‘If a change in price leads to sharp shift in demand or supply for a particular good, that good is said to be “elastic.” If a price change results in little or no change in the level of supply or demand, the good is “inelastic.”‘
People will migrate to jobs, but it’s a chicken and egg problem to bring the capital investment that creates enterprises into a place where people don’t already live to fill those jobs. Capital can only be formed and preserved through profit, and governments don’t make a profit. Capital moves through the market to seek the highest return on investment. Capital cannot afford to remain idle for a labor market to respond.
Elbert County has a regulatory zoning scheme built around the intent to preserve the look of an untouched state of nature. Cows and horses fit this scheme. Enterprises that don’t involve cows and horses do not. Ranching is not labor intensive, it requires large tracts of expensive land, and it presents no competitive return on investment to capital.
Inheritance taxes are levied at market land valuations that stay high due to the scarcity of land in a state of nature, and a supply of buyers who bring accumulated wealth from enterprises outside of Elbert County. These buyers don’t invest in Elbert County land to make a return. They come here to escape progress, not to promote it.
In Elbert County, labor is inelastic. We have a small population; labor is scarce, and not as diverse for available skills as the labor forces in cities. As a result of all the above, we don’t have a rich job market waiting to hire people in Elbert County.
Still, America is a free country. The deck is stacked against us, but when has it ever not been so? A hard set of economic facts, hard, at least, for members of the labor force without land or a full bank account of acquired wealth from another place, need not determine our economic potential.
The same corporate forms that provided the organization for profit-making enterprises throughout the rest of America are freely available to Elbert County non-landed citizens. It starts with a plan to make a product, research into the fabrication method that product requires, discovery of sources for the input materials, and finding the market. All of these things exist for every product we consume; you just need to do the research to discover them.
The accumulation of start-up capital can be done by selling shares in the enterprise to all those pledged to work for the company. This core group would become the preferred stock holders.
Look around at all of the manufactured and assembled products we use in our daily lives. Many of them are not that difficult to put together. Many are built in lands on the other side of the world from materials that come from American plastics, fibers, minerals, and machinery.
Foreign supply chains from domestic materials incur steep round trip transportation costs to send raw materials out and bring finished goods back. Consider the costs in an international supply chain that could be eliminated by locating production here in America—fuel, transportation infrastructure, middlemen taking a cut, government levies at various transaction points, regulatory takings from multiple government agencies—all built into the price of the products we buy. In effect, as a domestic producer, these are recoverable opportunity costs that, by their elimination, fall straight to the bottom line of an expected return from domestic production.
At a policy level, the supply chain costs that American consumers are willing to bear in the prices they pay support powerful private and public constituencies whose interest it is to keep labor rates depressed in the third world. While our domestic markets may give third world labor an opportunity to work, when you add in all of the overhead that comes with the opportunity our markets provide, we may not be doing them as big of a favor as some would think.
The existence today of a given international product supply chain should be seen as an opportunity, not a determinant of our future. So too, a hard set of economic factors need not control us. We are a free people with the ability to create any structure we can conceive. With a little ingenuity, passion, and effort, we can make whatever future we want. Right here in Elbert County.
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