More On Mourning Michigan
February 10, 2009 / 4:43 pm • By Dr. Melissa ClouthierA blog reader commented on my post from this summer about Michigan. It was so telling, that I thought I’d share it:
I, too, live in Houston but was born and raised in Michigan. And, you are so right about Michigan.
Beautiful. I miss the four seasons.Anyway, I hear comments to your blog about how can liberal policies have caused this? I am a
chemical engineer and when I graduated from college (University of Michigan) in 1975 Michigan
had a vibrant chemical and process business economy. However, I remember Attorney General
Frank Kelly waging his war against that same industry. I remember the unions striking one chemical,
pharmaceutical, and food processing plant after another. The result was obvious. Not a sudden
move out, rather a slow disinvestment in the state. Plants didn’t shut down immediately, There just
was no investment. So departments and plants slowly rotted until one after another they were shut
down. If you don’t want business, it isn’t going to stay for long.Michigan could have a strong chemical business but most are gone and those that are left are
just rumps of what they were. Michigan could have a strong food process business but who wants
to deal with the environmental hassle? So, most the plants are in northern Indiana or northern Ohio.Michigan’s economy has caved in because they drove everybody out except the auto business. This
took 30 years. Now, the only one left is dying. So, what happens? The state dies.
And this cycle is the cycle that the Democrats would like to impose on the whole country. When there is no where to escape to, America will be like Europe. High unemployment, cushy social services for the lazy, low productivity, long vacations, little innovation (why invest when the government takes the gains?), low birth rates (who can afford kids) and importing labor from regions who don’t like the host country very much creating an angry underclass sucking off of social services.
In a word: socialism. It slowly crushes the spirit and defeats the individual. Unions like it though–everyone is “equal”. Equally miserable.
10 Responses to “More On Mourning Michigan”
February 10 2009 / 6:03 pm
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I readily agree that labor unions have overreached in many cases the past few decades. At the same time, I stand behind high wages for workers, tough environmental standards, and fair taxation.
Did you know back in the ’50s, the Flint River used to change colors day by day depending on what color of paint the auto plants were running that day? The bottom of the Flint river running through downtown has been sealed off with concrete because of the high concentrations of heavy metals and other pollutants in the river bed.
The Flint River is a beautiful watershed — at least it WAS before it became synonomous with “sewer” thanks to the impact of decades of corporate pollution.
THAT is what corporations (and individuals) do when they are allowed to pursue profits without regard for the environment.
If business had its way, the Great Lakes would be nothing but greasy, smelly oil slicks lapping garbage-strewn coasts. The Cuyahoga river feeding Lake Erie actually caught fire numerous times in the 20th century due to its heavy concentration of pollutants. A particularly infamous fire in 1969 embarrassed Congress so much they passed the Clean Water Act of 1972.
You probably don’t think of these things because you have enjoyed the benefits of environmental protection laws all your life.
Those chemical companies you mentioned did not leave Michigan because they could not prosper in Michigan. They left Michigan because they could prosper MORE in a place where they could pollute more.
Are you suggesting that Michigan should be more like those other states and be more accommodating to polluters?
It is RIGHT for a society to impose the cost of pollution (prevention or cleanup) on the business that derives the economic benefit from creating it. Otherwise, the opposite happens: the business imposes the cost of its activities (increased environmental pollution) on the society, while keeping all the profits as well.
Naturally business prefers the latter arrangement and will move production anyplace where it can reduce its production costs to the minimum and maximize its profits. You can study Nigeria and other third-world nations sometime and see how corporations have exploited the lax regulatory environment in those countries to the devastation of the land and people.
If reasonable environmental protections “drive out” business, then I say to heck with business. Let them go. I would rather live in a clean state where I can drink the water, eat the fish, and breathe the air on minimum wage than stand in a cesspool in my high-priced shoes.
February 10 2009 / 6:21 pm
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Enjoy the state alone, then. That’s upstate New York: pristine nothingness–a state overrun by deer because no one is there to cull the population so they starve.
This is not a question of either/or. It is possible with new technology to be industrial and environmentally sound.
But you’re not addressing the central concern. The fact is, workers in Michigan did, and still do, get paid more than is moral for the work they complete. It is immoral to pay a guy $70 an hour to turn a screwdriver when the market would not bear it. This artificial wage drives his co-workers out of jobs because the product cannot be made competitively.
Two forces are at work: increased productivity which has driven out jobs and unions which over and over again cut their noses to spite their faces. A nice big GM plant is being built in Brazil right now. All that investment–to gleefully pollute? No. To pay a fair wage for a job and be competitive with other car companies. Union wages won’t allow that.
Worse, is the taxation. The taxation both individually and corporately gives people a disincentive to achieve. Why make more money when there’s no ROI? Why take risks when the added gains put you over another taxation threshold and exposes you to more liability?
Far from noble, I believe your philosophy is elitist and discriminatory. It discriminates against innovators. It discriminates against the middle class. It discriminates against those who are more efficient and better workers.
Try staying compliant with all the government rules and regulations while owning a small business. Good. Luck. We are not in the industrial age where corporations are dumping toxic waste. If America is to be competitive at all though, industry and manufacturing have to have a home somewhere.
Michigan will be relegated to an agrarian paradise. Sanctified in it’s simplicity. All it needs is a nice fundamentalist religion and the women in burkas and the throw-back to pre-industrial perfection will be complete.
February 10 2009 / 6:49 pm
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I grew up, and spent probably about 35 years of my life in MI. I began to hate it after my first year in college in Ohio, and then in the Army for a couple of years out West.
I think of Detroit, Benton Harbor, and Flint, when I think of MI. I am a hunter and fisherman, and love the outdoors, but every year that goes by the cost to hunt and fish, and maneuver through rulebooks costs more, while fewer and fewer people hunt. The big city anti-s are wrecking outdoor sports.
The winter is much too long, the overcast is too long, the rain too often. Factories not only must pay extortion to unions and eco-nazis, but pay huge cost in heat and snow clearance, sick days, and exorbitant taxes.
Of the three of my siblings and I, three of us live in the sub-tropical belt from Southern Californication, to southern New Mexico, to Florida, and my parents will move to one of those, or Alabama if they can ever sell their Lansing home. Once “man-made global warming” re-glaciates MI the Gaia worshiping eco-freaks will have their *pristine* wilderness state, and should be required by law to live in it permanently.
February 10 2009 / 10:44 pm
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I think you need to get back to your roots! the kkKlan
February 11 2009 / 12:59 am
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Don’t know about up north or in the UP, but in the SE, the problem is clear — an adversarial, us-versus-them, grievance-nursing, somebody-owes-me mentality. Whether it is the unions and union workers, who have the mindset of merely taking and getting the most they can out of management and government, or whether it is the race hustlers of Detroit, demanding that somebody else come in and do something to save them. On one side, you have “it’s all the white man’s fault,” and on the other side, you have, “the blacks are to blame.”
In the SE section of the state, rare is the individualistic, can-do, let me do it myself attitude. Those that do think that way have longed moved away. In short, for too many years, they have been New Orleans during Katrina. And like New Orleans, it has become a Third World hell-hole.
February 11 2009 / 9:04 am
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All socialist-run governmental entities become *Third World hell-holes* absolutely WITHOUT EXCEPTION. It doesn’t matter where on the globe it is, or how *benevolent* the paternalistic gov’ts are[claim to be], gov’t power over individual liberty and capitalist/ free market economy(which is to say, PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY, at home and at work) have only one outcome(absent a repeal of socialism)…totalitarianism.
The *T-Os* of the world who have run their homes, cities, states, and countries into various-sized SLUMS because EVERYTHING in their lives is someone elses’s responsibility, are just self-sold slaves. They live on hand-outs from Massah Democrat, and blame “White Devil” personal responsibility conservatives for every self-inflicted(or otherwise)problem.
The 13% population of blacks (and maybe shrinking, because they are obliging the racist/eugenisist founder of Planned Parenthood, Margret Sanger, by killing their offspring at the highest rate)have sold themselves back into slavery, and are ordered around by the commie-lib Dem plantation owners, and must do their bidding and eat their table scraps like good little Sambos.
February 11 2009 / 9:08 am
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One of the sad and ironic downfall of Michigan was a multimillion dollar radio comercial advertisement aimed at small business’s to move to Michigan because of low taxes, Goverments pro business and low crime….These adverts was done in TEXAS!!Do they really think that the people in the largest economy, biggest exporter of manufactered goods,low tax’s,no state income tax ect…ect..are so stupid they would fall for such claptrap?But again a leftist liberal State Goverment,that doesn’t deal with facts but lives in a elitist fantasy world would think a bunch of “hicks” would fall for such snake oil.
February 11 2009 / 9:41 am
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But again a leftist liberal State Goverment,that doesn’t deal with facts but lives in a elitist fantasy world would think a bunch of “hicks” would fall for such snake oil.
Which is really ironic considering that Texas sent electors for George H. W. Bush twice, Bob Dole, George W. Bush twice, and John McCain.
In other words – we didn’t fall for the Dukakis, Clinton, Gore, Kerry, and Obama Snake Oil.
February 11 2009 / 9:46 am
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Ooh! Ouch! (tee-hee)
The death of the Gay Old Party in a nutshell…
December 2 2009 / 5:02 am
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You are a very smart person! I like the viewpoint. Regards,