Why, then, do so many Americans think that nothing is made in America anymore? Well, let’s take a look at four things that America makes:

Cars – This is perhaps the least surprising thing on this list. The world’s biggest car company is American. American car companies, however, have plenty of competition. German, Japanese, and South Korean companies all sell many cars inside the United States (strangely, France and Italy are home to some very prestigious automobile companies which have failed to penetrate the American market).

Commercial Airplanes – Remember the last time you bought a commercial airplane? Well, it was probably made in America. Boeing is the world’s dominant manufacturer of commercial airplanes. The only other company that can compete is Airbus, located primarily in France and Germany (Russia also makes commercial airplanes, but nobody buys them).

Construction Equipment – When you look at any construction site, you’ll almost certainly see a bunch of heavy yellow machines with the letters CAT stamped on them. Those machines were made in America. The industry of building machines which build buildings is dominated by one American firm: Caterpillar. The main other company that seems to also be in the business is Komatsu Limited, a Japanese firm with one-fourth as many employees as Caterpillar.

Tanks – It’s hard to tell, naturally, what country makes the world’s best tanks. Nevertheless, America does make a lot of tanks – and it’s probably safe-to-say that the quality of American tanks is amongst the best in the world (the cost, on the other hand…). It seems that the major “competitors” in this field are Germany, Great Britain, and perhaps Russia.

Conclusions

There are several things which are easily noted about this list. First of all, the items listed above are very difficult to make. These items require extensive expertise with lots and lots of parts that have to be put together just right (making those parts is usually a multibillion dollar industry itself). There is generally no room for failure. This is not like making a T-shirt (although America also does do that).

Secondly, America’s major “competitors” in manufacturing are not the countries most people accuse of stealing jobs. Third World countries do not manufacture the same things that America manufactures. Rather, America “competes” with France, Germany, Great Britain, and Japan.

Finally, to answer the question above: Why, then, do so many Americans think that nothing is made in America anymore? Well, the answer is that America tends not to make consumer goods that people buy every day. Rather, it makes things like cars, commercial airplanes, heavy construction equipment, and tanks. But if you ever decide to buy a commercial airliner for your next vacation, or some heavy construction equipment for your house…that commercial airliner or heavy construction equipment is probably going to be made in America.

For decades critics of the public schools have been saying, “You can’t solve educational problems by throwing money at them.” The education establishment and its supporters have replied, “No one’s ever tried.” In Kansas City they did try. To improve the education of black students and encourage desegregation, a federal judge invited the Kansas City, Missouri, School District to come up with a cost-is-no object educational plan and ordered local and state taxpayers to find the money to pay for it.

Kansas City spent as much as $11,700 per pupil—more money per pupil, on a cost of living adjusted basis, than any other of the 280 largest districts in the country. The money bought higher teachers’ salaries, 15 new schools, and such amenities as an Olympic-sized swimming pool with an underwater viewing room, television and animation studios, a robotics lab, a 25-acre wildlife sanctuary, a zoo, a model United Nations with simultaneous translation capability, and field trips to Mexico and Senegal. The student-teacher ratio was 12 or 13 to 1, the lowest of any major school district in the country.

The results were dismal. Test scores did not rise; the black-white gap did not diminish; and there was less, not greater, integration.

Everybody who is looking at this post should take a look at Ciotti’s full report after this post. It is very, very disturbing reading. The school district of Kansas City essentially had all the funding that it could dream of, and student performance utterly failed to improve.

Improving a country’s education system, as the example of Kansas City shows, is something in which no easy answers are available. It is perhaps one of the most complicated tasks out there. Even the full might of the American government has had little effect on improving American education throughout the decades.

It does seem, however, that simply putting in more money does not solve the problem. Indeed, the United States spends a lot of money per student on education relative to other countries in the world:

The results, however, are decidedly mediocre. Despite all the money spent on education, American students generally score in the middle and lower end when compared to other wealthy countries.

If more money is not the solution, then what is? That’s a very complicated question, of course. It’s a question which nobody has really answered satisfactorily in America to this day. I have written several modest suggestions and thoughts on the problem in previous posts. But I personally cannot even dream of finding a comprehensive solution if decades of experts have also failed to do so.

And here, in suggesting what Kansas City should actually have done, Paul Ciotti and the CATO Institute fall short. They do great in diagnosing the problem and in showing how one proposed solution – better funding – does not work miracles. But in suggesting a solution himself, all Ciotti has to say is this:

In the meantime, they [the Kansas City School district] ignore ideas that might work. They might fire poor teachers and reward good ones with merit pay, give parents vouchers so they could send their children to private schools, or stop trying to solve the problem of dysfunctional families after the fact and look upstream for a solution–the elimination of welfare to end the resulting social chaos.

For a thirty-five page report, this is a surprisingly short list. Let’s take a look at each one of them:

Merit Pay – This is being tried extensively today; it is the “hot” new trend in American education. We shall see how it works in a decade.

Vouchers – Studies have indicated that voucher schools don’t work. Students who go to charter schools do academically just as well or badly as students who go to public schools.

End Welfare – This sounds more like rhetorical blather than an actual proposal. In fact, the welfare reforms of 1990s did substantially reduce welfare. School districts aren’t doing much better today than they were then.

So two out of three of Ciotti’s proposals have already been experimented with and failed.

This leaves us in a rather depressing place, with a bunch of unsuccessful solutions to a seemingly unsolvable problem. How to get out of this rather depressing place is, alas, beyond the sight of me and many, many others.

In the two particular conversations that I recall, the tone was somewhat critical of Occupy Wall Street. One person stated that it seemed that the movement didn’t really have a set goal, and just seemed to be protesting for the sake of protesting. Another group of students was also skeptical of the movement; my memory is somewhat hazy on this matter, but they seemed to criticize the protesters as not really representing the working-class.

These anecdotal critiques may seem of little significance to most people, but they actually point to a very big problem with the Occupy movement. These people who were critiquing the Occupy movement were not conservatives by any stretch; they hold very liberal views. By all rights, the individuals I talked with ought to have been strong supporters of Occupy Wall Street; in fact, they should have formed the core of support for the movement. College students are some of the most liberal people in America; the typical college student is one of the most likely demographics in the country to support a protest on social inequality.

The problem with Occupy Wall Street is not really the goal of the protests but rather its tone. It just seems too hippie for most of America. I cringe when I read the “About Us” section of its unofficial website, which uses words like ”people’s assembly.” There is a very negative connotation that most of America holds when it hears a phrase like that.

This is very sad, because most Americans would agree with the aims of Occupy Wall Street. It’s just that the tactics of the movement will eventually alienate the typical swing voter.

If Occupy Wall Street can’t even win students at my college, how is it going to win Middle America?

Apparently not. This article indicates that many of directors on these failed companies have prospered quite nicely:

A few of the directors conveniently omit Enron from their biographies, but they do not appear to remain tainted, staying in their chosen professions…

The experiences of the Enron directors over the last decade would appear to offer great hope to the directors of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers.

…the Bear and Lehman directors are returning to public company service even quicker than the Enron directors. In part this reflects the old boy network on Wall Street, which keeps people in the same positions because of friendships. It is not a coincidence that two former Bear Stearns directors serve on the Viacom board.

The trend also underscores the decline in the importance of reputation on Wall Street — even since the time of Enron. Prior bad conduct simply is often not viewed as a problem.

The fact that these people have done so well constitutes a potent illustration of the problem ailing the United States. Simply put, the corporate world is no longer in any sense accountable to succeeding or failing. CEOs like Mitt Romney can personally lead firms to ruin and yet still get paid incredibly handsome “golden parachutes.” Meanwhile inequality continues to increase at an inexorable rate and the economy continues to flounder.

Reading about the denizens of big business succeeding to this extent while America as a whole flounders really strikes a bone of contention with me. There are few words in the English language to describe the wrongness of what is happening – how people who singlehandedly fail at everything that they are supposed to do still get tens of millions of dollars.

Here is one: unjust.

I personally don’t know enough about the case to really comment, nor do I really have an opinion about the appropriateness of the death penalty. But there does seem to be validity to the claim that the current method of executing individuals – lethal injection – can cause severe pain. This is especially true when injection is done incorrectly, which has sometimes happened.

Which is why I have a – slightly satirical – suggestion to those worried about the suffering caused by lethal injection: Why not use the guillotine?

The guillotine is one of the most humane, least painful, and quickest ways to execute a person possible. After a mere couple of seconds, a person falls unconscious. He or she dies after thirteen seconds, not a lot of time to suffer even if you hadn’t fell into a coma during the first two seconds of having your head severed from your body.

Better yet, the guillotine always works. There are multiple instances of lethal injection and the electric chair not working properly – and thus causing extreme pain to the sentenced. In contrast, there doesn’t seem to be a single instance in recorded history of the guillotine failing to chop off the sentenced’s head. That’s quite something, considering the number of times it was used in the French Revolution.

A person might argue that the guillotine causes considerable mental suffering to the sentenced. But what method of execution does not? It’s hard to believe that a person being led to the guillotine suffers more in his or her mind than a person being led to a lethal injection bed.

Of course, the real reason why America’s justice system doesn’t use the guillotine is because it causes such revulsion amongst the wider public. The guillotine gets a pretty bad rap due to the French Revolution. More importantly, seeing decapitated heads tends to do wonders to the polling numbers of death penalty opponents.

Nevertheless, there is definitely merit to say that execution by the guillotine is more humane than execution by lethal injection. Lethal injection is much less distressful for the public, but sometimes much more painful for the sentenced (if, for instance, there’s a problem with the dosage). The guillotine is much more distressful for the public, but causes much less suffering for the sentenced. The fact that America executes through lethal injection rather than the guillotine says a lot about human nature.