In this post I channel an “ideal” Mitt Romney: an efficiency focused free-market advocate. I imagine some of his thoughts around the time Trump said “carnage” during the inaugural address. He is slumped in his chair, bitter, sipping grape juice. His car elevator no longer brings him joy. Note that I am not Mitt Romney, so these are not necessarily my views…
Is this really what the 45% want? What the hell? It was pathetic enough when the bleeding-heart liberals wanted the government to create a nice safe little country for them, where they would be cared for and no one would say anything bad about whatever weird lifestyles they chose today. Fine. That is just what they always do. But now, the (ex)factory workers want their safe spaces too. They want to be caressed by the government, making sure that nothing bad ever happens to them. Worst of all, they want to be paid more for their work than it is worth. They even want the government to create jobs that no one has use for. Essentially they want their welfare payments routed through businesses so they can pretend that their work matters. Do they have no dignity? Let me tell you a story of what the Trumpsters want; it is a pathetic story indeed.
In the 1950s and into the 1960s, much of the world outside of the U.S. lay in a rather ruinous and economically primitive state. The parts that were not feverishly attempting to rebuild after the war were busy plunging themselves into a socialist nightmare of underproduction. Most people were dirt poor, they needed lots of products of all sorts, and there was a shortage of laborers with easy access to capital to make those products. This was great for the American laborer. He could just walk down to whatever factory that happened to be in town, agree to bang on some stuff for the day and walk out with plenty to take care of an entire family.
All of this was even better for white men, because all kinds of racist conspiracies by unions, companies, and towns kept non-whites from getting the best jobs and homes. Restrictive immigration laws, which did not exist during the earlier expansive periods of the American economy, also kept the numbers of workers with access to capital low. It helped that these jobs often excluded women entirely, though the more physically demanding work of many factory jobs already naturally favored men. So, even though laborers of every color benefited from this high demand for their services, white male labor was at a premium like never before. Of course, sweet deals like that can’t last very long.
Perhaps the U.S. could have kept so many high-paying manual labor jobs if it had done more to undermine foreign economies, more wars might have helped. But it was just a matter of time before other countries got their acts together, and gave their workers the same sort of access to capital that American workers had enjoyed for so long. The world has become a much better place over the last 60 years, and many countries today (most notably China) have the sort of infrastructure, capital, and workforce that the U.S. has enjoyed since in the ’50s. It should be noted that the rise of China was a wonderful thing, which has halved the world’s poverty rate in the past 20 years and decreased the price of goods. Nearly everyone’s standard of living has improved. Foreign aid had little to do with this, rather capitalism, open markets and hard working Chinese people did.
This then is the crux of what makes the most recent call by white-working-class men for protectionism so pathetic. They don’t want the opportunity to better themselves; they just want the exact same jobs that their fathers had. Their problem is primarily the fact that they can’t compete with people who are harder working and had far fewer advantages. A worker in a Chinese factory may have grown up in a hut in the countryside, with barely enough nutrition to keep him alive, and with almost no formal education. The American worker, who wants to do the exact same work, has had access to one of the best educational system in the world and more food than he knows what to do with (and lots of it nutritious if he likes). But he demands a pay rate that is many multiple the pay rate of the poor man over in China. He is unwilling to offer the market something better than the Chinese worker is willing to offer, but wants to be paid far more. He wants the government to protect him from the market; in a sense he wants an economic safe space, so that he can be payed more for his work than it is worth. He asks to be treated like a child.
This is all protectionism is. It is simply an economic safe space, for those who feel they cannot hack it in the free market. And what happens when we force Americans to buy their over-priced American-made goods, just so working class workers don’t have to bother getting skills that the market demands? Of course, we all end up paying more for our products, we all end up poorer. Their refusal to improve themselves and demands for more pay anyway, force us all to have worse lives. But there is something even more shameful than this (though demanding inefficiency is itself a rather shameful thing). When they force American consumers to buy their over-priced goods, they are essentially stealing food from the mouths of hard-working foreign workers against whom they can’t compete. Their laziness will lead to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.
Of course, they might say that there is no hope for them. The system is rigged against them. They can’t get the skills they need to compete. This is especially the lament of white men, who can’t find the jobs to support their families. And so can’t convince women to start families with them. Well, the failure of white men to keep up with the economy is matched by the success of women over the past 50 years to go from marginalized status in the labor market to nearly equal participation. How did they do that while some men have done so poorly? They graduated high school at higher rates than men, graduated college at higher rates than men, and prepared themselves for the sorts of jobs that our economy is making (especially jobs in the medical and service sectors). They are willing and able to do what needs to be done in the economy. Of course, the bleeding heart liberals will tell them what they want to hear, that it isn’t their fault but rather the “system’s” fault. But get serious. They are the ones who have failed themselves and their families. They should be men and take responsibility.
They might complain that their towns are dying, and that this is why their lives have gone so poorly. What I don’t understand is why they act like this is anything new. Economic progress has always required some people to move, made some communities more active and others less active. What would their parents or grandparents have done if they were faced with such a reality? They would moved in search of opportunity; in fact, this is exactly what people have done for generations. It is the American way. Just as no worker deserves work if his work is not desired by someone else, no community deserves a factory if its workers are not of use to a company. Again, if they want to change their communities, they should stop whining and do something to increase the skills of the workers. If they can’t do that, then they should go somewhere else to find opportunity. Life is hard sometimes, but whining about your problems won’t solve anything.
Finally, you might say that I can’t possibly understand their pain, because I went to a fancy boarding school and was able to get a big loan from my relatives. Fine. They can talk about their pain all they want. Heck, their pain is probably why they didn’t vote for me four years ago. But at that point they are just as pathetic as those fragile liberal college kids who demand criticism-free-spaces in order to talk about their feelings. Except they are worse, because they are demanding that the entire country become a safe space for them. Sad.
Man, Mitt Romney is an angry person…