Personally, from my reading of industrial trends that is pretty much what is going on for the past 20 odd years since Bush 1 and his air/water reauthorization acts. The only new investments have been in areas where labor can be cost effectively replaced by automation. In fact I stumbled across an article in a waiting room where the author was describing one of the construction operations not affected by the recession was in dismantling old industrial plant’s power houses and shipping them abroad.
In short we are living off a previous generations investment.
It is remarkable to me how “progressives” are actually living in nostalgia for the past. Instead of being “progressive”, they’re astonishingly “reactionary”. Examples:
No jobs? Well, try to reinstitute labor union dominated pricing of the 1950s when the rest of the world’s industry was in ruins and manufacturers could pass any cost on to consumers. Never mind that you have to tax everybody more or borrow to pay for that trip down memory lane.
Poverty? Nothing better than returning to the confiscatory/redistributive policies of the failed socialist societies and the revolutionary romanticism of the 1930s. Most of all, suppress the middle class “Kulaks”.
Social policy? Easy. Look to Virginia Woolf and Neitsche, as well as the anti-Catholicism of the French Revolution and the reign of Masonic oppressors in Mexico. And, of course, there’s always Sartre and the Marquis de Sade.
Environment? Nothing to it. Never mind incentivizing people in the countryside who actually do protect the environment and control most of it. Better turn to 1962 and “Silent Spring” emotionalism and contrived science. Ban everything you guess or want to think might have an effect on the environment, especially if it’s helpful to people.
Transportation? By golly, if riding bikes for transportation was good enough in Mao’s day for the masses, it’s good enough for American commuters today, unless, of course, they want to drive an updated 1910 electric car that will actually go 30 miles before exhausting its charge instead of 5. And people don’t need to fly from NYC to LA in a few hours when they can ride for two days in a train like Great-Grandpa did.
Energy? Our ancestors shivered in the dark during the winter, wore heavy clothing indoors and didn’t bathe very often due to lack of energy resources and primitiveness thereof. There is no reason why we should not be as conserving and intrepid as they. If we can make utility bills “skyrocket” by making energy hard to get, that ought to do it. And too, our ancestors pumped water with windmills and heated water for washing with sun-warmed tanks on their roofs. The few industries that existed in the 1700s ran on water wheels. We need to return to updated versions of that. And never mind that hundreds of elderly people died in France without air conditioning a few years back during a heat wave. It takes too much energy to keep them alive. But they’re old, and outlived their 1812 life spans anyway.
Race relations? We shouldn’t just be ignoring race as a factor in economic and social relations like the conservatives do. Hispanics and blacks should FEEL THE WEIGHT of their racial and ethnic heritage and find reasons to resent everyone else even if the reasons have to be invented. After all, just because racial oppression can’t be detected, that just means it’s more subtle. We need to talk about chains so they’ll think it’s still 1858. Since they can’t understand regular English, we have to imitate 1890 minstrel show “black accents” when we talk to them.
Food? There’s that energy thing again. It takes fuel to produce it. Better to raise our food with muscle power and make it at least as expensive relative to income as it was in 1850. A very good example can be set if the president pretends to rely on a vegetable garden on the white house grounds. Never mind that he actually eats Wagyu beef that comes all the way from Japan. That’s different. Divine right of kings, and all that.
And (for now) last, but certainly not least. We need to return to the 19th century social organization of Bismarck. Suppress Catholicism whenever possible. Propagandize children in the schools so they will think the government is right in everything and that their existence is unimaginable without government intervention at every turn. Regiment and regulate the society as much as one can. Set up an elitist bureaucracy that regulates every detail of peoples’ lives. And most of all, get in bed with the big capitalists that can help you stay in power…as long as they pay money and lip service to statism.
I have to go out of town today, burning fuel as I go. It’s probably a good thing. Don’t want to get injured by the bombs that will be thrown in response to this half-joking post.
