Health care crisis: Made in the USA

The following examines briefly only a part of how the government made the health care crisis it now proposes to solve.

When I was young our neighbors worked at places like:

Ball Corporation (Muncie)

Borg-Warner (Muncie)

Chrysler Foundry (Kokomo)

Chrysler Transmission (Kokomo)

Delco Electronics (GM)

Delco-Remy (GM)

Ex-Cell-O Corporation (Elwood)

Firestone (Noblesville)

Fisher Body (Marion)

Ford Motor Co. (Indianapolis)

Guide Lamp (GM)

TRW (Noblesville)

Western Electric (AT&T Indianapolis)

These jobs paid $25/hour or more typically (in 1970’s dollars, perhaps equivalent to $35/hour or more more today)–often quite a bit more–and that’s just the list of local jobs. It doesn’t include more distant but still Hoosier domiciled outfits like Bendix (South Bend), International Harvester (Fort Wayne), Whirlpool (Evansville), Ford (Connersville), Dana Corporation (Churubusco and Richmond), numerous Gary, and numerous northwest Indiana steel mills. And these are just the outfits that readily jump to mind.

What I left out were the hundreds of manufacturing suppliers that formed up to supply components to these operations.

These corporations paid the kind of wages that allowed mom to stay at home, they paid for fabulous health coverage (often given in lieu of heavily taxed pay raises thanks to a progressive tax system that created its own dramatic cost-of-living increase and which Obama will restore in 2011), provided generous paid vacations, sick days and retirement. They made it possible to own a piece of the American Dream for those unable or for whatever reason unwilling to attend college. These manufacturers came about largely as a result of the mobilization of America’s manufacturing needs emanating from World War 2 and were one of an endless series of examples of American exceptionalism that became the envy of the world and the dream for emigrants from nations of lesser prosperity worldwide.

For over 200 years no one gave even a second thought to a need for national health care.

But today we are debating a need for government health care in large measure because though the radical implementation of free trade in which from 1983 to today the government destroyed all of this. In other words, the very problem the government proposes to solve today is a crisis which, together with greedy unions and moronic managements, it manufactured itself.

Because free trade destroyed these jobs, this legacy and this heirloom the government became both arsonist and fire department and the Obama demographic and the neocons lack both historical knowledge and experience of having lived not only through the era of US prosperity, but also its dismantling.

You cannot easily quantify this destructive revolution but you can go through the list and see that almost everyone of the manufacturing operations listed above no longer exist on US shores, let alone Indiana.

These manufacturers didn’t employ a few dozen as at McDonalds, or a few hundred as with a Wal-Mart, but each plant employed 2,000 or more people. And how important was it to Indiana? Even with the wanton destruction of this legacy with nothing to replace it, Indiana still has the highest percentage of workers employed in manufacturing of any US state.

Need further evidence of what was lost? Consider the last time you went job hunting. How many apps did you put in at the local foundry versus the number of apps you put in at the local Burger Doodle?

Health Care Deceit by Paul Craig Roberts

[Via http://terrygarrity.wordpress.com]