It's ridiculous! There is no concept that if they demand more than the employer can pay, then everyone loses. It's common sense! But the union mob bosses don't see it that way. They want to line their pockets, period.

To your point of pay up or we'll shut you up. I live in New Jersey, near Atlantic City. There have been at least two casino closures due to union contract demands. The one that stands out the most was tone where the union demanded a 5 % raise across the board. The casino said it could not afford such a raise. It even opened its books to the union for them to examine. The review showed that the casino could not afford the raise. the Union demande3d it anyway. The casino gave them the raise. Seven months later it closed for good and all union members lost their jobs as well as all of the nonunion people.

Yen = Japanese.. Yuan = Chinese. ;-) At the current market valuations and (immediate) stability index, I'd rather invest in Yuan than Yen (damn, say that 10 times fast!!)... then again, considering it's all Italian Automaker Money (Fiat)* I think I'll stick to investments backed by something more than a dotgov promise...

*no offense intended toward Fabbrica Italiana Automobili Torino.

Truly it exposes the union mentality of pay up or we will shut you up. It's revolting and why I cannot tolerate unions in any way. The lackeys made the case for keeping lower wages by claiming that they are able to have them because of lack of specialized skills and education. A fry cook has not earned the right to make $15.00 hr. Plus this forces smaller businesses to hire fewer employees, and also cut back hours for those they already have. My children understand you can't expect to be paid at that rate for a job which isn't designed for that.

Thank you for sharing this. Welcome to the Gulch by the way!
Regards,
NonMoochingArtist

See here. About 2 minutes long: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5KSBosUa_...

RIGHT! I saw a video on Reason TV recently that covered this - what they want is certainty & dependence without any call to growth, development or creative thinking (indeed, what they want is complete stagnation). Why do people live in America if this is how they think???

The looters, rotters and moochers want a $15 minimum wage. We'll never see any resurgence in Made in America at that ridiculous job-killing rate.

I remember reading of the "Service Economy" back in the seventies. It was another Utopia. My question then and now is what is the intrinsic value of last year's tax forms? We all need the service provided by tax people, but after they're done what value do the documents have?. You could say the same for yesterdays banking papers, stock receipts, and any number of service products. How much is a haircut worth 4 weeks from now? How much is an insurance policy worth, until the owner fills it with cash?

My point is wealth is not created by the service economies. Cash is, income for the provider is, but wealth, or future value, is not.

By classic definition wealth comes from land, resources, improvements to land, and value added through manufacturing. In the late 19th & 20th Centuries "intellectual property" was added to that list. Copyrights, patents, etc.

Most of us will not write a best seller or #1 hit song, Land and resources are available to most, but cumbersome and not easily transported. That leaves "value added through manufacturing" as a source of wealth available to most people. Let's shorten that term to "labor".

This is something politically we have moved away from since the 70s. Wealth from labor is no different than the farmer taking harvest, going to market, and keeping the overage as a profit. The blue collar family did the same for years. Go in everyday, get paid, buy your necessities, keep the change. Except, we were being told it would be so much better to become a service economy.

This is only my opinion, but there are a lot of people that really aren't college material, and I'm one of them. But, someone has to fix the leaky pipes, keep our cars running, put on a new roof, seal the driveway, build the cars, build the roads, etc. There are fortunes to be made doing things people don't know how to do or don't want to do. In a paperless service economy where financial. medical. legal, and tax services lead the field the humble working person is mostly forgotten.

In our Nation, if we look at that list again, there are resources. If we look at the heydays of the US, it was when we were using our labor to procure our resources, to manufacture new and wonderful products the world wanted to buy. There are a lot of arguments back and forth about ecology, economy, labor costs, and so on. Even the invisible hand of equilibrium is mentioned. The underlying fact is, to import all or much of the things we need, we must export the labor, which is a shortened version of one of the sources of wealth. We are exporting a large part of our wealth for "things" with little long term value. When we made this turn, we became a debtor nation, because we were consuming more than we produced. When we borrow to finance this consumption, or a war on top of our consumption, we only magnify the problem of exporting labor.

If the people that are more gifted at labor related tasks are abandoned, they become a large group of people to be cared for by our progressive Utopian nannies. On the other hand, if there would be a renewal of manufacturing those same people would be producing rather than a net consumptive loss. This production, and the overage, adds up to wealth.

Yes, the rich do get richer; because just as jobs trickle down, wealth percolates upward. The rich getting richer doesn't mean the poor have to get poorer. The poor can rise out of poverty with the "fruits" of their labor. In the socialist/progressive model this is not possible. In that model they can only remain poor. Additionally, in both models the rich get richer, because they know how.

I've been thinking if there are any good documentary people out there they should do a documentary of someone starting a business highlighting the taxes, regulations, and all the related hoops that businesses have to go through to run a business in the US. Maybe that would put the spotlight onto some of these issues for people to better understand why we need less taxes and regulation.

Bingo!!!!!!

let's not forget the weakening of our patent system-which now rewards large corporations at the expense of the entrepreneur.

The author seems a little optimistic. I don't see our current elected class doing anything to help business.

Major dittos OA. I believe a manufacturing revolution is about to begin. Are we ready for some 3D printing?

Food for thought, Having been in manufacturing for decades, it is not the competition that bothers me, but the taxation and regulation that makes it so attractive to offshore.

The key words I read were taxation and regulation. The beauty is that lawmakers don't have to "work" to bring jobs back to America. The simply need to get out of the way.