Delegate Nancy Guthrie, 30th District

A just released report on the top ten employers in West Virginia is not only troubling but every alarm should be going off. Wal-Mart again leads the pack along with some other service providers as our top state employers. Domestic manufacturing was pretty much nowhere to be found.

Why is this alarming? West Virginia along with the rest of the country is losing it’s dominance in domestic manufacturing. If we don’t recapture it, and pretty soon, we will effectively undermine our standing as a world power and our economic stability will become as endangered as the polar bear.

Free market apostles will shrug off the alarm as being another sign of ‘the global economy’ as though that’s an answer. Forgive me but I can’t see that our globe has gotten any rounder. Neither have we picked up any additional acreage that I can tell. In fact, since the more frequent occurrences of Tsunami’s, earthquakes, melting glaciers and Hurricane Katrina’s we’ve undoubtedly lost ground along with a lot of once valuable acreage.

Free market disciples tell us that free markets work best. But they fail to finish the sentence. The economists’ those free marketeers are so fond of misquoting more accurately said, “Free markets work best when government regulates them to prevent excess”.

Our recent lack of government regulations or rules of commerce now blows back on the American public with almost daily excess. As consumers we find ourselves flooded with a string of defective and dangerous toys, food, and drugs we can’t trust, manufactured for American companies in foreign countries by cheap and often captive labor.

How much lead paint in toys – banned from manufacture in the United States in the early 1970’s – tainted pet food, fish, salad, meat, pharmaceutical drugs does it take before American manufacturers come to their senses and return manufacturing operations to the nation that made them profitable and treated them to a pretty darned good living over the years? How long will it be before our government makes them return?

It’s ironic that free market disciples claim government should stay out of their business until there’s a crisis like the most recent one that disrupted the housing market, and the economy. Then, somehow, government intervention is a good thing.

Business can’t keep having it both ways. It’s bad for our long-term progress and our economic stability. We used to be a powerhouse country of invention and innovation that resulted in products being manufactured here in the United States. It was that kind of ingenuity that moved our economy to the head of the class as an industrialized nation.

But it seems our great nation has “fallen on hard times”. Today, more and more of our citizens are taking lower paying jobs in service industries and are shopping at big box stores for cheap foreign products because it’s one of the few remaining choices still within their family budget.

And if you’d like to argue that globally we’re raising the ship of fortune for foreign citizens while our economic ship sinks like a stone, look at the slums, human trafficking, environment and health hazards our global philanthropy is helping create around the world not to mention the state of disrepair we see on our own Main Streets here at home. Instead of improving on the virtuous circle that once existed in the USA between employers, employees and stockholders we seem stuck in a vicious cycle.

Here in West Virginia we’re told we need to be more like Virginia. Until we can figure out a way to back the Atlantic Ocean up to our borders so that eleven percent of our economy comes from shipbuilding or other things nautical, that’s not likely to happen. Unless like Virginia, forty five percent of our electricity is manufactured at nuclear plants, it also is not likely to happen. And unless we can figure out a way to move Northern Virginia and their complex of government contractors away from the seat of government they serve in Washington, DC it likewise will never happen.

And then there’s Forbes Magazine and the US Chamber of Commerce – also helpful in their ongoing characterization of West Virginia being a ‘judicial hellhole’. I often wonder who we think the readers of Forbes Magazine to be. If we look not so hard, I suspect we’ll discover they are the same corporations who are undermining our domestic manufacturing base and their own by selling it off to the lowest foreign bidders, and then apologizing for their wrong-headed actions after the damage is done. Sure enough though, Forbes and the US Chamber of Commerce are successfully running off investments here just as they do in emerging nations whose riches in natural resources are likewise prey.

The key to stable economic development in a state like West Virginia is pretty simple. First, workers are attracted to states with wages above the national average. Second, people are attracted to communities that are modern and smart places to live. Both take a genuine commitment and lots of money invested here. Finally, people are attracted to states that capitalize on their strengths. Here our greatest strength will always be our natural resources. It remains our challenge and our duty to put the possibilities for the riches of those natural resources into practice.

Not one prosperous civilization in the history of the world has ever remained a world power without a strong domestic manufacturing base. So why doesn’t our government rein in the excess? It’s almost as if our corporations are on a collision course to undermine their own long-term prosperity for short-term gain. At some point in time they will run out of customers as markets increasingly become saturated.

The economic model being used by free market apostles increasing makes no sense in the global economy, and it keeps blowing up in the face of American consumers. The occasional Keating Bank or Enron scandal and now the mortgage lending industry scandal are reasons enough to sound the alarm. But worldwide we are also experiencing almost daily outrages from globalization gone wrong.

West Virginia and the nation could be inventing, innovating and manufacturing products to improve our economy, our energy consumption and our environment for the needs of the 21st Century. Instead we’re celebrating another year with Wal-Mart and other service industry providers being our top employers. What’s wrong with this picture?