Letter: From the other side of the outsourcing debate 3103

Razor Face

Housing is in a bubble - has been. That bubble formed as a direct reaction to the dotcom bust. Farther back, not only is the land rent subsidized, but the financing and in come cases, construction and development.

This is not an example of market forces at work.

Energy is also hard to accept as being at its natural price. It's most likely subsidized by , frankly, military actions on the behalf of the regimes currently in power in the oil-bearing regions.

And health care is the queen of the subsidy industries, excluding education.

*All* this is due to subsidy. IN order to get real prices, we have to give up those subsidies, not add to them.

And this had not-at-all to do with production. It has much more to do with how we must adjust expectations as the economy becomes more complex.

As with rust belt in the '80s, the oil bust, all manner of bubbles, I think you are choosing the high water mark as typical, then complaining because the tide went out.

And yes - people are being hurt by this. But the die is cast, and I don't think that simply isolating America is the answer.

Well, he's clearly smart enough to restrict this particular measurement to things that meet a better definition of "market basket" - that aren't a subsidy queen. He doesn't need to measure *that* - other metrics do it better.

It took me a long time to explain to my wife that *inflation is an exponent* - the x% per year is cumulative. People *feel* that, and it scares them.

And people lived in 900 square foot houses, owned at most one car, ate cabbage more often than not, and made do with a radio.

But this was not a typical period. Again, we're cherry-picking our database if we want to restrict to that period. The U.S. had the only standing industrial infrastructure. And subsidy crept in in the absence of any compebreastion. We're largely *paying* for that - Blue Cross was a direct perk under wage freezes that arguably started the out of control spiral in health care costs.

I don't know of any argument which claims we can expect to revisit those conditions, nor even any who suggest that we should.

Go find Loretta Lynn's "Little Red Shoes" "song" ( it's really spoken word ) and find out good the good ole days were. It's on he "VanLear Rose album". She damn near died from being turned away by hospitals with a serious blow to the head. Granted, this is in the 1930s ( I think? ) but things like this are so many orders of magnitude better now... that was *typical*.

You seem to think us Murkins are uncompebreastive, and deserve to be protected. I don't think that's the case. I think we should be compebreastive, and I don't know why we shouldn't be.

-- Les Cargill