Smith echoes some of the essential themes of my blog: how the financialization of the economy has hampered the productive side of the economy, the backbone of the wellbeing of a society.
From Of Two Minds:
The Status Quo heavily rewards financialized profiteering and resource extraction while penalizing productive capital investments in manufacturing.
There is so much ideological, quasi-religious fanaticism around "free trade" (there is no such thing as "free trade," there are only various permutations of managed trade) and "industrial policy" (every nation has one, explicit or implicit) that it is difficult to make any sense of the many intertwined issues.
Ideological purity is not a substitute for knowledge, any more than a superficial admiration of machines equals actually knowing how to assemble, maintain and repair them.
As a background context, we might start by noting that Marx outlined how finance capital comes to dominate industrial capital, as industry comes to depend on the credit extended by the banks/finance capital.
The key takeaway: if you don't control the banks, then they will end up dominating industrial capital. In the U.S., we have the worst of both worlds: a dominant financial Elite and various cartels (military-industrial, sickcare, agribusiness, etc.) that have captured what little of the Central State that isn't already beholden to financial capital.
As I repeatedly point out, Apple, Google, Facebook and Twitter together have relatively few domestic employees. As production is overseas, then that's where the design jobs go, too, eventually.
You have to understand the entire value chain, not just the assembly costs.
http://www.oftwominds.com/blogjune11/manufacturing-finance6-11.html
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