Unions responsible for their own demise in rust belt

Thomas Sowell:

IT'S fascinating watching pols say how they're going to rescue the "rust belt" regions where jobs are disappearing and companies are shutting down or moving elsewhere.

The North American Free Trade Agreement is being blamed. In fact, "free lunches" are a big part of the reason once-prosperous regions declined into rust belts.

When the American automobile industry was the world's leader in its field, many seemed to think that labor unions could transfer a bigger chunk of that prosperity to its members without causing economic repercussions.

Toyota, Honda and others who took away more and more of the Big Three automakers' market share, leading to huge job losses in Detroit, proved once again the old trite saying that there is no free lunch.

While US automakers are laying off thousands, Japanese automakers are hiring thousands of American workers. But they're not hiring them in the rust belts.

They're avoiding the rust belts, just as domestic businesses are avoiding the high costs that have been piled on over the years by both unions and governments in the rust-belt regions.

The people who lose their jobs, and who live in communities that decline, need to look beyond the political rhetoric to the grim reality that there is no free lunch.

Where does NAFTA come into the picture?

International trade is just one of the many ways in which the competition of lower-cost producers can cause higher-cost producers to lose customers and jobs. Technological improvements or better management practices by domestic competitors can have the same result.

Jobs are always disappearing. But why aren't new jobs replacing them? Because rust-belt policies that drove out old jobs also keep out new jobs.

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The poor remain poor because they keep on doing the things that made them poor. The same can be said for rust belt unions and governments. Pandering to those bad decisions by Democrats is no way to lift them out of the cycle of decline they have put themselves into. They need to ask themselves why Toyota decided to put its new Tundra pickup plant in San Antonio instead of Ohio. Ohio did not lose those jobs because of NAFTA. It lost them because its taxes and labor are uncompetitive. Instead of addressing those issues, the Ohio politicians seem bent on making them worse.