#198. Political Season Follow-up

As promised, we are including some of the responses we received to our Agurban last week on the political season.

** Love your insight. I agree.

As the world shudders and shakes into a more stable foundation, the bigger rocks that took up too much space will be cracked and broken and made smaller. The gravel of entrepreneurial enterprise is a very stable foundation for vertical development. It can better take movement and accommodate different economic topologies. There is also better vibration connectivity between gravel, lots of smaller stones touching, that big heavy boulders … BUT … as foundations shift and shove and heave and finally breathe, a new archi-economical or economitectural language will emerge. Value is going to remain a perceived thing but it will be labeled digitally and digits can be sold, traded and saved.

The grey market and perhaps even shadows of the black market will find their way into the mainstream. Trading “value” digitally, will allow commerce to transact without governmental infraction/intrusion. Entrepreneurs will always find a way to move product, create value and perpetuate commerce.

What’s encouraging is that more and more entrepreneurs sense and see the value in sustainable commerce, “making green with green”. Greed, if not being replaced by, is perhaps tempered by, a growing social consciousness. This alone gives me hope.

** Reader: What verifiable evidence do you have to back up any of these statements noted below from your article? Having been concurrently in economic development and the energy industry for over 20 years, I have seen countless towns “dry up” when their value-creation jobs went somewhere else to “raise other boats”. The remaining workforce was left with virtually no way to make a sustainable living. So what is the cost to our citizens, our communities, and our country until they benefit what you state will happen in the “long term”? And we have plenty of citizens to teach to be entrepreneurs before we go outside our borders to help others.

Jack’s response – Thanks very much for your comments on our recent Agurban. I understand your perspective but have studied both the data of our economy’s growth and see numerous examples of communities that are thriving with the changes that have occurred in world trade. While it is often difficult to make the transition (capitalism is usually messy!) the end results of better paying and more numerous jobs is the end result.

As to data, I think that you can look at the amazing growth that we’ve had in GDP since Ross Perot’s famous “giant sucking sound to Mexico” quote in the early 90s. You can also see it in the dramatic increase in exports, many from very rural states in the past couple of years.

I agree with you that we have the potential for many more entrepreneurs in this county, but if those new entrepreneurs can export their goods around the world we all gain.

Reader: Thanks for the response, but I respectfully disagree. Supporting growth in other countries while abandoning our own communities to try to then survive on their own is not good economic policy. And how much of the GDP growth was created by unsustainable debt? And where is this “GDP wealth” now concentrated?

There should at least be a balancing of free world economics versus destroying the fabric of towns and families with providing some sort of “soft landing” under a transition. This growth export has also caused tremendous cost increases in many of the commodities and materials needed in the U.S., so that downside of growth elsewhere needs to be factored in as well. Power plant construction alone has gone up 50% and more over the past two years.

And as to exports, it is my understanding that there is now a container shortage in the U.S. due to reduced imports. Hopefully, we will “remigrate” many of these jobs back to rural America. And our addiction to oil and debt need to be addressed if we are to make it as a world leader. Otherwise, we may be on our way to the same obscurity as the British Empire.

** I like your thoughts on the crisis we are now facing. My thought is that when we, Americans, start to “get it”, that we are the most resourceful people in the world and are able to provide so much for the entire world, when we “get it” that we can dig ourselves out of this mess without turning ourselves into a socialist society, we will get past this and be even better. We will learn from the past and make sure we don’t make the same mistakes again. I realize our government needs to step up and help us get past this but I only hope we stop making knee-jerk decisions and make sure the fix is long-term and well thought out with safety provisions so our government can get out at the right time and we don’t allow for a few greedy people to make decisions that lead us down this path again.

** Hallelujia! Someone that sees the Big picture! Yes, thank you for your insights. At this point I am getting more interested in Alan Keyes. Some tell me this would be a lost vote. What do you think?

** Not sure I agree with that . John F. Kennedy was wrong, a rising tide lifts all boats is NOT correct. While the tide was rising in 2004 through 2007 it did not raise all boats. Some boats sank while others became ocean liners!!! Just look at the financial crisis we are in today and ask yourself, who made out and who lost. Corporations support foreign trade and the elimination of trade barriers. What resulted was that the presidents of our large companies received rather large bonuses while the working man or women lost their job to folks overseas.

The big question I do not have an answer for is, “can the rest of the world live the life style of most Americans”. I truly doubt it. I am not even sure we have enough natural resources to support that. Understand the rest of the world is aspiring to the American life style.

** If you get the moral character of a leader right and he can humbly assemble a good team around him you’ll have a winner. You have to know the good and the bad about someone and their voting record, not just their “big talk” and sometimes that means you have to bring up the negatives; that’s truth and reality. I just wish someone would say “I don’t have all the answers on the economy, but I am going to assemble a great team of advisors who understands these issues better than I do and listen to what they have to say and try to do the best thing.” That’s reality because the candidates are not economic experts. I also am totally disgusted in network TV’s lopsided “coverage” and failure to bring to the public various issues and concerns that have been raised and are TRUE – verifiable! Whatever happened to truly “investigative” reporting? CBS, NBC, ABC, and even to a lesser extent PBS are continuing to let the public down with their coverage of the campaigns. There you go for a response to this week’s Agurban. I’m no economic expert either but values/ethics and honesty are the basis by which you judge a man (or woman).

** If you don’t know by now which one gets it you haven’t been paying attention.