Rebuilding America
“Blown up, sir!” – Stripes
Raw materials for steel have gone way up in price. Producers say it’s a horrible ore deal.
When I was in 6th grade, I remember driving to Capital City with Pa Wilder while he had a business trip. As part of the trip, we went through Industrial Town. The major feature of Industrial Town was a miles-long hulking rusted out steel plant complete with huge towers, big enough to hold Oprah’s breakfast.
To me, they looked like the discarded remnants of an ancient technological innovation. In fact, when I was reading a novel about explorers that had gone to some far-off world that had been littered with the technology of an incomprehensible civilization, I visualized that old steel plant.
It was rare to have one-on-one time with just Pa and I. He often worked long hours, but on longer trips, sometimes we’d talk about, well, whatever. As I’ve mentioned before Pa was a banker, and I think he was more amused by my early fixation on science than anything. But when it came to the steel plant, Pa Wilder knew a lot, and that day was the first time I ever heard “Bessemer Process”, and we talked about steel and history during the drive. He said that once upon a time, you could bring your ore, make steel, and sell it for a fee. Apparently “He who smelt it, dealt it” didn’t catch on as a business model.
I hate recycling aluminum cans. It’s just soda pressing.
Bad dad jokes aside, when we drove by, that old steel mill wasn’t doing so well. The major reason, oddly, was World War II.
During World War II, the United States and Britain, mostly did everything they could to blow up anyth8ing in Germany that could make a ball bearing or paper clip. At the end of the war, the country was in ru8ins. The same thing happened in Japan – the country was wrecked, and, unlike Germany, the Japanese didn’t have many of resources needed for steel production, things like iron ore or coal.
In both cases, Germany and Japan didn’t build back with the Bessemer Process, they built back with the newest technology. Japan, especially, had to focus on being efficient since Japan has fewer natural resources to work with to make steel than Kamala Harris has for use in a battle of wits.
Once Kamala though she might be pregnant. She asked the doctor, “Is it mine?”
To be clear, it was very hard to rebuild nations shattered by the Last Modern War, but once those countries did finally rebuild, they were the most efficient and highest quality steelmakers in the world.
But this took decades.
The infrastructure had to be completely rebuilt. Then people had to learn how to make the new technology – basic oxygen steelmaking was pioneered by the Swiss and the Austrians. Oh, sure, the Austrians and Swiss are so autistic that asking a girl out is a seventeen-step process that has to be memorized prior to execution, but that’s exactly the autism level needed when you’re going to change an entire industry.
In a rare screwup, the Swiss dude who invented the process wasn’t legally able stop the Japanese from using his process for free, and the Japanese licked it up without having to pay royalties. The Swiss, experts at chocolate, hoarding gold, yodeling, and engineering. At being attorneys? Maybe not so much. 80% of Japanese steel was made using the basic oxygen process by 1970, because it was far cheaper.
Oops.
But Baltimore is gr . . . oh.
Since the United States didn’t bother to innovate, US Steel©, once the biggest steel manufacturer in the world, was sold to Nippon Steel™ for the equivalent of what Elon Musk keeps in his couch cushions back in December, 2023.
What’s the lesson here?
To be clear, in many cases our economy is where Japan’s was after World War II. There are two major differences:
- It’s not as obvious because the nigh-infinite ability of the United States to print cash and trade it for things like steel is still in effect, and
- We were complicit in the destruction of our own industry via free trade, regulations, and financialization, and didn’t even need to use any bombs.
To rebuild an industry requires time. It also requires a lot of investment of money, but it also requires the best talent in the country. Silicon Valley became the information systems capital of the world because it brought together capital and talent over the period of decades. Taiwan became the semiconductor capital of the world because of the capital and talent it consumed over the course of decades.
Hey, that’s what Xi said.
What did New York do? Soaked up capital to loan and soaked up talent to figure out how to magic more cash into existence – by and large a waste of decades of some of the best and brightest in the world.
This is the game that we should have been playing, but stopped when the United States was the undisputed manufacturing giant of the world. Now, the reason we were the undisputed manufacturing giant of the world was because everyone else was blown up. What did we do with that success?
Rested. Relaxed. And began to believe that the economic success was a right, not a consequence of hard work, talent, and investment.
We have to learn to build things, not financial products. But we also have things to unlearn. Our liability system is horrific, but that’s because liability lawyers fund the Democratic party, so, they buy more bacon-wrapped shrimp than others.
The other thing to unlearn is zero impact. As long as humans live on the planet, we’ll impact it – the idea is to conserve and make wise use of our resources. The GloboLeftElite have taken their mask off when climate ideologs go after the United States, with declining carbon emissions, and ignore China and India with massive and growing carbon emissions, with China producing nearly three times the CO2 of the United States.
How dare you!
But have the GloboLeftElite complain about China or India?
Nah. They wouldn’t listen anyway.
The path forward requires that we fail. Great news! We’ve failed! We’re in a worse place than the Japanese after World War II due to our cultural inertia and the newfangled “all the Zoomers have a mental disorder” society.
The second part of the path is letting go of the financialization and making PowerPoints® in New York as the goal of society. If we want to be serious, we have to make stuff, not accounting irregularities.
There’s a reason that China’s buying gold, and that reason is simple:
They’re making steel.
