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What's the administration's specific aim in bailing out GM? I'll give you my theory later.

For now, though, some background. First and most broadly, it doesn't make sense for America to try to maintain or enlarge manufacturing as a portion of the economy. Even if the U.S. were to seal its borders and bar any manufactured goods from coming in from abroad -- something I don't recommend -- we'd still be losing manufacturing jobs. That's mainly because of technology.

When we think of manufacturing jobs, we tend to imagine old-time assembly lines populated by millions of blue-collar workers who had well-paying jobs with good benefits. But that picture no longer describes most manufacturing. I recently toured a U.S. factory containing two employees and 400 computerized robots. The two live people sat in front of computer screens and instructed the robots. In a few years this factory won't have a single employee on site, except for an occasional visiting technician who repairs and upgrades the robots.

Factory jobs are vanishing all over the world. Even China is losing them. The Chinese are doing more manufacturing than ever, but they're also becoming far more efficient at it. They've shuttered most of the old state-run factories. Their new factories are chock full of automated and computerized machines. As a result, they don't need as many manufacturing workers as before.

Economists at Alliance Capital Management took a look at employment trends in 20 large economies and found that between 1995 and 2002 -- before the asset bubble and subsequent bust -- 22 million manufacturing jobs disappeared. The U.S. wasn't even the biggest loser. We lost about 11 percent of our manufacturing jobs in that period, but the Japanese lost 16 percent of theirs. Even developing nations lost factory jobs: Brazil suffered a 20 percent decline, and China had a 15 percent drop.

What happened to manufacturing? In two words, higher productivity. As productivity rises, employment falls because fewer people are needed. In this, manufacturing is following the same trend as agriculture. A century ago, almost 30 percent of adult Americans worked on a farm. Nowadays, fewer than 5 percent do. That doesn't mean the U.S. failed at agriculture. Quite the opposite. American agriculture is a huge success story. America can generate far larger crops than a century ago with far fewer people. New technologies, more efficient machines, new methods of fertilizing, better systems of crop rotation, and efficiencies of large scale have all made farming much more productive.

Manufacturing is analogous. In America and elsewhere around the world, it's a success. Since 1995, even as manufacturing employment has dropped around the world, global industrial output has risen more than 30 percent.

More after the jump.

--Robert Reich

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There are plenty of instances of misleading and otherwise bad stats being used by anti-piracy groups, like the recent BSA numbers from Canada that were basically made up. Now, a group from the UK is saying that piracy costs that country's economy tens of billions of pounds. It makes the same mistake as plenty of other studies before it: counting every instance of piracy, or perhaps even just the availability of copyrighted material on file-sharing networks, as a lost sale. It's fallacious to assume that every single person that downloads a piece of content, or simply has access to it for free, would pay for it if the free version wasn't available. Furthermore, any study like this that says an entire economy is being harmed by X amount of money because of piracy is pretty much bogus. This money that's supposedly being lost because of piracy isn't being lost by the economy, as undoubtedly it's being spent elsewhere. It's not being flushed down the toilet or turned into ether, it's just not ending up in content companies' bank accounts.

Carlo Longino is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Carlo Longino and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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The plans you are discussing embody my core belief that Americans should have better choices for health insurance, building on the principle that if they like the coverage they have now, they can keep it, while seeing their costs lowered as our reforms take hold. But for those who don't have such options, I agree that we should create a health insurance exchange -- a market where Americans can one-stop shop for a health care plan, compare benefits and prices, and choose the plan that's best for them, in the same way that Members of Congress and their families can. None of these plans should deny coverage on the basis of a preexisting condition, and all of these plans should include an affordable basic benefit package that includes prevention, and protection against catastrophic costs. I strongly believe that Americans should have the choice of a public health insurance option operating alongside private plans. This will give them a better range of choices, make the health care market more competitive, and keep insurance companies honest.

By plunging into the details of the reform rather than cheering from the sidelines, as he has done for months, Obama raises the political stakes for the summer?"s big legislative battle, and will hearten liberals who have yearned for his intervention to put a public sector option on the table.

We are thrilled to see President Obama's strong, unambiguous commitment to reform that includes the choice of keeping private health insurance or joining a new public health insurance option. The choice of a new public health insurance plan is the only way to control costs, guarantee coverage, ensure quality and transparency, and set a benchmark by which patients will know whether their private health insurance is truly giving them what they're paying for.

There is tremendous unity among President Obama, key committee leadership in both the House and the Senate, the broad coalition represented by Health Care for America Now, and the American people for reform based on the choice of private or public health insurance plans. It is now clearer than ever that this choice will be a fundamental part of the reform sent to the President's desk this year.

Over at NRO I have an article suggesting that the Tea Party movement adopt as its program what I am calling “Reagan’s Unfinished Agenda.”? In one sentence, it describes a way of going on offense, and getting out of the defensive crouch that is the dominant posture of conservatives at the moment.

… starting in 1987, Reagan offered a more comprehensive package he called the ?SEconomic Bill of Rights.? In addition to the balanced-budget and line-item veto amendments, Reagan proposed three additional amendments that would impose a federal spending limit, require a two-thirds vote of the House and Senate for any tax increases, and prohibit wage and price controls.

The European Union is close to banning all Canadian seal products, and a grassroots campaign to boycott Canadian fish and seafood is gaining momentum. But what of Europe's own barbaric culinary practices? In response, Full Comment will call attention to European hypocrisy and demand an immediate end to the brutal slaughter of helpless creatures. Today's poor victim of continental cruelty: mice...or possibly rat. It's hard to tell.

Thousands of years ago, Roman legions on the march brought along specimens of mice, known as edible dormouse or glis glis, which could be quickly fattened and then consumed as an emergency source of food, should the unit find itself unable to live off the land. That tradition lives on today, concentrated primarily in European Union member Slovenia, though glis glis poaching remains common in parts of Italy, as well.

The dormouse is a rodent, of course, and bears some superficial similarities to the common North American squirrel. A nocturnal creature, their loud squeaking makes them an easy target for human hunters, who can paralyze them with flashlight beams before killing them with a firearm or a well-thrust skewer. Various forms of wire or bladed traps are also common means of capturing dormouse. Dormouse hunting was especially popular in Slovenia due to a belief that Satan is their shepherd, meaning that the slaughter of a dormouse is not only a way to eat, but also a way to strike a blow against Satan. Even in modern times, stewing dormice with red wine and vegetables is a popular dish, as is fried chopped dormouse.

In Italy, where the hunting of dormouse is illegal, they have been poached almost to the brink of extinction in certain areas. Some Italians, facing increasing difficulties in finding dormice in the wild, have taken to raising dormice domestically, fattening them up before turning them into stew. Italian chefs, arrested for serving such stew, have offered as a defence that they aren't really serving the protected creatures, but are merely lying to their customers and feeding them common rats, instead. The wisdom of this legal defence remains in question, as serving rat is also illegal.

The National Post calls on all Canadians to boycott Slovenian agricultural products, until such time that this barbaric practice is brought to an end, and further calls upon the Italian government to crack down on the illegal poaching of dormice within their national borders that is threatening this peaceful species with extinction.

Matt Gurney
National Post

matt@mattgurney.ca