> Even those not in the rust belt have a good reason to want those jobs to stay here: current account and exchange rates. Yes, everyone wants those jobs, or, j

> Even those not in the rust belt have a good reason to want those jobs to stay here: current account and exchange rates. Yes, everyone wants those jobs, or, jobs, to stay. But almost no one working today has a job that looks anything like a job of 100 years ago, and I doubt anyone would want those jobs. Almost every job worked today is going to disappear, or change beyond recognition that it's still the same job. Those lost manufacturing jobs are just among the first of the current set of jobs to disappear. Yes, it's painful and tragic; not because those specific jobs were lost, but because we have mis-managed the idleness of the people whose jobs vanished. The fix is not to cling to jobs that the free market says should not exist, and that consumers also say should not exist by buying the cheapest available products, often products not previously available. Some of those consumers are the very ones that have lost their old jobs. The only way for those manufacturing jobs to stay or come back is to never buy anything that didn't exist 50 years ago, and to stay out of Walmart and Amazon and everywhere else that sells anything at all from outside America. Who starts? We've lost the recognition that the reason we band together into communities and governments is to support each other. We've come to act as if "I've got my support, sorry you lost yours" is the proper way to treat each other. We need to stop being so punitive and miserly, automatically blaming people for their condition. How anyone got anywhere doesn't much matter. How we move each other to the next better thing is what we should be focusing on. I despair that we can get anywhere near that as long as quarterly, my bonus, my election thinking allows the few to stay a few steps ahead of everyone else. We treat each other as social petri dishes, and we're quite willing to throw the experiment materials out if it doesn't fit our data, our view of how we think the world is and how it ought to be.