Some us have seen shows on tv that let us see a little bit of how things are made. Cameras and crews go through bottling plants, nail making factories, and other places in which raw, or rawer, materials are transformed into more useful objects.
As they do, it’s amazing how much is produced without human help. Bottling plants, for instance, crank out unknown billions of bottles every day. There are long lines, with few people actually involved in the actual process. Bottles are cleaned, dried, labeled, filled, capped, put into cases, cases onto pallets, and pallets moved to staging areas before being trucked out with hardly an individual bottle, or can, being touched by a human being.
The same processes have revolutionized the making of everything. Prices haven’t gone down all that much, but profits have increased. Those bypassed by mechanization simply don’t know what to do. Their governments are equally perplexed. “What is going on? Manufacturing output has gone up since WWII. But, the number of workers involved in making things is only 11% of the workforce. What’s going on?”
The answer is to be found in automation and mechanization.
As manufacturing jobs decline, people lean on elected officials at every level. Every local, county, state, and federal official hears, every day: “I need a job. My kids need jobs. You’ve got to do something!” Suddenly, we see why the graph below changes as it does:
As populations of workers swelled, primarily by illegal immigrants who aren’t shown, anywhere, the goods-producing industries were a smaller and smaller part of the population. From 1962 until 2007, there was a growing national population, but no real increase in goods-producing employees. The percentage of g-p workers has continued to drop, now comprising 11% of workers.
So, we saw, beginning in 1960, a nearly straight uptrend in government employees, interrupted only for a few years around 1983, absorbing some of those put out of work by automation. But, only “some”.
The high cost of American production is caused by taxes and environmental lunacies whose financing comes from foreign countries desperate for jobs. As those paying the environmentalists intend, many American companies are moving their factories to China and other places with low-cost labor to escape onerous regulatory burdens. This chart is particularly interesting:
In the past fifteen years, America’s exports have doubled, from 150 million containers to over 300 million containers. In that same period, incoming containers have tripled, from 210 million to 600 million. A mystery: Why does this chart show such a swing in imports within each year? Between January 04 and January 05, there’s a swing in containers from a low of 400 to a high of 650. The same swing takes place nearly every year. Christmas goods arriving in August?
