Excellent op ed piece from the city paper.
http://www.toledocitypaper.com/view_article.php?id=1797
Excerpt:
Retail and entertainment are nice, but they skim the cream from a functioning economy, they don’t drive one. Going to see the Walleye at the new arena or shopping for a boat at Bass Pro requires discretionary income, something fewer and fewer of us have. We need jobs that pay a middle class wage, not folks hawking popcorn or retail clerks ringing up camping equipment.We worry about the long-term viability of Jeep and PowertTrain as gas prices make Americans rethink their love affair with SUVs. Xunlight Corporation seems poised for a massive expansion in solar power, something accomplished completely with private investment after roots in University of Toledo R and D. Can we shed our dinosaurian history and move into the 21st Century as the new hub of renewable energy sources?...
...Our children hope so. Or else they’ll be forced to follow the stampede out of town....
IMO that pretty much sums things up nicely...
Surely you realize that the majority of people don't understand that a viable economy is based upon a core of manufacturing, and that manufacturing base itself has to concentrate on making capital equipment (i.e. the stuff that can be used to generate an income, and other stuff that creates more real wealth). They're so in love with tech and biotech and all the rest of that crap that they've let the baby slide into the drain along with all that nasty bath water from manufacturing.
We CAN live in a post-industrial world. But we'd have to go BACK to living like we did in the 17th Century. We'd EACH have to have land upon which we could raise our own food. That land would have to be exempt from taxation, since it would be very difficult to get a sustainable income to pay such taxes. The public networks would have to decay since there would be no tax base that would support it. Yeoman farmers and craftsmen would have to return to prominence. And that's what was sustainable, when you didn't have heavy industry.