Conflict of Interest

The show trial that's going on in Congress over Toyota's safety engineering is a definite conflict of interest. Number one, it's unfair competition when the owner of General Motors undermines the major competition.

Number two, the relentlessness of the stories in the media indicate that Congress is catering to the UAW, not to real concerns for safety. Toyota workers have repeatedly refused to join the union which is so desperate for members that they're backing Card Check.

And then there is the sad spectacle of using questionable "experts" to denigrate Toyota. Joan Claybrook is the Carter appointee who forced automakers to install air bags despite vehement warnings that the technology was not yet developed enough. As a result, 65 deaths, mostly infants and children, occurred because of exploding air bags. Clarence Ditlow is notorious for approving the use of rocket igniters to "prove" on NBC that GM pick-ups were unsafe. These two are favorite anti-business expert witnesses. It's time the public remembered their names and protested their testimony.

On the international front, humiliating the head of the world's largest auto manufacturer on television before members of Congress is poor diplomacy. It's bad enough when the hypocritical Congressional Clowns self-righteously attack American CEO's. It's another thing altogether to do it to someone from a culture where saving face is so important that suicide is preferable to public indignity.

After this week we can hardly expect any other foreign companies to build plants in the US and give jobs to our countrymen.

Economic Forecast

This is the last paragraph from "All I Ever Needed to Know about Economics I Learned in Genesis," that I read this morning...

"Running the printing presses day and night to churn out dollar bills is not going to revitalize the economy. At is most basic level every economy is about dealing with the “dust from the ground” of which we are made, with the rocks and soil of this planet. We aren’t like God, able to create ex nihilo; we aren’t angels who can sustain ourselves on “information.” The real stuff that makes an economy hum is fished or grown or mined. It is taking the raw materials of this earth, “by the sweat of your face,” and making it edible, wearable, or otherwise usable to some other human being that forms the basis of any economy. When we see growth there, that is when we will be back."

It reminds me of the maxim I learned in the fifties that all wealth is created by farming, fishing, mining, and manufacturing. All other industries or vocations merely served those wealth generating ones. Then in the late eighties, Everyone began to say that this was the Information Age and we no longer depended on that old maxim. At the same time, we began transforming farming into massive Agri-business enterprises that relied on government handouts and practically eliminated the family farms, began allowing other countries to fish our coastal waters without protest, began denigrating mining as environmentally harmful, and began shipping our manufacturing overseas. Those Everyones ignored the fact that computers and information technology was a form of manufacturing although they quickly began shipping all those related services overseas also.

We were lulled into thinking that because bankers and investment advisors were wealthy themselves, that they were creating wealth for our country's economy. Then last September, as it collapsed, that empire showed itself to be a mere house of cards as our personal wealth collapsed with it.

I pray that we have the will to rebuild the US economic base.