about whether or not I want to have kids have left me disturbed. I want to be great at what I do. I want to fight and work and ensure myself the opportunity to be competitive in the workplace and thereby create work by my own terms. I want a degree of economic comfort for myself and whoever I settle down with to marry. But kids? Will I be able to be a good father? Can I do that without working my tail off? How do I be a good “man,” defined by my ability to be protector and provider, and a good “Dad,” teacher, lover, guide, friend?
My father has tirelessly managed to do both extraordinarily well, but the physical and emotional toll is clear. As the economy worsens, and the profit margins shrink, you cannot help but look around the office when you walk in for the pink slip. And if my father lost his job (again) at this critical juncture of college education for his sons, would he still be able to call himself a man?
I don’t know the answer, I’m afraid, but somehow, we as a society need to be able to definitively answer yes.
Although we disagree often, Dave is an extremely intelligent and level-headed thinker, and I heartily recommend adding him to your blogrolls and rss feeds.
Filed under: Community
The death of someone close almost always seems to come as a shock. We know that , for all of us, our time will come, and we have little say in when that time is. Yet we are still shocked at death’s arrival. It just never fits. As the Christmas season is well underway, it seems even less appropriate for a loved one to leave us, yet it happens all too often. People die, and with them so does a piece of ourselves. And Christmas, a time for hope, seems a little less hopeful.
The untimely passing of a close family friend has left me to dwell on these things. The manner in which he departed is distressing, to say the least. But it has left me to wonder about the expectations thrust on the head of a household and what it means to properly provide for one’s family. Whereas, in the past, it was enough to love, protect, and provide the basic necessities, the modern world presents so many added pressures and responsibilities, yet removes the control an individual has over these responsibilities. In a terribly unstable market, a man who is faced with the loss of his job–which he has held for an extremely long time–must not only face the fact that his skills may not “fit” into today’s modern, globalist workforce. He must also worry about his children’s college education, his retirement (or lack thereof) plan, the myriad of insurance issues that my arise, and much more.
Modern man is an island. Although he is more dependent on others–and on government–than ever before, he is the victim of a system he has no control over. If we’re shipping jobs overseas, we say: “Tough. Learn a new trade. These jobs weren’t staying here anyway.” What about the immeasurable human toll this takes? Although modern conservatism has become little more than soft-footed supply-side economics and fear-mongering, Edmund Burke decried the rise of economists and sophisters because of their lack of concern for human interests. By falling back on dollars and cents we only flaunt our lack of concern for working families and project our ignorance to those who have seen the emotional toll such an attitude takes.
This is not meant to argue that economics is something to ignore. I am only asking why, for so many men, it is a matter of life and death. If the United States wants to be a country of rugged individualists who take responsibility for their lives and their families, it can’t take on policies that throw these proud men, hurt by their inability to provide, to the wolves.
A generation of men is heartbroken because we don’t need them anymore. We have Hondurans now. But when tragedy strikes close to home and nothing short of, if you’ll forgive the phrasing, a crisis of confidence is to blame, an untold number of family and friends are left to pick up the pieces and make sense of the senseless. Now our hearts are broken, too.
This Christmas, hug your friends extra tight, and remind them they will always be worth more than their 401k.
Filed under: Conservatism
I doubt it.
But according to Victor Davis Hanson, we are already there! His sales pitch to understandably distrusting conservatives:
There is no party-line take on unfolding events. The mishmash of libertarians, social conservatives, blue-dog Democrats, independents, paleoconservatives, neocons, religious traditionalists, atheists, and doctrinaire Republicans who contribute to NRO ensures a wide-variety of views, to say the least.
This is news to me. The only writer I think can even come close to a paleo is John Derbyshire, and his militant atheism and lukewarm disdain for tradition should probably disqualify him. Apparently I am not the only one a bit dumbfounded. The sarcastic Matthew Roberts at TakiMag:
I suppose we should look forward to seeing many of those purged from NR (e.g. Peter Brimelow, Steve Sailer, Joe Sobran) to be reappearing soon at this crossroads of the American Right.
And the brilliant Dr. Gottfried:
Mat Roberts may be overly cynical when he accuses NRO’s star intellectual Victor Davis Hanson of being dishonest in his recent description of what he and his pals are doing at work: “There is no party-line take on unfolding events. The mishmash of libertarians, social conservatives, blue-dog Democrats, independents, paleoconservatives, neocons, traditionalists, atheists, and doctrinaire Republicans who contribute to NRO ensures a wide variety of views, to say the least.” According to Mr. Roberts, the NRO website features nothing more interesting than doctrinaire Republicans and neocons. But my young friend may be wrong. If he casts his net more widely, he should be able to find on the same website the atheist Christopher Hitchens and the Trotskyist Steve Schwartz denouncing Islamo-fascism. I’m sure Roberts can also locate there Democrats singing the virtues of Joe Lieberman as a maven on Middle Eastern affairs.
Perhaps the message of Hanson, a neocon expert on the foul deeds of Kaiser Wilhelm and Robert E. Lee is a harbinger of pleasant things to come. It is after all a dirty little secret, which my book on conservatism dares to reveal, that NR has been throwing people off the bus, and occasionally under the wheel, since its inception. This trend became more pronounced when the present neocon potentates took over the magazine, and as one of the earliest expellees who is still above ground, I assume that what Hanson is talking about is a new policy of inclusiveness that his publication and website are about to initiate.
I am not quite as optimistic as Dr. Gottfried is, but I hope he is right. National Review has always had the potential to be this type of forum, but has proven it would much rather stifle dissent than encourage it.
On a completely unrelated note, if Gottfried is right, and any NR folks are reading, I will be entering the workforce relatively soon. I’m willing to be the token paleo for a meager 22-year-old salary. I just refuse to work with Kathyn Jean Lopez, and with good reason.
From the new issue of The American Conservative:
Arrrr, there be a new global security threat. This month, off the coast of Somalia, a band of picaroons seized a supertanker loaded with more than $120 million-worth of black gold bounty. The hijacking–the biggest in history–caused reverberations across the world’s crude oil markets. It also drew attention to the growing international problem posed by the pirates of the Gulf of Arden, a vital waterway that separates the Middle East from North Africa.
Many wonder how this ancient crime has reared its head. The answer: Somalian piracy is on the rise thanks to worsening anarchy on the mainland. And that chaos, me lovelies, can be attributed in no small part to the outgoing Bush administration and its one-eyed quest to defeat terrorism.
In 2006, 15 years after the fall of dictator Mohamed Siad Barre, the popular rise of the Islamic courts movement led observers to predict that Somaia might achieve at least a semblance of order. But the U.S. government, responding to reports of a “new Taliban,” turned against the emergent regime, funding and assisting Ethiopia’s invasion of Somalia. The ensuing war has killed at least 10,000 Somalis, displaced more than a million, and left over 40 percent of the population in need of humanitarian assistance. Amid the mayhem, piracy has thrived and so has al-Qaeda. Chalk up another mission accomplished.
The limitations of the “they hate us because we’re free” mentality continue to become clear. I’m sure Somali orphans will make great Islamic crazies one day…
As many have been eager to note, my last post was a bit of a departure from my normal modus operandi. It was never meant for public eyes, and was a bit self-aggrandizing, very meandering, and extremely bleak. I won’t be making a habit of it, to be sure.
But the most peculiar comment I received was from someone with whom I am extremely close. She said, not to put too fine a point on it, that she doesn’t like to see me “so hopeless.” I’ve never considered myself hopeless, but my views on the world being as cynical as they are, I have been mulling over whether I truly do believe that this country and this world has hope.
As we find ourselves emerged into the Christmas season, we must have hope. And I don’t mean the soft-focused Hope with a capital H peddled by Barack and his ilk. Hope in its truest form is nearly indistinguishable from faith, be it in God, in your family, your friends, or yourself. Christmas offers a unique time to reflect on these things.
I will be posting this video several times this month. It means a lot to me, and had a profound impact on me as a child.
And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid. And the angel said unto them, “Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord. And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.” And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying, “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.”
-Luke 2:8-14
On earth peace, good will toward men. Maybe this year a nation of Christians will not only pray for it, but fight for it as well.
No matter how bleak, for that I will always be hopeful.
