How Can American Manufacturing Compete?

America has never been a low cost country in terms of wages.  We were very successful in manufacturing though.  How can this be?  There were numerous reasons:

• Americans are very innovative.  More innovations have originated in the USA than probably the rest of the world combined.
• Our free market economy has allowed many, many entrepreneurs to start companies and make excellent profits.  This high return on investment attracted a lot of venture capital and provided significant incentive to the entrepreneurs to take the big risk of starting their businesses.
• There was a time when American products were considered to be of very high quality.  That includes excellent, innovative design and superb manufacturing quality.  In fact, the quality techniques that the Japanese are known for today came from an American, W. Edwards Deming.
• American workers had the highest productivity in the world.  This was possible because of innovative manufacturing techniques.  This included things like specialization, automation, and computers.
• The USA is flush with all types of natural resources.  This includes various minerals and metals.  There is also plenty of fertile land to produce plentiful, low cost foods, trees for paper or lumber, cotton, and more.  Of course, we have plenty of energy -- oil, natural gas, coal, water power.

The low cost of natural resources and energy and the high productivity offset the above average wages.  This allowed our manufacturing to pay higher wages and still compete.  So what happened?

There have been a number of things that I attribute to the MessAPolitico that have led to this problem:

• People that don't work hard in school and don't go to technical school or college get rewarded with minimum wage levels or more likely welfare, earned income tax credits, aid to families with dependent children (AFDC), food stamps, government housing, medicaid, etc.  Why become a productive member of society?  Minimum wage levels dictated by the government essentially make anyone whose skills are worth less than that level unemployable.  They then become permanent wards of the state.  That creates a huge level of government entitlement spending that requires high taxation.  These people are also unproductive.
• The entrepreneurs that brought all the innovations to the American marketplace are roundly vilified by the liberal politicians today.  Even the conservative politicians are afraid to say anything good about these entrepreneurs.  The successful used to be envied, but today they are ridden out of town on a rail.  They're either greedy or don't pay their fair share of taxes or are guilty of some other horrible evil.  They also don't bother to innovate or start businesses anymore.
• The boneheads in our government have decided unilaterally that we shouldn't use our natural resources.  We can't drill for oil here or there or anywhere.  We can't build any new refineries even if we did get the oil out of the ground.  We don't want to use fracking to get natural gas or oil because, well, that might cause some sort of vague ecological problem to drinking water or something (even though fracking has been around for a long time and there has never been any evidence that it causes any such problems).  All this stuff drives the price of energy through the roof, because the supply has been limited.
• The EPA acts like another legislative branch of the government.  They just arbitrarily issue regulations that work like laws.  They force the electric power utilities to shut down certain coal fired power plants based on some arbitrarily determined limits of kW-Hrs/ton of carbon dioxide.  How was this limit determined?  Well a certain number of power plants had to be shut down to drive the price of electricity high enough to make all that alternative energy profitable.  Is this really necessary?  No.  Not unless you're trying to appease a bunch of "tree huggers."  (Why doesn't the opposition take this to the supreme court?  How can an agency like the EPA legally create regulations that amount to laws.  This is unconstitutional!

So we need to end this MessAPolitico today!  The manufacturing segment of our economy is essential to our prosperity.  It will be lost if this MessAPolitico is allowed to go on!