Live From Fantasy Land

"Clueless," "hypocrite," "ridiculous," "stupid," and "living in a fantasy land." If you want to tick off your readers just advocate doing something radical to save the U.S. economy.

Yesterday on this blog, I played the "what if" game. As in, "what if" Apple moved all its iPhone production to the states so we could reap the benefits of all those jobs.

I am under no delusions that this will happen—ever! And looking through the comments, your points are for the most part, well, on point. A Harvard MBA couldn't have pooh-pooh'ed it better. In reality, I agree with you.

But take a moment and breathe. I'm trying to make a larger point. Sometimes making decisions based in reality is just a way of enabling a really bad reality. The economy doesn't just suck. It's broken. And it's not going to get better (at least in a way that sustains us for any length of time), until we make some really, really big changes and take some really, really big risks.

Telling Foxconn to take a hike and shipping iPhone (and iPods/iPads) jobs to the Heartland may seem crazy and impractical (not to mention smartphone suicide for Apple), but its going to take something equally bold, crazy and risky to reinvent the U.S. economy.

I've singled out Apple, not because I think its the key to our salvation, but as an example of the kind of radical shift in priorities we need. Here we are at the dawn of a whole new industry; tablets for example, and the table is being set right now for American workers to not get a piece of it. Apple could be to this generation what GM was in the 50's and 60's.

I find the impassioned nay-saying of some of my readers interesting. Could this nay-saying culture be part of the problem? American businesses keep inventing stuff that the world wants and then building it somewhere else. We're doing a great job of growing the economy—in Asia. How many generations more of this can we survive before we are the third world country?

Corporate America's addiction to padding their profits using underpaid third world labor has been going on for so long, it appears some of my readers think its ridiculous to even imagine doing otherwise.

Two hundred some years ago, many business leaders scoffed in a similar manner at the idea of dismantling the slave trade. "We can't make money, if we actually have to pay our workers!" Eventually the infamous triangle trade ended. I'd like to point out that capitalism didn't.

I'm just sayin'. Discuss.

P.S. For those of you that pointed out my spelling errors. Busted! If you read this blog with any regularity, then you know spelling is not my strong suite (just kidding, I know its "soot").

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