Take a look at this article taken from the Orlando Sentinel on President Obama’s Earth Day talk in Newton, Iowa.

The venue was once a giant Maytag appliance factory which now houses a wind energy company. It represented, for me, not so much the ecological theme President Obama was touting but the ebb and flow of classic American free enterprise where companies are allowed to succeed and to fail; where industries flourish and sometimes die; where there is no concept of “too big to fail.”

After World War II, we had the greatest economic expansion in our entire history as the mighty industrial power we had forged creating munitions to win the war turned to the manufacturer of appliances and other consumer products after we won the war. The 1950s and 1960s reflected a further expansion of that enormous industrial capability bringing prosperity to Maytag, other manufacturers and the entire economy as a whole.

Those days are gone, for Maytag, and for many of those manufacturers, as we shift our priorities from consumer products to alternate energy sources. But is that not what free enterprise is supposed to do—provide a shifting of resources in line with a shift in priorities?

When AIG, Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, General Motors, and various other companies become “too big to fail” that our government must step in time and time again to both thwart the natural ebb and flow of the economic order as well as to subsidize policy directives not otherwise supported by economic validity, my stomach gets queasy.

That we have found ourselves in a position in 2008 and 2009 to forgo the natural economic order is less of a concern to me than what it portends for the future where these activities become not extraordinary, but palpably institutionalized. I don’t fear and I’m not concerned about what we’ve done (nor do I second guess or Monday morning quarterback); I am concerned about what it might mean for what we will continue to do in the future.

Original writing date: April 23, 2009
Article writing date: April 23, 2009

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 28th, 2009 at 6:51 am and is filed under Articles of Interest, Business, Dynetech, Larry Pino, Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.