Timothy Birdnow

Tired of winning yet?

Blue-Collar Wages Under Trump Post Largest Increase in Almost 60 Years

This is what happens when you kick out labor that is undercutting the market and at the same time increase the number of jobs. It's basic economics.

BTW I argued years ago at American Thinker that illegal labor was destructive to economic prosperity in the same way slavery was destructive to prosperity in the antebellum south. Read my article Plantation America and it's companion More on Plantation America at American Thinker.

Real wages (adjusted for inflation) are up 1.7% this year.

Slavery destroyed the antebellum economy in the South by depressing wages for poor or working class whites, which is why the South had such a distinct aristocratic nature; nobody but the wealthy could amass any money because no small business could compete with free labor. The end result was the South was primarily agrarian and had almost no industrial base (except here in Missouri, which is why Lincoln ordered his man Nathanial Fox to "keep Missouri in the Union at all cost"). The end result was they had nothing with which to fight. Everyone remembers the scene in Gone with the Wind where Rhett Butler points out that the South had no factories, no arms plants or cannon plants, limited railroads, and all it had was "arrogance". He was right and the South believed that elan and good breeding was enough. That might be helpful but a good old fashioned gun or bomb is better!

America was becoming a huge version of the South, except instead of wanting limited government the ruling class wanted more and more control. But the economy had been hollowing out much the same as the Old South, and for many of the same reasons.

Hopefully this trend will be the long-awaited reversal of decades of decline. The "service economy" never produced what it promised.

I remember a show in the mid two thousands called Jerico. It was about a terrorist attack on the U.S. that took out 25 cities and left the small town of Jericho Kansas isolated. One of the characters was dating this dumb skateboard kid. He didn't know why everyone wanted the old country back. His girlfriend asked him "where will we get our stuff?" to which, after some thought, he replied "we'll get the internet back up and just buy it from there'. That has pretty much been the mentality of moder America for some time. Eventually you can't buy it from there, or don't want to. You have to make your own stuff at some point or you are at the mercy of those who DO make it.

Which was the plan all along. This whole "free trade" and unlimited international trade business mirrored what was done in Europe starting with the Coal and steel treaty between German and France. France wanted to bind Germany's economy intimately with their own so they dared never attack France again. Soon other countries wanted to join and the Treaty of Rome was signed crating the European Economic Community, commonly called the Common Market. This eventually morphed into the European Union we know today. The internationalists used this as a template to try to create a world government, and they sought to intimately bind all national economies together in the hopes the nation-states would wither away and the international organizations - the U.N. the World Court, etc. would become a true world government.

But such a system is gossamer in nature. In fact it was much like this at the end of the Bronze Age; the great powers of that time became too dependent on trade, and when the Sea People showed up and disrupted the trade routes the whole thing fell apart. Most of the Bronze Age nations have long since ceased to exist.

We saw the difficulties of trade during Covid, and are seeing it now with piracy and with Houthi terrorism. A major war between the superpowers would end international trade; we'd better be making our own stuff or we will collapse in any sort of dusrupt, even if it is not a major military engagement.

So there is no good reason to keep outsourcing our jobs to India or China; we need Americans and American jobs. We neither want to outsource nor insource via labor that is below market rate. Both are destructive to our way of life.

But then to many on the Left that is the whole point. Cloward and Piven made that argument. You gotta break a few eggs to make an omelet.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 10:41 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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