Protecting the Buggy-Whip Industry!

Protecting the Buggy-Whip Industry!
Posted by Butler Shaffer on February 15, 2012 12:25 PM

Whenever I watch the ignoramuses at MSNBC pontificate their ignorance of basic economics, I am reminded of Rothbard's admonition for such persons not to propose economic policies.  Would someone suffering from a brain tumor seek out a phrenologist for advice and treatment?

On yesterday's "The Ed Show" on this channel, Mr. Ed and Rep. Gary Peters [D-Mich] were praising the Obama administration for having come to the financial rescue of the auto industry, saving this important industry and the jobs of those who work in it.  Analogies to the early 1900s with the emergence of that industry and the decline of the horse-drawn carriage industry have become such a cliche that I will not draw upon it again.  Instead, I will relate the personal experiences I had in law practice in the late 1960s. When copies of documents had to be submitted to courts/adminsitrative agencies, the means of the law firm doing so went like this: two or more members of the secretarial staff would take the document, place it on a piece of photographic film, and expose both to a bright light. The resulting film would then be exposed to a piece of copy paper which, it turn would be placed in a tray of chemicals so strong that those engaged in the process would have to wear rubber gloves. To get one  decent copy would often take three or four efforts.

The entire copying process was greatly advanced, a few years later, by the invention of xerography.  No more slow, d-r-a-w-n-o-u-t  methods of getting a single mediocre reproduction of a document; no more chemicals against which secretaries had to protect their hands, etc.  Ahhh, but what of the impending disaster awaiting the photo-copying industry that was being replaced by xerography?  What about all of the jobs to be lost, the investment in equipment, and the decline in demand for the chemicals used in this process?  I suspect that, if Mr. Ed and labor union representatives in Congress were to speak on the topic, they would have intoned on the importance of government intervention to save this dying industry, and to praise the politicians for their "foresight" and "vision" in bailing out firms that insisted upon their refusal to adapt themselves to the creative processes of the marketplace.