Hitting the Reset Button

In the United States, we are beginning to see what so many pundits have stated in the past: the country's economy is sick and dying. There's just no denying it. The fundamentals are not sound; they are fundamentallyflawed, built upon false premises and illusory market conditions. There was never any boom; there's only a deafening thud.

Back in 2000, Naomi Klein published No Logo, a book that I had the pleasure of picking up and reading back in my youth. In that book, Klein pointed out the transition from manufacturing to service in the American economy, and how that would eventually cause it to falter. It makes sense; a majority of service industry sectors do not lead to large amounts of export income into the country. Retail, restaurants, and financial services primarily benefit the domestic market; they are not in high demand outside of the country.

As manufacturing leaked out of the United States, the economy failed to adapt. Funds were available to re-train workers, but those workers could not find work, even after re-training. It is, and was, patently absurd in the Clinton years to believe that a displaced or laid-off auto-worker could re-train to become a computer programmer or technology developer in two years. The federal government, with all of its spending, provided training to people looking for work that never cropped up.

Unfortunately, unlike an XBox game, we can't just hit the reset button.

What we can do, though, is look backwards to find where the country went wrong, why, and address those issues. There are a multitude of federal Acts that led to the collapse of the financial sector, including the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act and the DIDMCA. However, rather than entertaining the revival of these regulations, the federal government has chosen instead to expand government, add another layer of bureaucracy, and muddle the system even more. Soon, the bureaucratic infrastructure will rival China's.

Meanwhile, we get mired in rhetorical talk on health care, an issue that is neither novel nor complex from a conservative point of view. The financial sector goes back to business as usual -- the same business that got us into this mess in the first place -- and the various media spin mills proliferate their messages through the Internet and airwaves.

Let's go back to a time when wages matched productivity. When you could not get an A.R.M. When public broadcasting was important. Yeah. That'd be a nice change. Like hitting the reset button.