Jobs, Jobs, Jobs

In a very real sense, the world that anyone of us who’s over fifty grew up in no longer exists except as a memory and a reference point by which to reckon the current acceleration of change.  Things like newspapers, television advertising, most brick-and-mortar stores and even paper money effectively don’t exist anymore.  The whole of life in the most prosperous nation on the planet has been upended in such a way that it has disrupted every facet of life.  Young people aren’t getting well-paying jobs in the numbers needed to sustain institutions like marriage, parenthood and homeownership.

The truth is the tech revolution threatens to destroy the way of life in this country by eliminating the need for a good chunk of the jobs formerly filled by the American middle-class.  This is a crisis that is orders of magnitude greater than when the industrial revolution introduced mechanical power to replace horses, typewriters replaced scribes and oil displaced wood and coal as fuels.  There are millions of people who grew up in middle-class families who live in their parents’ basements, and can’t make enough money to move out, and have no prospects of having families of their own.  Think about that.

Donald Trump wants to make America great again.  The only way that can happen is to figure out how to provide gainful employment for the majority of Americans.  This country only became powerful because the majority of its citizens existed above the poverty line.  If that ceases to be the case we will see a revolution here.

Trump’s solution is to reshore manufacturing jobs that had been sent to Asia.  There are a lot of questions associated with that idea.  How quickly can it be done?  How many jobs will there be.  How well will they pay?  Of course I don’t claim to have all the answers.  In fact, no one does.  But I have the sense that he’s on the right track.  Manufacturing has been an enormous engine for bringing places like China, Vietnam and India out of the depths of poverty and into at least the “second world.”  All that is really necessary is for U.S. industrial policy to include sufficient positive and negative incentives for American companies (and German and Japanese and Taiwanese and Korean) to move their manufacturing operations back here.

In a real sense this is an inflection point for this country.  We won’t stay where we currently are.  The old economy and those who worked in it are going away.  Either we replace what’s here with a restored industrial landscape or we allow the future to be stolen from our children and grandchildren and watch America turn into a feudal state with haves and have-nots sharply separated into a small aristocracy and a large but shrinking underclass of underemployed surplus human beings.

I’m betting Trump can do it.  He’s broken the hold on things that the Deep State previously had and he’s getting things done.  If he can avoid being assassinated in the next three and a half years, he has the potential to save this wonderful place.