|
Faileocon Files: Is Paul Craig Roberts Developing Alzheimers?
by "Maguire"
7 April 2005
http://www.vdare.com/roberts/050404_drought.htm
Faileocon File: Is Paul Craig Roberts Developing Alzheimers?
A widely accepted major sympton of Alzheimers is short-term memory loss. The victim is able to recall random details of his life from decades ago but cannot remember what happened five minutes previously. A related symptom of Alzheimers is the sufferer's inability to process and learn from experiential data, especially if these data conflict with preconceived beliefs. It is also now known that Alzheimer's is a chronic disease whose onset occurs years and even decades before the grosser symptoms become apparent. These grosser symptoms appear to be themes running through all of Mr. Robert's recent economic writings.
The only American industries whose outsourcing and offshoring demise Mr. Roberts consistently bewails today are the software and related so-called knowledge industries. I believe we can trace the source of this fixation to an earlier period in Mr. Roberts' life. Back in the early 1980s Paul Craig Roberts was the Assistant Treasury Secretary for Economic Policy under Donald Regan (of the Merrill Lynch labor arbitrage firm) and Ronald Reagan (an aged former acting employee of the Jewish producers of Hollywood). Prior to this appointment he was a Republican Congressional aide. Throughout that era Mr. Roberts was a key first-generation cheerleader for what was claimed to be a new 'Post-Industrial Information Economy' for America. The proponents claimed this New Economy would be far superior to the one it replaced.
Within the economic theory of both Reaganomics ('supply side') and Reganomics (labor arbitrage by means of stock exchange jobbery), the offshoring and outsourcing of basic energy and metallurgy industries was stated to be either unimportant or even benefical. It was claimed that silicon chips and manipulating electronic impulses and phosphor dots on screens in air-conditioned offices would both save Americans from the need to sweat and provide lifetime economic security at a higher material level than industrial work. Long-established sectors were derided as 'smoke stack' and 'rust belt' industries.* Their decline was either ignored or accelerated by the Acting President and his Administration.
The Assistant Secretary for Economic Policy therefore ignored the ongoing collapses in basic iron and steel, as well as secondary effects on industries downstream. He also ignored the sudden collapse of the relatively small but crucial American machine-tool sector, which event took place on his watch. (The metallurgical and machine-tool sectors have the same relationship to broader manufacturing that gasoline and spark plugs have to internal combustion engines.)
In this earlier incarnation as a first-generation cheerleader for outsourcing, Mr. Roberts apparently even applauded the outsourcing of America-developed Computer Numerically Controlled machine-tool technology to the Japanese at the same time American machine-tool manufacturers were contracting sharply. Certainly Mr Roberts, the Treasury Secretary from Merrill Lynch, and the Acting President from Hollywood were content to largely base their own military buildup on imported machine tools. In retrospect this slumbering somnolence at the application of computers and knowledge to machine tools and manufacturing appears obviously contradictory.
The Assistant Secretary even ignored the almost instantaneous 1980s appearance of imported-steel components such as cases and power supplies in the same computer industry on which he claimed America's future rested. Even this did not shake the faith of the 1980s cheerleaders for the now outsourced Post-Industrial Knowledge Economy. The Reaganomicists apparently expected that Orientals could never learn how to program computers. Looking back we can see this expectation was as idiotic as thinking an Oriental auto-industry worker could never learn how to drive a car.
Reaganomics was certainly a new response to a familiar problem previously overcome by many generations of white Americans, ever since the European immigration of the 1600s. This recurring problem was how to renovate and modernize existing industries whose continued need was not disputed. A fairly modern example of this white American problem-solving process occurred in iron-ore mining and iron-ore and steel refining in the early 1950s (Note for diagnosticians: during Mr. Roberts' early adulthood).
Iron ore has various percentages of iron content. The highest iron-content ores are called Hematite and can range up to 60% iron content. The lower percentage ores are called Taconite and range to as low as 20% iron content. For many generations Taconite ores were deemed less valuable than Hematite and even economically useless. In the early 1950s, America's natural store of Hematite in its Upper Great Lakes iron-ore ranges was determined to be exhausted. A state of crisis was widely publicized and was even claimed in the newspapers to mark the end of industrial manufacturing in America.
The white engineers and technologists of the era were undaunted. After a short period they developed a new mining process based on crushing, washing and concentrating lower-grade Taconite ores into higher iron-content Taconite pellets. This new process not only saved the American steel industry, it saved both energy and labor compared to all earlier processes using higher-grade ores. It is so successful that even Hematite ores mined on other continents today are subjected to pelletizing.
Out of concern for Mr. Roberts' personal welfare, I think it is vital the above should be carefully considered by his current medical advisors in their evaluations. Earlier experiences in his life were clearly being forgotten as far back as the early 1980s. Twenty five years later in 2005, Mr. Roberts is only able to recall one or two details of the economic environment he celebrated in the 1980s.
"Maguire"
Note: It is now clear the Democratic leaders of the late 1970s and early 1980s had a clearer vision for America's basic industries than the NeoKahn Reaganuts. Unfortunately they coupled that sounder vision with an anti-white racial hatred so malignant that the overwhelming majority of the white managers, engineers and skilled workers in those industries refused to give them a hearing.
|