It is not with pleasure that I enter this blog today. It is with frustration on the one hand and thanks on the other. My family and I have not lived with an excess of financial success. We have lived rather frugally by most standards but have managed to find money for the things we really wanted to do. One of the main things that has allowed us the freedom to do many of the things we wanted to is our ability to find contentment in places other than those advertised on TV. We have never owned a new car and likely never will. Thankfully, my wife and I both feel like a car is to be a servant to our family, not our master. When I buy a car now, I expect it to run well over the 300,000 mile mark. If it doesn't make it I feel like I have failed to choose wisely and am disappointed. Additionally, I do most of the maintenance myself which has saved us untold thousands over the years. Unfortunately, this approach to car buying leaves us looking at Japanese-made vehicles, not American-made. A few years ago I purchased a Camry with over 200,000 miles on it, for an even thousand dollars and when we gave it away, (still running), it had over 300,000 miles on it. America should be producing the best everything as far as I'm concerned, but we're not. While GM was becoming a manufacturing-based health care provider the Japanese were working hard at developing processes to produce high quality cars. While we were demanding more and more pay for producing lower quality cars, they were taking personal pride in their workmanship. While I don't have specifics in front of me I believe that, by and large, union workers at GM were making more money with better benefits than the vast majority of the people who were buying their cars. I understand the challenges of manufacturing here in the US; many of those challenges are unavoidable. But the big paychecks and huge pension promises made by our biggest companies will see that we are held at a disadvantage for decades.
So this is my frustration. And here is my thanks. Thank you, Japan, for supplying my family and me with reliable and efficient transportation for the last 40 years.
It is taking a while to digest all that is going on in this country right now. Slowly, I would say, the picture is beginning to clear up a bit. Transitioning from a mostly agricultural economy to one based on manufacturing was a difficult but economically prosperous endeavor for the last 60 or 70 years. Still, looking around our country in the midst of an economic crisis, I see plenty of evidence of a comparatively rich society. None in history has accomplished what we have and I would suggest it was, at its heart, due to our Constitutional freedoms. Having said that, our current predicament, (jeepers, I took 3 shots at that spelling and missed all three times), would seem to be a result of our freedom to be greedy. Let me explain a bit. What if there is a challenge to our company's position from another company offering a similar product at a lower cost thereby impacting our company's bottom line. We are fine with a tariff, or new regulation which will put our company, and our personal fortunes, back in front. In other words, we are ok with the million people who buy our widget paying more for it as long as I don't lose my job. Never mind the inherent unfairness of the situation, or the ultimate dis-incentive provided by such action to future businesses. We kept our job and that's what's important. Do we really believe that bailing out GM was a wise move? There are no more cars being built today than if GM had been allowed to fail. The only difference is that the people buying the cars now have the added financial burden of propping up a proven failure, GM. I suppose we will also end up paying all of their health care and retirement costs as well. Where does it stop? The company I worked for for 23 years went through quite a transition over its life. Originally it needed experienced electronics troubleshooters to repair the avionics equipment that they serviced. As time went on, the prevailing method of repair was to replace whole circuit boards which had become fairly cheap with all the advances in circuit board design and manufacture. The company was now in a predicament with a highly skilled, well-paid workforce that was competing with younger companies who could hire less skilled workers for less money and provide a similar level of service to its customers. While this is unfortunate, it is, in fact, capitalism. Bailing out such a company only artificially sustains a segment of the workforce, while burdening the rest of it. It is not, at all, an example of a "Free Market" but rather an example of an artificially skewed market. That is what we have here in the United States now as government has become more and more involved in business. We are destroying the most remarkable system ever encountered in this world and we are inhibiting its ability to adjust and respond to challenges. We are loading its backpack up with more and more rocks as it tries to compete on a global scale. We are prolonging an unsustainable illusion while destroying our ability to excel in the future. We are, in fact, guaranteeing a mediocre future, rather than offering ourselves the chance to continue with our truly exceptional economic system.
