By Hunter Wallace
This has been building for a while now.
After the Dylann Roof shooting in Charleston, there was a frenzy by the Left to erase every last vestige of the Confederacy in the Southern public landscape. We threw ourselves into the middle of that fight. In hindsight, it was the right thing to do because we should honor our ancestors and preserve their memory for future generations.
At the same time, I couldn’t help but feel that all these heritage battles are on the same level as fighting over ancient Rome, Greece, or Egypt. It just seems to me like that era is incredibly distant from what I see in the present day South. Slavery hasn’t existed here in 150 years. Jim Crow hasn’t existed here in 50 years. Nothing about this area – the Alabama Black Belt – is reminiscent of the Confederacy.
While it is true that I dream of Southern independence, I don’t believe in restoring anything resembling the Confederacy. Slavery, for example, was rendered obsolete generations ago. Because of the mechanization of agriculture, black slaves are no longer necessary to harvest cotton, tobacco, or sugar, and our economy is no longer based on the production of those commodities. In fact, we now grow far more timber and peanuts in the heart of the old cotton belt. Even the textile mills which came to the South decades after the war are ancient history.
What does “restoring the Confederacy” even mean? The historical Confederacy was defeated by the Union because it was vastly inferior in infrastructure, manufacturing, agriculture, shipping and population. We naively believed we could just secede and continue to trade our cash crops for Northern and British manufactured goods. Supposedly, a weak central government of quarreling sovereign states presiding over this hopelessly disorganized mess was going to catch-up to the North in all these areas on the fly and preserve our independence.
It didn’t work. It never could have worked. That model couldn’t work today for all sorts of reasons. Forget slavery, which no one is proposing to bring back. Few White people still work in agriculture. By and large, the family farm has been made obsolete by corporate agribusiness and its economies of scale which deliver the products in your local supermarket.
Yesterday, I was talking to my friend Michael Cushman about the dominance of Jeffersonianism in Southern Nationalism, largely due to the influence of the Abbeville Institute which still seems to mentally live in the Confederacy. It occurred to me that Cushman lives in Aiken, SC which I know happens to be where most of the workers at the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site also live. To put this in perspective, the nuclear reactors at the Savannah River Site were shutdown after the end of the Cold War, but we are more focused on and know more about the economy and politics of the South Carolina of 1861.
This post got me thinking: do I really believe in all the Jeffersonian doctrines on which the Confederacy was founded? Do I really believe in the American political theory based on radical individualism, social contracts, constitutional compacts between sovereign states, an agrarian economy, equal rights and so forth? Not really, it sounds to me like something a bunch of lawyers conjured into existence.
Instead, I would rather look around the world, see what works, and apply those insights here. My sympathies are much more in tune with the Chinese whose attitude is “a great nation needs a large aircraft industry.” I think Finland has a better education system, South Korea has better broadband internet, Denmark has less income inequality, Japan has a superior immigration policy. Whereas Taiwan has a semiconductor industry and sees itself as a silicon island, Alabama specializes in the export of poultry products. What’s wrong with this picture?
Take a look at three cities in Alabama: Birmingham, Selma, and Tuskegee. What do you see? If you are a liberal ideologue, you might see a glorious triumph for civil rights and equality in the American story of progress, but if you are a practical minded realist, you might see an unmitigated racial, cultural and economic disaster.
I don’t want a weak, caretaker, nightwatchman federal government and a laissez-faire economy built around a lawyer’s narrow political theory of individual rights and constitutional government. I would rather have a strong state that fosters education, infrastructure and commerce, a tax and trade policy that fosters broad based economic prosperity, ideally led by practical minded businessmen and engineers.
A strong state will be necessary anyway to secure our independence, deal with countless internal enemies who will attempt to sabotage us from the outset, and to clean up the mess of fifty years of open borders and civil rights. In commerce, the Southern states already nurture foreign corporations – looking at you Airbus, Hyundai, BMW, Mercedes-Benz – with lavish incentive packages to encourage them to build factories here. Why can’t we do the same for our own industries?
All this really requires is that we stop lying to ourselves: the prosperity of the Sunbelt South has far less to do with Jeffersonianism than New Deal, World War II, and Cold War military spending. Where did the TVA and rural electrification come from? Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Appalachia? NASA in Alabama, Texas and Florida? Nuclear power, biotechnology, the internet, computers, or genomics? The interstates that opened our commerce or all the land grant colleges? From Northern textile mills to Japanese automobiles, “the state” has strategically fostered industrialization. Who brought back the iconic wild turkey and the whitetail deer? And where did polio, smallpox, malaria and pellagra go anyway?
I’m not citing these examples to argue that “government is always good” and the “free market is always bad.” A government policy can be constructive or destructive and it usually depends on the nature of elites and whatever is motivating them. We might place kudzu, civil rights, China’s one child policy and the Iraq War in the minus column. At the same time, we could place a lot of R&D, space exploration, and aerospace technology in the plus column.
Is that a radical centrist point of view? I’m not sure. All I know is that the independent South that I envision isn’t a place where the majority of our people will be poorer, less educated, and less healthy than they are now. We ought to be open to solutions that work and not be held back by an ideology that has already failed us once.
I agree with the sentiment you espouse. There are strengths to having a consolidated government just as there are weaknesses, but the strengths can easily outweigh weaknesses.
How did rural areas outside of TVA’s service area receive power?
Good question.
In South Alabama, it was due to the Rural Electrification Administration, which was created during the New Deal:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rural_Electrification_Act
http://www.covington.coop/index.php/component/content/article?id=183
I think maybe a movement could be built on the preservation of western civilization, traditional American society, opposition to the worst of modern craziness, meaning transgenderism, transable ism, homosexual marriage. I believe that people learning to grow some of their own food is important, gardening.
I also think any movement on the right should appose the American police state, millions in prison, and the constant war mongering coming out of Washington, and glorification of the military.
Opposition to cheap foreign labor is important, but one fact that is often not faced up to is, robots, machines and computer programs are
taking people’s jobs.
This sounds a lot like the argument that communism can work with the “right people in charge.” The consolidated government that we have will invariably lead to the types of elites that we enjoy today.
On your plus/minus chart, put evil oligarchs on the minus side.
Japan has a consolidated government, but the Japanese are not as obsessed with “liberty” and “equality” like the United States. Because they don’t have those ideological blinders, they have avoided America’s disastrous mistakes.
South Korea, which was a war zone with an economy on par with Ghana in the 1950s, now builds automobile plants in Alabama and Georgia to use as its forward base to conquer the American market. Meanwhile, Alabama and Georgia specialize in the export of poultry products.
Correct me if I am wrong but those economic incentives are not reserved for foreign investors. Aren’t those incentive packages available to both foreign and domestic companies?
That’s not the point.
The point is that Southern state governments have been offering incentive packages to foster industrialization since the Jim Crow era. In such a way, Northern industries like textiles and aircraft and later foreign corporations have been lured to the region. Texas and Florida have poached countless out-of-state companies. That’s not very laissez-faire.
Liberty and equality are products of West Civilization. It is derived from the manner in which North European societies were formed. Therefore, no one should expect for the Japanese to adopt strictly Western ideas of equality and liberty into their society as they are both foreign to their society.
I don’t know enough about Japanese society but Japan has had the advantage of having a monarch. Monarchs do a much better job at ensuring that the well being of the people are not undermined by foreign elites. Japan post WWII is nothing to brag about IMO. Although they are materially wealthy, their traditional culture has been replaced with Western culture. Today, they are a puppet state to the US.
It would be more accurate to say the obsession with “liberty” and “equality” is a product of Enlightenment philosophy which also erroneously conceived of “societies” created by autonomous individualists who left the “state of nature” to negotiate social contracts.
Does that theory sound anything like European history prior to the French Revolution? No, it doesn’t. No one told the Romans or the Greeks about the theory of universal natural rights.
The Japanese were practical and copied aspects of the West that they thought would improve their economy. They didn’t become ensnared by an ideology and neither should we.
Your question was “Why can’t we do the same for our own industries?” Noting that the economic incentives are available to domestic industries answers your question and therefore is on point.
Corporations never have and never will be principled advocates of laissez-faire capitalism. That they do is just a myth. Corporations are happy to accept all forms of state subsidies whether they need them or not. They very well might have relocated to the state without the subsidies. On the flip side of the coin, note that many companies have relocated due to a friendly business environment that’s present in the South. Although low taxes and low regulation are not completely laissez-faire, it is a case where less government intervention is favorable to business, their workers, and their customers.
1.) I went on to say that the South has a long history of luring Northern industry to the region. I wasn’t saying that this is only something we do with foreign industries. Instead, I was highlighting the contradiction between the actual practice of our state governments in their courtship of foreigners and the free-market, free-trade laissez faire ideology that prevails here.
2.) Good, now that we are back in the real world of economic history, we can point out how the actions of our state governments routinely contradict the prescriptions of libertarian economic theory.
3.) Is it fair to say then that certain state governments like Florida and Texas are pursuing an economic development strategy? They are luring out-of-state businesses and corporations with incentive packages which are calculated to spur investment and industrialization. Isn’t that kind of like what Singapore does?
I don’t know. I have read recent articles about why people of Northern European descent are more individualist and egalitarian than people in other cultures. I read articles that discuss the high trust societies in Northern Europe compared to the low trust societies of Southern Europe. Apparently, the freedom, individualism, and egalitarianism have anthropological bases and are not just part of an ideology. I plan of picking up some books on this subject.
Not to today’s extreme. But there was the Magna Carta, which did predate the French Revolution.
“Meanwhile, Alabama and Georgia specialize in the export of poultry products.”
What’s wrong with poultry products?
What are the spillover effects of poultry processing? Aside from illegal immigration?
Maybe a little bit Jefferson, a little bit Mussolini?
I don’t think Jefferson would even promote 18th century Jeffersonian democracy today. From what I’ve read, his system was premised on a largely agricultural society of small landowners. Of course we should respect Jefferson’s goal: a prosperous middle class society not under the thumb of the plutocracy. We just need different safeguards to get there, which would involve a stronger state.
Jefferson’s agrarian utopia was obsolete in the 1930s. It is even more obsolete today. So we will inevitably have to look elsewhere.
It doesn’t sound like even the Northern Europe of two hundred years ago. And the Greeks and Romans had nothing resembling universal natural rights. They didn’t even have individual rights as we conceive them.
That’s something I would like to try.
The best analogy I can give you is by comparing democracy in 1815 with democracy in 2015. Although there was some democracy in 1815, it was restricted to White, land-owning men who were at least 21 years of age. In 2015, it means anyone who is at least 18 years old regardless of race, ethnicity, gender, or (soon to be) citizenship. In 1815 there probably was some understanding of “rights,” but they were mostly restricted to White men. Today, universal rights apply to damn near everything from right to women to have an abortion, to the right for men to commit acts of sodomy, to the right for blacks to demand a job, etc, etc, etc.
“What are the spillover effects of poultry processing? Aside from illegal immigration?”
Well, the illegal immigration is a separate problem. What are the spillover effects, as you say, that are bothering you?
Every poultry processing plant that I have ever seen in Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee and Arkansas has been a magnet for illegal aliens. It seems to me that low wages and burdening local communities with the spillover effects of illegal immigration is a feature of that labor intensive industry.
But let’s look elsewhere for inspiration. Look at Taiwan and its semiconductor industry which was fostered by government intervention in the economy. The spillover effects of a workforce trained in making semiconductors, as opposed to processing chicken parts, led to new technologies, industries and jobs in Taiwan whereas we get I guess Mexican restaurants.
Wait a minute: maybe I misunderstood. By “spillover effects,” do you mean beneficial things?
There aren’t many positives. It’s a very narrow industry. Unless scientists discover some kind of super fuel and stronger-than-steel nanofibers from poultry products, its growth will stay very linear. Executives will always be looking to lower wages and increase automation. Much more so than other industries.
Giving up our economic edge and wholesale replacing our technology and manufacturing sectors with something like poultry shouldn’t need any explanation as to why it’s a long-term disaster for future generations of Americans.
All anyone has to do is look at your average town where poultry is the major commodity and export and compare it with a town where the technology and manufacturing sectors are the major commodities. In many cases there is a stark contrast.
Well, okay, if you think poultry processing shouldn’t be so great a portion of the economic activity of Alabama, I hear you, Mr. W. It’s your state; if you want something else for it, fine–but I’m not sure it’s fair to compare Alabama to Taiwan. In Alabama, you have a large black population living among whites, don’t you? That usually doesn’t work out very well. I’m living in a city whose history is proof of that. It’s not Taiwan up here either, as I’m sure you know.
In Birmingham, we have the corporate headquarters of Golden Flake. I would say the spillover effect of making microchips in Taiwan is much greater than our specialization in potato chips in Alabama.
China, India, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, South Korea and Vietnam are all examples of dirt poor developing countries that have been or are currently being utterly transformed.
See also European countries like Latvia, Finland and the Czech Republic.
As Trump points out, Mexico is becoming a manufacturing powerhouse.
Those left run cities that jack up the minimum wage are basically just trying to drive out the left tail of the Bell Curve from their cities.
John,
Waldron, AR – roughly a 90% White population
http://www.motherearthnews.com/nature-and-environment/environmental-policy/tyson-foods-kills-rural-towns-zm0z14djzmat.aspx
Poultry isn’t really the problem. It’s the way the industry is manipulated. It’s an extremely linear industry that makes the executives very rich, and that’s about it. When your economy is relying on that as its major export, then the idiom ‘skating on thin ice’ is a serious understatement.
Hunter Wallace, of course you’re on the right track about this and I want to come back to post on the subject but please allow me at this time to offer some OT quotes from the next Prez of the USA (if we don’t do away with elections and just make him Emporer for Life):
Quotes from Crippled America, by Donald Trump:
“I would be lying if I said I didn’t believe the vast majority of political problems facing Americans come from a small, wealthy group at the top of society. These are the people who benefit when ordinary Americans fight their country and each other. And they don’t want you to realize it.”
“Israel refuses to allow Palestinians to return to their 1967 homes, claiming it has a duty to guide sustainable demographics. However, while Israel builds walls, it joins the very people protesting it in calling for greater migration from the Middle East to Western countries. Israel is not special, and this logical gap is not an accident. Their leaders know what they’re doing, and it’s very smart. China restricts immigration the same way. We in the west are getting played by leaders much smarter than ours.”
“America has grown strong in its lasting struggles, struggles with other nations, and struggles with ourselves to be the best we can be. America will only die as a result of constant peace and self-satisfaction.”
“A nation with no identity is not a nation. Many people like to claim that America is an idea. I disagree. I believe that liberty and freedom are ideas. America is a nation that follows them. And we need to start teaching children to realize their identity as Americans, and the strength that comes with that identity when we all work together as a community.”
I got the book this morning. I’m going to review it after I finish the Prestowitz book.
None of those countries are overrun with nogs dragging them down. Or do you plan to expel them?
Thank you, Marc!
Write an open letter to Jim Webb, in it ask him to run as an independent with a large portion of his plank being basically to keep pushing TVA/New Deal economics along with what you are talking about in luring industry to your country.
In Christian theology there are three recognized ways of organizing churches: episcopalianism, congregationalism, and presbyterianism, or, rule by hierarchy, rule by equals, and rule by the few elect. Now, as these ideas pertain to the organization of government, the first and second have been debated and discussed ad nauseum. The latter, presbyterianism, however, could provide an interesting “third-way”; a government of wise, far-seeing, and honored elders, much like America’s Senators were intended to be before the 17th amendment sent them begging for votes.
A presbyterian-like structure might work for the Scots Irish people of the South, who by nature tend to respect age, past acts of bravery, and longstanding ties to communities.
Marc,
Trump sounds like an aristocrat and I mean this in a good way. He seems to understand the idea of noblesse oblige. He’s gone beyond the rants about trade policy, has properly covered immigration, and has moved on to key issues regarding war, foreign policy and identity. I never thought that any Republican in my lifetime would contest the proposition nation orthodoxy. If he just wanted to get elected all he would have to do is resurrect some old Reaganisms about a shining city on the hill. He has actually contradicted St. Reagan. Well done Mr. Trump.
I’m looking forward to reading the book and seeing specifically what Trump intends to do about trade and how it works with his tax policy.
I’ve been reading about how Ronald Reagan sat in the Oval Office with his top economic advisors and silently ate jelly beans in the 1980s while Japan’s predatory dumping destroyed one American industry after another.
Why is it necessary for a “great nation” to have a large aircraft industry? I think nations like Belgium, Denmark, Sweden and Canada are great nations and neither have a large aircraft industry.
Belgium, Denmark, and Sweden are part of the EU which has Airbus.
As for the Chinese, I am guessing it is because they anticipate that China will be a huge market for aircraft in the future, and they want their own industry, the exports, economic growth and the jobs that go with it. So they are going to once again do the exact opposite of what free-trade, free-market theory would have them do, which is to grow rice or make tennis shoes and buy commercial aircraft from the US and EU, and build their own industry.
We have to have a Third Positionist economy. Originally a strong State monitored economy must allow entrepreneurship but work to make us economically independent and ensure that globalist forces of finance can’t hijack our means of production. Neither capitalism or communism, but nationalist economics
They can always buy their poultry products, potato chips, and peanuts from Alabama.
Birmingham is a world leader in the payday loan industry.
These are separate countries. And Airbus predates the EU and is headquartered in France. Therefore, the above countries (unless they don’t count as countries anymore) don’t have a large aircraft industry.
Question, what Chinese designed/engineered products are in demand around the world? They are good at manufacturing products designed in other countries but I don’t see any major Chinese designed products in use outside of their country?
Like I said, Belgium, Denmark and Sweden are part of the EU. Also, Airbus is a European aerospace consortium that was specifically created to compete with Boeing. It is a joint project of many European countries and has manufacturing facilities all over the EU. The EU also began as an economic union long befoe the euro was adopted. In creating its own aerospace industry, China is following the EU’s example.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbus
We have a trade deficit of hundreds of billions of dollars with China mostly in manufactured goods. All sorts of American companies have outsourced design of new products, not just production, to China, Taiwan, Singapore, etc.
“They can always buy their poultry products, potato chips, and peanuts from Alabama.”
Throw in a carton of diet Snapple, and we’re good.
A couple of recent examples of strong government are the Iraq War and the subprime mortgage disaster.
Theoretically, a strong central government can be beneficial but only if it’s strength is coupled with strong discipline and intelligence. Otherwise Uncle Sam will mutate into Uncle Sambo, an obese retarded gorilla who goes into the private sector to fix things or engages in poorly thoughtout warfare.
All state and federal governments should be subject to the discipline of a balanced budget requirement. If the government wants to spend more, then present a cost-benefit analysis to the voters. Don’t sneak around their back and dump a huge tax burden on their children unless you muster a 2/3rds vote.
To have a more intelligent government we’ll need a more intelligent, responsible, and experienced electorate.
Ideally, the minimum voter age should be increased significantly. Wisdom is gained by experience and the human brain doesn’t fully develop until the mid-twenties.
Requiring a minimum score on a nonverbal I.Q test would be ideal.
Eliminating the non retired able bodied chronic parasites would be a necessity.
The more disciplined and forthright is the government and the better is the quality of the electorate, the more likely that government action will be beneficial instead of destructive.
Of course, here in America we’re handicapped with a huge bottom end population of blacks and mestizos which is why White racial solidarity and greatly reducing nonwhite immigration are so crucial.
It’s true that Ronald Reagan was irresponsibly wedded to laissez faire doctrine, but his administration did bow to some political realities in the 1980s and thus did confront the Japanese threat on some levels.
The Reagan Administration negotiated the “voluntary” automobile import quota for instance, which drove down the import share of the American auto market from 35% to 22% in a few years. Interestingly, Akio Morita harshly criticized American auto executives Roger Smith and Lee Iacocca for posing as patriots while collecting massive bonuses during this time.
The Reagan Administration also acted to protect the strategically vital machine tool sector, strongly intervened to stop Japan’s indigenous “FSX” fighter aircraft project, and perhaps most significantly cajoled the G7 to support the managed devaluation of the US Dollar in the Plaza Accord in 1986. In fact, the American balance of trade was actually restored to near parity by the early 1990s as a result.
Reagan’s successor, George HW Bush, also presided over a very successful government-business partnership which restored leadership to America’s semiconductor industry known as SEMATECH. Government and industry collaborated to fund research into advanced product research and development in the semiconductor industry, successfully defeating Japanese competition in the sector.
There is a lot of untapped electoral hay to make in this area. Most patriotic Americans (or Southerners–I’m a sympathetic Northerner) want to WIN and are not adverse to the government advancing that objective.
That said, many small l libertarian insights remain valid. Part of the reason the United States has such a significant lead over much other industrialized countries in per capita GDP is the freedom we give to business managers in this country. In nearly all other industrialized countries it’s illegal to fire full time employees at will (they’re getting around this lately with temporary employees).
Unfortunately, most of this edge shows up in the service sector as American investors wisely from their individual point of view drop out of tradeable goods sectors aggressively targeted by successful government-business partnerships from foreign countries.
I am one of them–the only manufacturing companies I own stock in are Emerson Electric and GE. I would never even consider being a stockholder in our auto companies.
The South benefits from Federal programs like TVA, military bases, Oak Ridge, Savannah River Site, NASA, etc because capital in conscripted from outside of the South (particularly from wealthy northern states) and invested. For advocates of Southern Independence, how can these programs be beneficial to the South if they lose their funding base? If the South has to fund them then they are a drain on Southern resources and not from resources outside the South.
All these countries have been transformed from command and control economies and have been greatly liberalized. According to The Heritage Foundation’s 2015 Index of Economic Freedom, Singapore is #2 at 89.4. According to Hunter’s definition, they qualify as libertarian/laissez-faire. Maybe the US should adopt their policies. Right?
http://www.heritage.org/index/
There’s simply no need of a new CSA, using the smallest southern state as an example. South Carolina is the same size as the Irish Republic, has significant manufacturing, a huge electrical power generation capability, a first class seaport, and good roads. South Carolina is self sufficient in all but one area, petroleum. Because other southern states have petroleum and because over 90% of the petroleum processing is located in the south, we don’t feel petroleum will be in short supply.
We don’t like and reject, utterly and completely, the nothing of an overweening national state. What could it possibly supply us? We don’t want standardized education, we don’t want a monstrous military, and all of the other powers a super nation state assumes over time.
The Confederate States of America embodied much of the enlightenment ideas that generated the US of America, with only window dressing changes. it protected nothing. In fact, the only threat from outside the south is the same government that conquered 150 years ago, a CSA would ensure the same result.
So Europe is now a country rather than a continent. Got it. I will rephrase my original point.
Why is it necessary for a “great nation” to have a large aircraft industry? I think Switzerland is a great nation (and not in the EU) and does not have a large aircraft industry.
1.) It would be foolish to say that because the federal government has done bad things in the South that nothing it has ever done has ever worked to our benefit. In Alabama alone, Huntsville’s economy is driven by federal spending on NASA and Redstone Arsenal and Birmingham’s economy is centered on UAB. Mobile was a small coastal town until it became a major port due to World War II military spending.
2.) In an independent South, it will be up to us to decide which programs we wish to continue. Do we want, say, the education system of West Virginia or do we want to want to be more like Finland, which was a small, poor country until very recently.
The European Union is a state, yes. That’s why you can drive unimpeded now from France to Germany. Both countries share the same currency, the euro.
As for Switzerland, it is not a member of the EU and it doesn’t have the euro, but it too is deeply integrated into the European economy. The EU has a number of free trade agreements with non-EU countries.
Why does Arkansas need to be a great nation? It has Wal-Mart and Tyson. It is a superpower in poultry processing and Chinese retail trade.
For those who favor the Chinese model, understand that government spending results in inefficiencies and malinvestment. Want an example? Try China’s ghost cities.
http://www.cnn.com/videos/world/2015/01/19/pkg-ripley-china-ghost-cities.cnn/video/playlists/china-in-the-news/
It was a waste of capital, labor and materials. But at least it created a lot of jobs. /
For those in favor of the American model, take a stroll through the post-apocalyptic wasteland that is Detroit. Compare Detroit to Shanghai or Dubai or Seoul or Taipei or Singapore in the 21st century.
Two words. Black people.
Detroit’s decline was caused by a combination of civil rights and free trade. Last time I checked, foreigners now control over half the US auto market. Surely, that has something to do with it.
All those countries have actually followed in the footsteps of Japan and developed export-oriented economies and private sector-government cooperation for national economic development.
In the 1950s, Americans told the Japanese they were fools to develop consumer electronics and automobile industries. Instead, Japan’s comparative advantage was in tuna according to American economists.
Two words. Black people.
Geologically, Birmingham occupies one of the most fortuitous spots in the world to make steel, but America’s leaders decided that a steel industry was too “old economy.” It made more sense to import steel from foreign counties.
It is not only Birmingham. It’s metropole, overwhelmingly White Pittsburgh, is now similarly depopulated.
How much does the Federal government, the state of Alabama, and the local counties spend on education (primary, secondary, community college, universities)? For this money, why aren’t people adequately trained to work in the semiconductor industries? Also, Alabama’s public education system produces people who are competent in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) fields. Why is the public education system capable of producing engineers and scientist but not people who can work in the semiconductor industry?
This is a good debate.
I would like to thank Jeff for his comments. I’ve always believed these debates stimulate the best exchanges of ideas.