Manufacturing, the panacea for the unskilled masses?
I just read a great blog post called Manufacturing Fallacy Debunked . It echoes many of the things I have said in the past... that the creation of that $58 Blue-Ray DVD player is a minor part of the value accumulated by the time you plunk down your hard earned cash swipe your credit card with your unemployment earnings. The process involves licensing on the parts and intellectual property (assuming that the Chinese actually pay for IP), shipping, off-loading, customs, trucking to warehouse, warehousing, re-trucking to retail store, stocking the shelf, cashiering and then clearing the money for the transaction. All of these things are profit centers that fuel HUGE amounts of additional money and jobs. PLUS, don't forget the actual profit that goes to Wal-Mart's or Target's stockholders and the state/local sales tax. I still laugh at the term "good manufacturing jobs". No one wanted to work in these jobs. Parents forced two generations of children to get a bett...