On his blog, Paul Soglin links to an Oscar Madison post about the Ford Motor Company layoffs. Oscar is the blog pseudonym of a UW Madison Law Professor and Soglin apparently found the thoughts to be insightful. The Professor writes with such a pure socialist understanding of the announcements I was going to carefully fisk it, yet each time I started, I stoped. The flaws within this piece of socialist reasoning simply are not worth wasting my time to enumerate them. It’s more amusing to just paraphrase the message.
Our beloved unionized and highly compensated labor has to suffer for the short sighted and profit motivated errors of the capitalist owners. Yet while our sympathy goes out to the workers, in the larger picture it is our fault for allowing a private Oil and Auto industry to have developed in America.Feel free to cut and paste to the source material.
In a prior century the railroads had the growth and political clout, enabling them to have their way with the economy of our country. Since "creative destruction" is inherent in capitalism, however, the railroads were doomed to be surpassed by other industries. This rise and fall of industries is not truly progress because the change has not been good for America. The Oil and Auto industry only achieved dominance over the railroads because of massive government subsidies to build roads. The roads in turn gave us residential sprawl across a polluted and destroyed environment, trapping workers into dependence on these private corporations.
All of America is now controlled by the corporate interests of Oil and Autos, and these profiteers require the continual violence of war to maintain their dominate role in our society. Oil and Autos will eventually fail, but not before the suffering and damage is widespread both within our country and across the world.
http://thecolumnistmanifesto.blogspot.com/2006/01/dinosaur-bones.html
http://www.waxingamerica.com/2006/01/petroleum_cultu.html
