The View From 1776

The writer of the article concludes:

Without a decade of growing government support from rising health and education spending and soaring budget deficits, the labor market would have been flat on its back.

A more accurate assessment is that, without massive government spending on the welfare state - which includes health care and education - and the attendant high taxes and strangling regulations, real jobs in manufacturing would have grown robustly.  Other factors associated with expanding government intervention, such as support for labor unions, played a big role in turning the employment picture upside down.

Western New York State, where I now live, is a case study at the state level of the destructiveness of the liberal-progressive lust to restructure society and redistribute wealth.  This area was an inventive and thriving manufacturing region through the 1950s.  Aggressively encroaching liberal-progressivism, manifested in higher taxes, environmental red tape, and suffocating labor union wages and work rules, led to a steady exodus of manufacturing jobs to business-friendly areas in the South and Southwest.

Beginning with Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society in the 1960s, the same economic poison was administered to the whole nation.  Capping these welfare-state toxins with the resulting inflation made American companies increasingly uncompetitive in world markets.  Whence came the necessity to outsource jobs to overseas locations.