Tag: Industry

We Don’t Need An Industrial Policy

Election time and we hear a lot about our industries….how they have been taken away or that we need a policy of industrialization to replace our missing ones….have you heard these campaign slogans lately?

we have lots of ideological in-fighting….this side trumps (no pun intended) this side….but let us say we do get an industrial policy….is that not a type of ideological action?

“[Mariana] Mazzucato is as ideological a thinker as anybody else. In her ‘The Entrepreneurial State,’ she says, very clearly, that she sees herself as engaged in a ‘discursive battle’ against those who want to reduce government spending by claiming its inefficiency. There is nothing necessarily wrong with that: strong disagreements, and passion, are what make the world of ideas engaging. But in this last FT piece, she claims with some nonchalance that ‘the argument ought not to be about whether the state should not be involved in driving growth but how it can do this in the best way’ and subsequently, ‘we do not need false or ideological choices between market and state.’ Ok, so, if you want to let the price system work to try to solve problems whose solutions is still unknown to us, you’re an ideologue. If you want a club of enlightened bureaucrats to step in, you’re not.” (08/12/16)

http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2016/08/isnt_industrial.html

The question is now…..with the end of this election will there be any change in our industrial policies?  Or is it just wishful thinking?

American Civil War And Egypt

Have you ever experienced those Egyptian cotton sheets?

If not then you have missed an amazing experience.

Why I bring up this subject will be apparent very shortly.

The weekend begins and I will step away from the news and the insanity these and enjoy some time with family……as most of my readers know I am a geek when it comes to history…..for if you ignore history then you are dooming yourself to mediocrity….

Over the next four years, roughly 700,000 Americans were killed, and millions of others were injured or made destitute. The south was reduced to a weakened state ravaged by war and no longer able to thrive on the free labor provided by the pernicious institution of slavery.

But for a number of fledgling countries and colonies across the world, America’s loss was their great gain. As northern warships blockaded southern ports, closing them off to commercial shipping, the cotton plantations of the Confederacy struggled to export their ‘white gold.’ With the great textile mills of England now deprived of the lifeblood of their industry, 80 percent of which had previously come from the U.S, the price of cotton very soon went through the roof. Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, birthed in Britain, the United States and its former antagonist and overlord  had symbiotically thrived on the massive revenues from the cotton trade, a titan of commerce reliant on the lives of the American South’s enslaved population. Now, the Civil War imperilled everything for the moneymakers on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.

Source: How the American Civil War Built Egypt’s Vaunted Cotton Industry and Changed the Country Forever | History | Smithsonian

Now with your history lesson in tact please spend some time enjoy yourself and get some rest…..