Were we thinking at all?

Is it possible that we simply weren't paying attention? The Gross National Product has gone up, with only rare exceptions, since the concept was created. Did we simply assume it always would? Did we assume that we could always create new jobs for an ever-increasing population? Would American ingenuity forever create new industries which would increase GDP and and available jobs?

Congress catches a lot of flak, and rightfully so, for focusing on the short term only. Most of us were taught since childhood to look to the future. Get good grades now so you can get into a good college and then get a good job. But while we preach the concept of looking forward, did we simply refuse to question where the future would end up? Did we really assume everything would simply continue to improve, with no boundaries or endgame?

At the same time, did we just blindly believe what the vast majority of economists have said for years? Free trade is the concept I'm looking at. Even back in the dark ages when I took Econ, free trade was a mantra. Free trade and supply and demand are the two biggest concepts I remember, and in most cases I've glanced at, it looked to me like they worked. Perhaps we simply didn't look ahead, again, to what limits there might be.

For decades, efficiency has been a major target for businesses, anything to wring another nickel out of their costs. For just as long, labor costs have been increasing so why were we surprised when jobs were shipped overseas? Even more insightfully, why didn't we see it coming? More importantly, why are we not now looking to what's coming next?

If free trade and supply and demand were valid economic laws, eventually every carpenter in the world will earn the same as every other, as will every doctor, every engineer and every ditch digger (and won't that please every worker in this country!). Well, that might be true if it were not for other factors, externalities I think they call them. Politics is the big one, and no country will ever be free of that one.

At the moment it appears that in the future, this country will have a few high paying jobs - true professions, highly trained technical people, and politicians and their sycophants - and a lot of low paying ones. What we've lost are all those in-between jobs, the ones most of the middle class depended on. But we all see that now. We've got to learn to determine what questions should be asked. But since I'm just an old gray redneck, I'm not smart enough to know what they should be.

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