The United States is #1?
Like most Americans I have grown up believing that the United States of America is the world leader in everything. Believing that our justice system is the best in the world. Believing that our health care system is the best in the world. Believing that our standard of living is the best in the world. Believing that our education system is the best in the world. Believing that the products we are buying are the best in the world because our free enterprise system “naturally” causes inferior products to be weeded out by superior products being offered in our free and open marketplace.
Unfortunately over and over again in recent years I have come to learn this is not the case in category after category. Most recently, and what brings this subject to mind today, I have learned while looking through a book showing what is available in the line of home appliances that we Americans once again are being sold inferior products by our mass retailers and American based manufacturers. We are simply not offered the best there is available and so we go on buying from the selection we are given thinking we are making the best choice of all the things that exist in the world. While in fact there are European home appliances that are far superior to the American products in terms of energy efficiency and water resource conservation.
Likewise our sunscreen products are inferior to European sunscreens according to a recent newspaper article by Joe Gradon of The People’s Pharmacy fame. While our government agencies are “we thought” looking out for our health, they are allowing known cancer producing ingredients to be used in American sunscreens. All the while for years the European sunscreen products have banned those potentially harmful ingredients and used other more effective ingredients in their place!
And, once again, while American politicians argue over how to fix our problems of sky rocketing health care costs making it unavailable to more and more people, we learn that several other countries provide better care for a lessor cost than Americans can obtain. Those who still have the benefit of employer provided health care may be coming to realize that health care costs are rapidly rising, but until they become one of those who have lost their link to an employer making it available to them they cannot know the full story of just how broken the American health care system has become. Being one of those who has lost that connection in recent years (due to two job losses related to out-sourcing and off-shoring of American jobs) I have become all too aware of the high cost trying to provide health care protection for myself and my family on my own.
The belief that “The United State is number one!” is just part of the “Great American Dream” that has become more Madison Avenue advertising and political hype than it is reality, I am sorry to say.
For too long we have rested on our laurels and allowed our leaders to fatten the pocketbooks of their “fat cat” friends as well as their own pockets. Meanwhile the working class has been allowed to slide into the lowered expectations of the “new world economy.” When we become part of the “world economy” and American workers (not just manufacturers and service providers) are forced to compete with those who do not have our former standard of living, we cannot expect but that the American worker’s standard of living will be driven down to that of the third world worker.
All of the benefits of the last 100 years which the American labor movement gained for the American worker are being lost. It is not just a problem with forgein manufacturers not being required to meet the same environmental standard as U.S. factories which gives them an unfair advantage when competing in the marketplace. But it includes the saftey standards, the higher standard of living for that worker, and the additional costs for those which the foreign manufacturer does not have to provide which makes it absolutely impossible for an American worker to compete in the “world economy.”
There is no “advanced technology” industry or job which the American worker can move into which cannot be done just as well by some foreign worker for less money. This is simply because those foreign workers are just average humans, just like the American worker. Given a little time they can be trained to do all the same things that the American worker can do … and they will do it for a lower pay scale because their standard of living is lower.
Until we insist that the playing field is leveled in terms of environmental, work safety, and standard of living for the worker, the life of the American worker will continue to worsen. And just because it hasn’t happened to you yet, don’t believe that it cannot and will not happen to you and/or to your children someday.
I know that all of this sounds depressing and gloomy. But unless we change the direction we are going, this is what the future holds. Maybe we need to start considering and adopting some radical changes if we want to restore the United States to being Number One again!