Atlas' shoulders are itching

The transportation department is now jumping into the Toyota recall fray, demanding documents to investigate regarding whether Toyota moved swiftly enough to enact the recall.

The Transportation Department demanded documents related to Toyota's massive recalls in the United States on Tuesday to find out if the automaker acted swiftly enough. Toyota, meanwhile, said it will idle production temporarily at Texas and Kentucky plants over concerns the recalls could lead to big stockpiles of unsold vehicles.

Atlas Shrugged is by no means an upstanding work of literature, but it is certainly an insightful one. One of the central issues of the plot involves an American government punishing successful companies by handicapping them against other companies (to make it "fair"), and enforcing industry-wide socialist subsidies to "promote" business. The result, of course, is that the successful companies are slowly and inexorably driven into the ground, trying to drag the burden of a massively unproductive sector with them. Ultimately the economy goes into an endless depression, with no real producers left.

While Toyota may not have acted as promptly as they should for the recall, one strongly suspects that the trouble they are in is not at all due to their procedure for the recall, and very much due to their success at the expense of American car companies. Toyota rose to the top by the choices of the consumer; now it appears suspiciously like the government is attempting to knock them down a peg to support our own failing domestic industry. And that failure is due to very specific, preventable problems. Yet what we see is nothing like an attempt to solve those problems, but instead an attempt to tear down their opponents, to "level the playing field".
The similarity to the situation described in Atlas Shrugged is troubling, to say the least.

Yet what we see here par for the course lately. Our government is actively engaged in propping up failed enterprises with good money. If not stopped, this can do nothing other than utterly erode our economic foundations and ultimately lead to the collapse of our currency, economy, and national stability.

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The "Post-Industrial" Economy - Eating Raccoon

An interesting sign of the times. The collapse of Detroit is apparently ongoing, the city having lost half its population. Wildlife are roaming the streets, and a canny blues guitarist is cooking up some barbecued raccoon.

While economic times are tough across Michigan as its people slog through a difficult and protracted deindustrialization, Beasley remains upbeat.

Where one man sees a vacant lot, Beasley sees a buffet.

"Starvation is cheap," he says as he prepares an afternoon lunch of barbecue coon and red pop at his west side home.

It's a fascinating story, and Beasley has some wisdom to share. The video is worth a viewing for his sake, though the host is annoying to the point of physical pain. Leaving aside the issue of raccoon hunting, however, my focus was immediately grabbed by the following portion of the article:

Hunting is prohibited within Detroit city limits and Beasley insists he does not do so. Still, he says that life in the city has gone so retrograde that he could easily feed himself with the wildlife in his backyard, which abuts an old cement factory.

He procures the coons with the help of the hound dogs who chase the animal up a tree, where Beasley harvests them with a .22 caliber rifle. A true outdoorsman, Beasley refuses to disclose his hunting grounds.

"This city is going back to the wild," he says. "That's bad for people but that's good for me. I can catch wild rabbit and pheasant and coon in my backyard."

Detroit was once home to nearly 2 million people but has shrunk to a population of perhaps less than 900,000. It is estimated that a city the size of San Francisco could fit neatly within its empty lots. As nature abhors a vacuum, wildlife has moved in.

A beaver was spotted recently in the Detroit River. Wild fox skulk the 15th hole at the Palmer Park golf course. There is bald eagle, hawk and falcon that roam the city skies. Wild Turkeys roam the grasses. A coyote was snared two years ago roaming the Federal Court House downtown. And Beasley keeps a gaze of skinned coon in the freezer.

So this is the future? Correction: This is the present. Yes, this is really happening to what was formerly a booming industrial metropolis, and important American city. Right now.

America is stifled by labor unions, sending our factories overseas, and not replacing them with anything. The workers don't suddenly become skilled service-based or high-tech producers, they just fade into whatever jobs are available. And the cities carved decades or centuries ago out of the wilderness begin to return. Meanwhile, out-of-touch politicians contrive "green economy" schemes in which shackling industry and business with oppressive environmental legislation is somehow supposed to produce more money magically. Perhaps the raccoons are going to subsidize them.

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