Among the richest Americans you will find Bill Gates (#1, actually), Christy Walton (and three other Waltons), Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Sergey Brin, and more. As of September, 2011, Steve Jobs was 39th on the list. And, of course, many more. These folks represent companies like Microsoft, WalMart, Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Apple. These companies represent the biggest marketshare ... of the 99%. Now, what's up with that?
Last year Steve Jobs and President Obama had a conversation at a Silicon Valley dinner in California. While Apple used to brag about being an American-made product, today its products are almost entirely manufactured overseas. Jobs told the president, "Those jobs aren't coming back." Apple employs more than 700,000 people either directly or as contractors to do work for them. Of those, 43,000 are in the United States. Of Apple, Jared Bernstein who used to be an economic adviser to the White House said, "If [Apple] is the pinnacle of capitalism, we should be worried." Apparently, due to unions and environmental laws and government red tape and more, American industry is not agile enough to get the job done in a timely or economical manner. So the jobs go to Asia and Europe and even Mexico, but not to the U.S.
ABC has had a Made In America series going since last year. They've been encouraging Americans to buy American. They started by pointing out how little we have here that is made here and how much good it would offer toward creating American jobs if we'd just buy American. And people like it. Okay, fine, but understand that there are some products you won't be able to get, like, say, the iPhone or practically any other Apple product. I mean, it's a nice idea, but we've so suppressed American industry and innovation that it's not nearly as possible as it once was. And, look, does ABC really favor buying American? I mean, they prominently enjoy the use of iPads and are owned by Disney whose products are almost entirely made overseas. ABC practiced their "hard news" reporting by investigating gift shops at the Smithsonian and the Capital and finding that their products were made overseas, but completely ignored the stores at Disney's theme parks for the same thing. What's up with that?
The Occupy Wall Street (et. al.) folks want us to stop the richest Americans. The government wants to tax them into equality. It would be easy to do ... just as easy as the Made-in-America thing. If you want to encourage American jobs, buy American products. If you want to discourage the "overly rich", stop buying their products. Don't use Microsoft. Don't shop at WalMart. Don't buy books (or anything else) from Amazon. Don't use Google or Facebook. Don't buy Apple. Say, while you're at it, Mr. Dell is really high on the list, so don't buy Dell computers. The CEO of HP computers is pretty high up there, too. Better avoid HP. And in a really short time we will manage to cripple America. No computers (PC or Mac), no software, no social media, no search engines. Easy! That ought to make things better.
Oh, wait ... in the words of Fagin, "I think I'd better think it out again."
2 comments:
"They started by pointing out how little we have here that is made here and how much good it would offer toward creating American jobs if we'd just buy American.
This is funny. Rich anti-capitalist anchors at ABC are using capitalist concepts such as self-interest to encourage the proletariat to do things that would be selfless for a nation the anchors see as getting where it did by robbing the world of its wealth.
AND, if people were basically good, wouldn't companies that didn't pay their employees high wages be shunned and put out of business?
And not only this, but the answers to these problems that are come up with by these free-thinking champions of liberty is to pass and enact ever more confining laws. One is left to wonder "freedom for whom?". Well the rich anti-capitalist of course. If only the public policies these folk love to foist on others reflected the policies of their personal lives as it pertains to the understanding of human nature, perhaps they would champion things that would encourage commerce rather than bind it with ever more increasing chains. But then again, good intentions always trump results, especially when those trumpeting the good intentions are not subject to the misery there intentions impose.
Wow, Dan, when I hit a subject on which you're passionate, you really wax eloquent!
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