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The free-market right commits a blunder when it exalts ‘service' over ‘manufacturing.'Last week, National Review ran an article saluting the Supreme Court’s abandonment of the “Chevron doctrine,” a principle of legal procedure dating from 1984 that said that when it is unclear what federal law requires, the courts should “defer” to the policies an executive department or agency adopts to implement that law. The demise of Chevron has generated yelps of complaint from the left, which used the principle to impose its interpretations of laws, especially because the left thinks Executive Branch agencies will be gelded from fighting pollution and the “existential threat” of “climate change.”
Dominic Pino’s NR article cited one of the totems of the environmentalist movement: Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River, which, in 1969, actually caught fire because of the density of flammable pollutants in its waters. Pino explains that a lot of the subsequent environmental cleanup came from changes in industry, from democratically enacted laws (rather than unilaterally issued bureaucratic regulations), and from changes in technology.
I agree with 95% of the essay. But there was one thing I vehemently rejected: Pino attributes Cleveland’s cleanup to “technological advances leading to more energy-efficient methods of production and the gradual shift from a predominantly manufacturing economy to a predominantly services economy.”
Cleveland — and America — are not better off because of a “predominantly services economy,” even if that is the orthodoxy of the globalist left and right.
The globalist left, which ideologically doesn’t like national states because of its “global citizens” mindset, doesn’t care (except in election years when Michigan is a swing state) that manufacturing jobs are in mainland China. Climate fundamentalists don’t care that energy bought from Persian Gulf–adjacent countries is dirtier to produce than gas and oil extracted in the United States.
The globalist right, which isn’t so much hostile as indifferent to nation-states but is populated by idolaters of the Almighty Market, has no hesitation about manufacturing at Vietnam costs. When one points out that one’s American consumers need good paying jobs, without which they can’t afford those goods, the mercantile Marie Antoinettes tell us, “Let them learn code!”
The “service industry” hasn’t served America well. Its proponents engage in an economic primitivism that imagines that a steel girder and a cup of coffee made in Cleveland are both “products” for which “demand” will produce “price” and “profit.” True, one steel girder nets more money on a single sale than one cup of coffee, but the girder might be in a building housing that coffee shop for a hundred years, whereas the cup of coffee will pass away by the Michigan state line, so “we’ll make up in bulk.”
Oren Cass, in his Once and Future Worker, rightly dissed this economic magical thinking. As he noted, work is not a collection of isolated “workplaces.” Work occurs in constellations. When Cleveland had steel mills, it also had adjacent coffee shops, where hungry steel workers might spend the money for a donut and cup of Joe. But when Cleveland has only coffee shops, they will never generate as many or as well paying jobs as the steel mills, and without those hungry steel workers, there won’t be the same need for coffee shops. Evelyn’s Coffee Shop will never compete for volume or the same wages as U.S. Steel, and without the workers, the clientele are likely going to be retirees as much in search of socialization as food. But as Ralph McTell bitingly described an abandoned old man in one such café in his song “Streets of London,” “each tea lasts an hour, and he wanders home alone.” By the end of the month, he might not even be able to afford that hour-long tea.
Let me add one other observation about our “service” economy: it isn’t. How much “service” does the “service” economy actually provide? How much of the “customer service” culture has, in fact, been lost?
Take checkout. Once upon a time, a cashier rang up your purchases. The cashier or, sometimes, a bus boy or local kid packed your bags.
Find that today! In how many places have checkout cashiers been replaced by “self-check” counters? Scan, check, bag — yourself. We’ll keep one store employee hovering in the vicinity for the Luddites who can’t manage the machine, but otherwise, cashiers are gone. In those places where self-check is being phased out, it’s not because a sense of “the customer is king” has returned, but because our coarsened culture and non-enforcing legal indulgence has pushed shoplifting past the limits of toleration.
You’re even expected to pay for your bag. Here, again, the extremes come together. The market right considers giving your bag an extra cost that — especially if they “discount” wares — they think you should also pay for. The environmental left considers bags the enemy to Mother Nature, so — after having bought $200’s worth of goods at inflated prices — you should presumably put them in your pocket to carry home? Or pay a fee for the bag, which nobody ever shows is abating anything except otherwise bigger deficits.
Maybe you can push it in your store wagon, the one you used to be able to get out of a rack and shop with, but for which now you should deposit a quarter, retrievable only when you chain it back in place?
Besides the erosion of a culture of customer “service,” those piddly inconveniences also send a message. Like manufacturing, the store cashier didn’t require a B.A. in critical theory and M.A. in gender studies. It enabled people with a work ethic, a capacity to interact civilly with other people, and usually familial responsibilities to have a job. The kid who bagged groceries, carried them out to the car, or chased after you to push your wagon back for that quarter learned how to earn and appreciate money. They didn’t need “internships” or “service hours” or “seminars” to learn those things.
So, apart from jobs for every American, what have we lost with our “service” economy?
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