> As someone whose community was destroyed by Thatcher I feel the quote
> attributed to Bette Davis is appropriate.."One should speak good of the dead.
> She's dead. Good!" Elvis Costello's Spike is playing as I type this.
Not judging, only asking: Is it possibly that the "community" in
question would have died eventually anyway?
We see that here. We prop up an industry in an effort to preserve a
few jobs or a community that has outlived its "best by date".
Throughout history, people migrated to where the food was. When the
food disappeared, the population needed to move to where it moved to
or to another source. Once we started building cities and made
ourselves no longer mobile, that's when the "unemployment rate" starts
to skyrocket.
Since we're talking about Gary, Indiana, this is a classic case in
point. People moved there because of job opportunities (food). One
those jobs dried up, the people would have, could have, and SHOULD
have, moved to where the new job opportunities exist. When the
population base no longer decides to be mobile, we end up with the
welfare and social issues we have now.
Here in Iowa, we've seen this happen on a very large scale. The rural
communities continue to shrink and even disappear as the population
moves away or dies away. Mechanization of agriculture has allowed for
fewer people to manage a given amount of land and harvest. There is a
baseline we can't drop below, yet, because you still need people
driving grain carts and trucks, but even that is changing with farmers
putting in their own storage bins at or near the fields to allow for
delayed transport/sale of the grains. So, instead of a massive
unemployment rate in our farming communities, people are just not
staying there. No need to. WHY would they?
By extension, why would I stay in a city where no opportunity exists.
"Oh, my family is here, I could never move." BS. Take your welfare and
food stamps away and see how quickly you'll pack your minivan and head
for North Dakota. You don't like your cousins and moocher siblings
enough to starve yourself.
Ms. Thatcher was an interesting character. She did a lot right. She
also did a lot wrong. I do believe that history will treat her in a
positive light as much of the negatives that happened under her watch
were eventually going to happen anyway. A whole lot of ugly has
happened since then too. She had bigger giblets than any PM I'm
familiar with.
--
Ken Norton
ken@xxxxxxxxxxx
http://www.zone-10.com
--
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