The actor told the chamber how society used to let children go out an play, explore, try things, fix things. At some point, society devalued self-directed play and pushing vocational work.
"There was a time when self-esteem was not bestowed on you by just showing up, you actually had to doing something."
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“You can imagine Tip O’Neill fixing his roof. Now imagine Nancy Pelosi doing the same thing. That’s not going to happen,” he said, to laughter. “So is it a surprise they don’t care about manufacturing going overseas? They don’t understand the strength of it.”
He talked about the sense of entitlement that he thinks younger generations have today. A CEO friend of his hired a man two years out of college and had to fire him three days later, said Ratzenberger. The employee wasn’t a team player and wanted an office with a window. On the fourth day, the former employee showed up with his mother, Ratzenberger claimed, demanding an apology to assuage her son’s self-esteem.
I would suggest that manufacturing can be competitive in the United States, but it takes a number of steps that many politicians are fearful of taking:
- Emphasize non-renewable energy. Cheap electricity is necessary for manufacturing.
- Emphasize capital. Capital makes workers productive through automation, robotics, and advanced tools and machines. This is anathema to the Occupy Wall Street folks.
- Emphasize scaling back strict environmental regulations.
- Emphasize scaling back unions, especially in the public sector, where even FDR felt public unions would be bad for the country.
- Emphasize scaling back taxes on business.
- Emphasize vocational education, not just in high school, but throughout one's life.
It should be no surprise that states that have high taxes, strong union work rules, large state and local government employment, and burdensome regulations (environmental, health, and work) will loose manufacturing jobs. Easy prediction: California will loose more and more jobs as environmental regulations get more burdensome, energy costs rise, and taxes rise. Therefore, captial (money, entrepreneurs, and skilled labor) will move elsewhere.
