This post is going to be full of half-baked assertions. I won’t be linking to many articles. There will be no charts, etc.
Take a look at this:
The part of the house were there are the five windows and the door with the concrete in front of it used to be a little neighborhood grocery store. I would walk or ride my bike there (we lived two blocks away) when I was in 4th grade to get things like milk or eggs. The family that owned the store lived in the house that is attached and hidden behind the tree.
Yes… other parents would send their 4th graders there to get cigarettes. They were, of course, awful parents and all those children are now in prison.
It is located in this neighborhood:
In our rush for more efficiency and lower prices we have driven these little businesses from our neighborhoods. Zoning has knocked them out. NIMBYism has knocked them out. Wall Street has knocked them out. They are gone. There is nothing like this in my part of Dallas. There never was, as this part of town wasn’t built until the 70’s. Any part of Dallas that had this sort of thing (lower Greenville Ave.) now has problems between the commercial operators and the residential owners.
It’s probably different on the other side of the river, but everything is different on the other side of the river. Including code enforcement.
I often think about how our drive for efficiency. Wall Street can’t fit that little grocery stores financial needs into one of their pre-package loan programs. And, since banks are now lend and sell, and not lend and hold, there is no longer any banker that has the ability to understand the financial needs of that little grocery.
These changes have driven commerce and the good examples the owners of businesses set for others from the neighborhoods.
In their place we have the soulless big box stores that offer us all the wonderfully cheap goods made in China, Vietnam, Pakistan and Bangladesh.
I don’t think it was a good trade.
You will keep hearing economists talk about comparative advantage. That free trade works because comparative advantage. I think that is correct. In some cases, anyway. But what I really think is that comparative advantage works best on a level playing field. If the foreign countries that corporations moved their production to had similar regulatory environments then comparative advantage would come into play.But what has really happened is that corporations moved their production offshore to avoid U.S. regulation and to also not have to pay U.S. level wages.
Again, not a good trade.
And then… And then… we get to an event like the Wuhan Flu. And we see an even more important reason to keep things at home. Our sanitary regulations are a lot better. Our public health regime is better.
I’d wager a bunch of Italy’s problem are Chinese nationals that are essentially slave laborers in the garment factories of Northern Italy. We are getting no information about the people suffering in Italy.
I really have been thinking about this and related issues for a long time. I guess becoming an old man will do that to you.
More later. Meanwhile, back to Wuhan Flu all the time…
