I heard this on Rush Limbaugh yesterday, cut and pasted from his transcript.. it's that good:
There are so many reasons why this began to change. It's not just due to trade deals, they are a factor, there's no question they are. But it's not just due to that. You can't talk about this without discussing the voluminous, punitive regulations that are on businesses from the federal government to the state government to local governments, sometimes as much as 25% or more of the cost of a product is nothing more than regulations, environmental and otherwise, that have been slapped on corporations and business practices that are not even with the force of law. They've just come from out of control regulatory agencies.
There's another factor that you have to consider when talking about this, and that is unions and how they price themselves. And when you start talking about unions, you then talk about something that is really key and fundamental to this, and that is profit. And profit is the result of being able to sell something for more than the total cost in manufacturing it, distributing it, marketing it, advertising it, you name it. If you can't turn a profit on it, then you will not stay in business. Not in the kind of economy we have. Not in a country like this. In fact, you can't do it anywhere. You can't prop up non-profitable businesses. Venezuela tried.
When you talk about unions and when you talk about regulation and when you talk about profit, there is one key ingredient here that you cannot ignore, and that is the retail price of whatever product that we're talking about here. And that price, for whatever product we're talking about here, has to be something that people can afford. This is what's gone wrong with health care. Then there is crony capitalism, the kind that government props up for no good reason other than politics. That's why we have Obamacare.
Profit, the ability of your customer base to pay for it, to afford it, your ability to market and advertise and distribute. Then you've got your competitors who are all not in America and whose costs for the other things that you face may not be the same, they may be less.
This is why markets work/ Any time people trying to get in the middle of this and artificially tamper with markets to make them more fair, you end up screwing up everything. If people would just leave 'em alone, and I don't mean unregulated. Nobody's talking about being unreasonable here. But we live in a country where the Democrat Party has succeeded in generation after generation believing that corporations and companies and people that make things are the enemy of average Americans.
They will claim that corporations want to kill their customers, they want to poison their customers. Corporations want dirty air, they want dirty water. They want cars and trucks that explode while their customers are driving them. They want their customers to get cancer from bad drugs. It's obscene what the Democrat Party has done. The Democrat Party has successfully, to their benefit, created this relationship where your average American Democrat voter thinks that everything in the commercial marketplace is his enemy.
That's how the Democrats get to control them, that's how the Democrats get to regulate them because they get public support. That's how the Democrats get away with running around punishing all these different companies. Take your pick of whichever company you're talking about. It's not as simple, in other words, as going to Ford or Carrier and saying, even pleading with them. I mean, you could strong-arm 'em, you can try to persuade them, you can beg them, "Please, for the good of America, please stay here." And they will tell you, "We've tried. We've tried." And then they will tell you all the reasons why they cannot manufacture in America at a price that will allow them to stay in business.
The consumer will hear that and think they're being lied to and think the corporation wants to soak 'em and wants to cheat them 'cause that's what the Democrat Party has for a hundred years succeeded in making the average American think of the average American business, large or small. The average American business does not exist to provide employment for a community. It does not exist to provide health care for its employees.
That's not the purpose of a business. It's not the purpose of a company. It's not to support charitable endeavors in the community. It's nothing of the sort. It's a very narrow list of requirements for a business to succeed and stay in business, and all the rest of that ends up being political attachments or PR attachments or goodwill attachments, and sometimes competitive attachments. Sometimes in a different market, where employees are tough to come by, companies have to compete by offering better benefits packages than other companies do. But if left alone, the market would take care of this.
But those days are long gone.
You see the surveys, Millennials now think socialism is the answer to everything. Capitalism is rotten, they hate it, 'cause that's what they've been taught. Millennials of this generation, 20 years ago the 30-year-olds of that generation thought the same thing, that capitalism sucks, it's unfair, and you know why? 'Cause there's winners and losers and this is not right. Yep, everybody should win or nobody should. It's not fair that some do better than others. It's not fair that some have more than others.
The reality is that 47% of Americans are so strapped that they could not come up with $400 without selling something.
This is a crime and liberals did it.
