I cannot subscribe to the notion that it was personal and corporate greed that killed manufacturing. Greed is just a derogatory word for profit motive, and EVERYONE has profit motive first and foremost in their mind in whatever they do. If you ever wanted a raise in pay or a promotion, you did it because of profit motive, or should I say "personal greed".
The story of an established manufacturing plant struggling to maintain profitability only to finally give up the ghost has been repeated so many times that it cannot all be ascribed to greed. These people wanted to see their companies survive and thrive, but just could not make that happen in a country where labor, materials and regulatory costs continued to rise, and the prices for their competitors products continued to fall. At some point when the cost to make the widget exceeds the money you get for the widget, its game over. If you were a stockholder of one of these companies, what decision would you want the management to make? You could either slug it out the way you have been and fail in a year or so of red ink, destroying shareholder value in the process, or you could try to follow the rest of the pack and relocate your manufacturing operations to a place where you may have a chance of becoming profitable again, thus salvaging some shareholder value. Those were the options. Pick one.
But it is fashionable to scapegoat faceless, nameless rich people as the root cause of all that ails us, perhaps not realizing that our own retirement funds may depend upon those rich people doing everything it takes to keep their companies profitable. So on one hand some may lambaste "the rich" for doing what on the other hand you are demanding that they do!
