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A Nation Of Truckers
Submitted by Jim Quinn via The Burning Platform blog,
Oh how the country has changed in the last 36 years. We were a nation of farmers, secretaries, and machine operators in 1978. The family farmer was still the backbone in the Northern Plains and Midwest. The internet didn’t exist, so letters needed to be typed, copies made, mail distributed, dictation taken, and coffee brewed. So every business was loaded with secretaries. The country still manufactured goods here in 1978. We sold them domestically and internationally. Globalization and NAFTA hadn’t become the buzz words of Ivy League educated MBA’s yet.

A look at the most common jobs today reveals how the country has changed. Corporations bought up most of the family farms and older farmers died off. Independent farmers are now a dying breed. The internet all but eliminated the need for secretaries. They became the buggy whip of the 21st Century. There is no need for machine operators when all the machines and manufacturing plants are located in China, Vietnam, and the rest of Southeast Asia. The Ivy League MBAs gutted American manufacturing and sent all the jobs to Asia, where they could produce the same products 80% cheaper and drive their corporate profits sky high, along with their own stock based compensation. So we are left with a nation of truck drivers transporting cheap Chinese produced crap to the millions of retail outlets, where the low wage slaves borrow to buy the crap. The American Dream achieved in 36 short years.

This is how you turn a nation of producers into a nation of consumers. And it couldn’t have been accomplished without the prodigious amounts of debt aided, abetted and distributed by the Federal Reserve and their Wall Street owners.
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print...oh.....four trillion + of clown bucks and slosh that around....it'll never add up...ever
I don't see 'burger flippers' or 'walmart greeters', geeze
The number of presuppositions the author expects you to accept before he advances his view is ridiculous. Its just confirmation bias doom bilge for those predisposed to readily accept it.
Is there a source by the author? I didn't see it.
I agree.
I'm under 35. I would never expect someone to compose an email for me and send it out. Make copies for me? Am I pressed for time? Set meetings for me? Answer my phone when some can just text me? No thank you. I just bring a very junior person in as a scribe and tell them to take notes and email them to the entire group.
I'm surprised nurse tech or orderly isn't on the map. But that's probably because they're called so many things.
Why on earth are the no goverment bureaucrats workers on that list? They outnumber every other profession by at least 2-3 to 1.
Because it says job which implies work and goobermint "folks" don't work.
Neither do the MSM and politicians
can be deceiving ---- depending how you define job categories, you could slice other categories into real thin slices, and keep "truckers" big at the same time....
by the same token, you can't compare diff years.
What the fuck are all these people school teachers for? They're just teaching the kids how to be obedient government slaves and ball lickers.
These kids of today have no future, except as debt slaves.
So where is that movie Smokey and The Bandit like 2015? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSs3_6TxgT4
Getting fed up with all those apocalyptic post-WWIII scenes.
I miss those days.
As a lunch wagon owner/operator .... I qualify as a cook and a truck driver ?
Part-time Sales Assistant.
Not buying any more crap, sorry, but that's it! Everyone who has kids and/or grandkids, hide them so they can't be drafted and can't volunteer. Let kids of TPTB/congress/presidents/politicians of all stripes/corporate officers and their boards/ and key people in universities do the dirty war work. Don't use credit cards and don't take on debt. Sit tight, let the storm pass by. Try to remember voting is about approval of the status quo.
What is the source of this data? I picked two random states labeled "Truck Driver" and checked BLS data. As of April 2014, retail salesperson was number one in both states. Trucker driver was third in one state and ninth in the other.
Speaking of vanishing jobs, I took a load of scrap aluminum from the ranch into town to get it recycled today. Good clean aluminum is down to .40 a pound and scrap iron and steel is down to ....
1 cent a pound, or $20 a ton.
That doesn't even pay the gas to haul it in, much less any labor cost.
My guess is that the steel industry in China is about as healthy as the US market in secretarial positions.
Everybody better be working on their lifeboats if they know what's good for them.
I guess that makes me a shipwright.
There was a time when most people here lived on farms, including me. We left because technology made us inefficient. We learned new skills and have better lives because of it.
Change like this was the key to achieving the modern world. People whining about it need to shut up and adjust like everyone else. It's the price of progress. You can't have your cake and eat it too.
Now that's quite the feat of central economic planning, or
is that just the unintended consequences of American desires?
The disappearance of 'Secretaries' is due primarily to technology changes.
The loss of 'Machine Operators' is due primarily to OFFSHORING. Those jobs still exist - in China and elsewhere. Those losses are far more ominous. Machine Operators are creating things - adding value and creating wealth. A nation gets rich by ADDING VALUE - mining ore, smelting metal, making metal into THINGS.... cutting down trees, making things out of the wood... growing wheat, milling it into flour...baking bread...
Truck drivers - while performing a needed function - are simply MOVING things - NOT adding value or creating wealth. There are MORE truck drivers because the US is now IMPORTING damn near anything that's manufactured - because it's all made elsewhere and has to be delivered somewhere after being offloaded in some port somewhere.
The US committed economic suicide with 'free trade' - all so corporations could increase profits. The problem is that once you've destroyed yiour country's job base, it doesn't matter how cheap things are. If you're not creating value you're not making money and can't afford to buy anything.
Some saw it coming:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PQrz8F0dBI
What's the difference in having foreign workers do the work more cheaply and in replacing workers with machines that do the work more cheaply?
As machine workers cause to happen.
Guess we should have throttled Edison for putting all those candlemakers out of work.
Those Chinese are really screwing us by selling us things cheaply.
Next you know the SOBs will be giving them to us free.
Then what are we going to do with all the money we save?
Investing it to make a better world with even better jobs?
Perish the thought. All those victims of modernization couldn't learn new skills, etc. like the rest of us have done. Poor things.
As per the comments, teachers were bottom of the list?
Plane drivers? Top marks for spelling plane.
I'm going to write a book about this thread.
Make about a dollar and change. But at least my grandchildren will know where we went wrong.
Lack of PROPER education. Starts with the parents. They need to care.
I always had the impression that most people here on ZH have the intellect of a truck driver.
Coming here is the digital version of visiting a shitty pub. :)
Hmmm...............we have a lot of truck drivers. These people make too much money. Not that technologically difficult to get plastic china garbage from point A to point B.
Robots to the rescue!!
People go for those 6 or 7 year auto loans and trade them in before they pay them off to pile on more debt.
Or more than likely a lease for 3 years which they never pay off or own their cars.
A nation of ever-more indebtedness own and controlled by the Wall Street banksters.
Where I live, the top occupations should be metal thief and heroin dealer.
10 years- A nation of drone pilots
Should have taken heed to Perot's words
It was Admiral Stockdale who threw us off course
I wonder what the American map will look like in 36 more years? Somehow, I suspect we will see a "blade runner" type of world. No matter what technological heights the human race scales, we just can't seem to tame the beast within.
The prosperity of our world is a consequence of production and TRADE. And truckers are crucial to trade, as railroads were in the past. They are its lifeblood.
Anyone who can't see something as simple as that has no business being in any kind of economics discussion.
And anyone who can't glean the proper context from the information in a paper doesn't belong in that conversation, either.
The author has not denigrated trucking, nor lessened it's importance or PRODUCTIVE worth. Indeed, TRUCKING ADDS VALUE, and is therefore PRODUCTIVE.
The point - which you seem intent on missing - is that MOVING THINGS is now THE MOST COMMON FORM OF PRODUCTIVITY, as opposed to MAKING THINGS.
Perhaps you should just sit in the back row and remain silent.
BTW, what is the difference between a producer and a consumer?
It's still just TRADE.
In which the "consumer" has to first produce something in order to have anything to trade.
The idea that consumption is the primary and production follows is inane.
In order to consume everyone has to first produce.
Which is one reason Keynes was a complete fool.
To "produce" means to add value, in this discussion. The mere act of making money - or ability to add to one's fiat stack - does NOT count as "production".
Often times it is vampirism...parasitism...cannibalism.
Get up to speed.
Keynes was not a "complete fool"...but Keynesians surely are. There IS a difference.
Here is another trucker with a MSc in Business Economics.
We're all CW McCall now....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sd5ZLJWQmss
"[Production, which earns money, often times] is vampirism...parasitism...cannibalism."
No it isn't. That's destruction, not production.
Read a little Aristotle or Ayn Rand and learn about statements that are self-contradictions. Get up to speed.
I have no problem with making a distinction between producing and stealing. But that distinction is not made by observing that we have become a nation of truckers (if so) and use money as a medium of exchange.
How about observing, for example, that everything the govt does outside its function of protecting individual rights is just wealth redistribution, stealing, and exploitation?
At least if you've got a sleeper-cab, you're not really homeless.
This is how you turn a nation of producers into a nation of consumers. And it couldn’t have been accomplished without the prodigious amounts of debt aided, abetted and distributed by the Federal Reserve and their Wall Street owners.
Everything that happens does so for efficiency ... people want more for less. For a little while you can force railroads to pull cabooses; you can force builders to use lath and plaster; you can force plumbers to use iron pipe with machined fittings; you can force shippers to use stevedores and pay uncompetitive prices and tariffs; you can force airlines to use flight engineers; ... etc. But like water, in time "efficiency" seeks its own level and nonsense is driven out.
In the 60's, before computers and dramatic communication improvements, clerical problems were solved with "an acre of tits" (didn't have much political correctness back then). Notice this article doesn't even mention "clerks" which were far more numerous than secretaries. Also notice, the essay doesn't mention "health care workers" today. Today, health care is an absolutely ridiculous part of the average total budget. Wait until a "properly running computer" and a "properly running auto" and a "properly running washing machine", etc. become "god given rights".
In time they will no longer be able to force us to accept and pay for government services.
The bigger question is, What will the map say in 2050 ? Given current trajectory, the top professions in each of the 50 states will be one of: 1.) Prostitute/Pimp 2.) Transient gambler 3.) Professional thug/gang member 4.) fast-food worker 5.) tattoo artist 6.) Lawyer/Politician 7.) Police operative 8.) Government operative 9.) Islamic cleric 10.) Farmer
They forgot three others: 1. Active military 2. Welfare recipient 3. backpage whore.