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This podcast that I listen to, Free Talk Live, was talking about globalization the other night and since I was listening to it after the fact so I couldn’t call in, so I sent them this email and I thought I would share it with TDB readers.

Hey Now -

When you guys were talking about manufacturing jobs, globalization, etc. last night - you asked ( maybe rhetorically, maybe provocatively ) “why can’t Americans compete, are Americans lazy?”

I think that as a whole Americans are definitely not lazy, in fact I think that a sizeable percentage of Americans are among the most driven and hardest working people in the world. I think the issue is that we have become addicted to a certain standard of living or lifestyle that is simply not sustainable.

While I agree that all of the rules, taxes, and regulations can make turning a profit almost impossible for some industries in the U.S., possibly a larger issue is that we have to pay our workers a much higher wage then factories in Guatemala do. Even if the minimum wage was repealed I don’t think that industries are going to be able to effectively staff their factories paying workers $1.25 an hours so that they compete with with central American or Chinese factories. Even as wealth spreads and foreign companies are forced to pay their employees more, they are never going to have to pay them wages that American factory workers came to expect in the heyday of American manufacturing.

People in other countries live differently then we do here in the US of A - if you need proof just look at the percentage of resources our country uses. With less then 5% of the words population we consume a quarter of the oil produced each year. We teach our citizens to be consumers, from early childhood, and to be consumers you need disposable income. You are not going to have much disposable income making $1.25 an hour.

Even if we can get rid of the very real fiscal factors that our government burdens us with, we will have to systemically change our culture before we can compete with other countries in a truly free market.

The next night Ian said that he was gonna kill himself if he he had to keep talking about globalization… Oh well nothing is perfect, not even free talk live.