This week General Electric announced it was moving its headquarters and 800 jobs from extremely high-tax Connecticut to moderately high-tax Boston, Massachusetts, which seduced the company with $145 million in incentives over 20 years, or a staggering $181,250 per job.

Right after that announcement, GE announced that it was selling its venerable appliance business to a Chinese company.

In addition to the incentives, another reason that GE was moving to Boston was to be in a hip downtown location that would appeal to its high-paid, khaki-clad professionals.

Translation:  Like just about every big American corporation, the executives at GE are looking out for themselves and other staffers at headquarters, who make six-figure and beyond salaries in functionary jobs, such as government relations (aka lobbying), regulatory affairs, marketing, legal, finance, accounting, information technology, public relations, shareholder relations, supply chain management, safety and health, environment and sustainability, employee benefits (including ObamaCare specialists), and human resources.

Probably half of these big-shot masters of the GE universe depend on the regulatory state and a Goliath government for their lucrative livelihood.   Why wouldn't they feel at home in big-government Boston? 

After all, they can socialize and network with other Goliath-dependent functionaries who are employed by other industrial corporations, or by too-big-to-fail banks that use the Dodd-Frank monstrosity of a law to drive smaller banks out of business, or by universities dependent on tuition loans and government grants, or by government itself.  They can live in expensive condos with their peerage and hang out at hip cafes and bars with other masters of the universe.  Sadly, they are either completely clueless about what is happening in the hinterland or, like Rhett Butler in "Gone with the Wind, don't give a damn—that is, they don't give a damn that the nation's industrial core is going with the wind.

The schlemiels who assemble refrigerators in some rural outpost of the GE conglomerate and American empire certainly know what is happening and give a damn.  So do the engineers and operations managers who work with them in GE's factories.  Not cool or hip, they see the detritus in their un-hip small towns from an economy and empire being hollowed out.  They see more and more townsfolk becoming dependent on a government welfare or entitlement check, they see deteriorating homes and infrastructure, they see former manufacturing workers ringing up Big Gulps and lottery tickets behind the counter at a convenience store, and they see a marked increase in obesity, drug abuse, and broken families.

Understandably but foolishly, they see Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders as their saviors, because they correctly see that other leading politicians do not understand their plight.

An aside:  This lament is being written by someone who, unlike Trump and Sanders, appreciates the economic benefits of free trade, creative destruction, true free-market competition, and the free movement of labor, capital and goods. My heroes include such original economic thinkers as Joseph Schumpeter and Adam Smith, whose economics advanced the human condition and compensated for the economic havoc wreaked by central planners, nativists, socialists, and communists.

Sadly, a free market no longer exists in the USA or the West in general.  Markets have been replaced by a sickening combination of mercantilism, crony capitalism, crony unionism, economic fascism (in the true meaning of the word), socialism, and the central economic planning of the unelected and unaccountable Federal Reserve.

The result has been cheap money, cheap credit, asset bubbles, stock market bubbles, massive malinvestments, ballooning government debt, widespread personal debt, and roller-coaster economic cycles.  In turn, instead of investing in plant and equipment, corporate executives have used cheap debt for questionable acquisitions and for stock buybacks, which juice earnings per share and increase the value of their stock options and grants.

The pillagers, plunderers and bottom feeders have not only congregated in places like Boston, Manhattan, and Washington, DC, but also in Midwestern and Southern state capitals.  A recent Wall Street Journal article detailed how well-heeled lobbyists and regulatory consultants have brought riches to such capitals as Lansing, Michigan; Madison, Wisconsin; and Raleigh, N. Carolina.  There are nearly 3,000 lobbyists in Lansing alone.  At the same time, Detroit has become a dystopian national embarrassment.

Boston is particularly ironic.  Of course the Boston area was where the American Revolution began—a revolution against a British parliament and king who, in terms of coercive statism, paled in comparison to the big, central government of today. It was also the heart of the early whaling and shipping industries, as well as the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution in America, particularly with cotton mills and textile plants. 

Where GE bureaucrats and government apparatchiks now sit drinking lattes with Apple watches made overseas on their wrists, there once stood warehouses, factories, docks, factory workers, stevedores, sailors, fishermen, and free, independent thinkers—all of whom built a thriving republic. That republic has morphed into a bloated, decaying, degenerate empire, where effete elites at the top drive German cars, use personal trainers, have gourmet kitchens that they rarely use for cooking, and have Ivy-League brains that they rarely use for deep thinking. 

Trump or Sanders would only make things worse, but at least they might give GE executives and bureaucrats what they deserve:  a Chinese refrigerator up their butt.  

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