August 5, 2003
)
(Senator Fritz Hollings, remarks on retirement, 8/4/2003)[R]iding up here, I saw this state could care less. I just saw Carolina license plates, Tiger paw license plates, they just can't wait for the kick-offs here at the end of the month. They just don't worry about the 60,100 textile jobs alone we have lost since NAFTA.... In the country itself, we don't make anything any more.
I had to make a talk on trade last week, and I looked it up and found out that at the end of World War II we had 40 percent of our workforce in manufacturing. And now we're down to 10 percent. We've got 10 percent of the country working and producing, and we've got the other 90 percent talking and eating. That's all they're doing.
Senator Hollings could have looked up the decline in agricultural employment since 1900, and found an even larger drop; and yet we're producing more food than ever. This is the nature of economic growth: when productivity improves in one activity, the rewards are distributed among everyone in society and employment shifts out of the advancing activity. The social distribution of rewards is why the salaries of butlers have risen from subsistence levels in 1700 to $30,000 per year today, despite the absence of productivity improvements in butlering. Immense productivity improvements in agriculture and manufacturing have enormously increased everyone's wealth, and enabled workers to shift to other forms of employment they like better.
Hollings seems, moreover, not to appreciate that non-manufacturing private sector workers, in order to receive an income, have to return value to the people paying them. These people are working, not just talking and eating, as politicians do.
But let the record show: Given a platform on his way out, Hollings used his precious time to insult his constituents for their love of football.