Japan achieved its top position as the world’s automobile manufacturer largely by application of exactly the principles free-market theorists rail against: intelligent (sometimes sly) and unyielding protection of their industry at home from foreign competitors. We could learn from their example.
How We Got Lame
The United States is drowning in the consequences of economic planning decisions our leaders have made over the past quarter-century. The interests of our myopic Chamber of Commerce stalwarts have consistently trumped those of ordinary Americans in matters of trade, finance, and economic deregulation for too long, and now we’re seeing the fruit of a number of these ill-conceived notions all rotting under our noses at the same time.
Yes, the housing bubble is bursting, like the 1990s dot-com bubble before it. The biggest, most profligate lenders are suffering collapse along with millions of home owners who are losing their overpriced, over-mortgaged dwellings. But there is an underlying erosion of US economic vitality against which these serious problems pale in significance. This is the decay of the American industrial base.
Take our tottering automobile manufacturing industry, the crowning glory of our post-World-War-II industrial ascendancy. Japanese cars began entering the US market in noticeable quantities in the 1970s and by the year 2008 one of them, Toyota, was outselling General Motors, until then the uncontested champion. Americans have been led to believe that this is because Japanese cars are “better,” partly due to the efforts of the Consumers Union (CU), a private ratings company.
For too many of us who know next to nothing about the vehicles we drive, the “experts” and management of CU publish allegedly objective evaluations of the relative quality of nearly everything we buy. CU can make or break product lines and companies. And it does so, based partly on some testing it performs (according to self-determined criteria) but mostly on “reports” the company solicits from subscribers to its magazine Consumer Reports. The periodical has a claimed circulation of four million, largely middle and upper class readers who’re thus unduly able to influence the buying decisions of others by their subjective evaluations.
Decades of ceaseless, monthly derogation of American cars and lavish, often skimpily warranted praise of German and Japanese makes by CU writers have had a predictable effect on US auto sales. But worse, the tunnel vision of Presidents and Congresses besotted with the dogmas of “free trade” and “anti-protectionism” have opened the import floodgates to inundate our economy with foreign-built cars that are, by truly objective standards, no better and often worse than our own. Our political leaders, guided always by the dollars they receive from lobbyists employed by our commercial elites, have brought on this current meltdown themselves, almost as if they intended it. They didn’t, so back off, conspiracy theorists. No, our most resourceful large retailers, in their quick-buck avarice, simply saw cheap imports as sure way to multiply their markups. Most consumers, they reasoned, couldn’t care less about where products were made, as long as they weren’t too shoddy.
Continued>>>
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