Economic Self Interest

For John, BLUF:  We still don't know how to fix the economy.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

I was visiting the blog ¡No Pasaran!♠ this morning and case across a link to a post at Patriot Update.  The thing that caught my attention was the headline at ¡No Pasaran!, which was "This administration is focusing like a laser beam on jobs; or rather like a super-powered death ray".  Here is the link to the article.

Last night I finally finished Professor Paul Krugman's End This Depression N❊w.  I am still sorting through in my mind what I think about it.

But, back to the blog post, the full paragraph, which starts with the ¡No Pasaran! blog post title is:

This administration is focusing like a laser beam on jobs; or rather like a super-powered death ray.  Everywhere it sees jobs being created it destroys them, and not just in coal country either.  Take, for example, the National Labor Relations Board’s decision to prohibit Boeing, our nation’s largest exporter by value, from establishing a new plant in South Carolina because of its right-to-work laws.  (Boeing later fought that decision and won.)

Chrysler and General Motors seem to have more latitude.  The federal government is still a major stakeholder in both of these companies, yet both are setting up new factories in China.  GM announced earlier this year that Shanghai would receive a new Cadillac factory, while Chrysler plans to manufacture Jeeps in China starting in 2014.

How’s that for chutzpah?  The federal government arrogantly dictated to a private company that it could not open a factory in a right-to-work state, while two companies with substantial government ownership were setting up shop in an entirely different country.

With all that economic analysis out there I am reminded of the old saying, "There must be a pony in there somewhere."

Regards  —  Cliff

♠  "Behind the Façades in France:  What expats and the mainstream media (French and American alike) fail to notice (or fail to tell you) about French attitudes, principles, values, and official positions…"