This thread has gone in many directions.I want to address the basic issue -why can't we produce things in this country?There is no more basic reason than IT COSTS TOO MUCH ----IE INFLATION.I was in Zimbabwe in 2008.I came home with 300,000,000,000 Zimbabwe dollars in my pocket--yes 300 billion.Nobody could produce anything---all the stores were empty all gas stations -empty.The union guy wants more money because he sees his costs rising.Don't you?
Rudyard Kipling put it very well in his wonderful poem "The Gods Of The Copybook Headings"
http://www.kipling.org.uk/poems_copybook.htm
" But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "If you don't work you die."
He wrote this in 1919,six years after Wilson signed the fed into law.He understood where we are going far better than most of us do now.China has the same damned straight from the communist manifesto central bank that we do!!!!The federal reserve.Marx stated in the communist manifesto and elaborated in "Das Capital " in `1867 that the monopoly central bank was the most important factor in destroying a Christian capitalist country.So blame unions, the NRA or any one you want,but as long as the fed can print a trillion in a nanosecond out of thin air they will buy your politicians and enslave you and your children to pay it back and production will continue to leave this country.The media ,which they own, will of course blame China and people with turbans on their heads ,never the true criminals. By the way, read the poem---what wonderful insight.
I am not particularly prounion.I can remember spending the night on a job sight with a gun as a teenager to keep the unions from putting sugar in my dad's machinery .We could lay a pipeline for $.50 a foot and make a profit.Try that now.