Creative Destruction and the Real Meaning of Homelessness

"Get a job!" That's the solution to everything... but how can a working man do that when the good jobs keep leaving town?

MDL reports on the departure of another manufacturer from the Madison area. Pavement Services, Inc., which builds pavers, rollers, and related equipment, is merging with Calder Brothers Corporation. PSI will take its operations to Greenville, South Carolina. Nine of the current eighteen Madison employees will go to South Carolina. The other nine... well, I assume they'll be lining up behind the job hunters from Arctic Cat. (No word yet on whether LAIC will be funding hiring incentives for employers to put these folks back to work the way they have done for previous workers laid off from Rosco, May & Scofield, and now Arctic Cat.)

Now it appears we're not looking at a case of rank abandonment. MDL quotes PSI owner David Thielbar as saying he started looking last spring "for an investor to keep the company here," but evidently no one turned up [Chuck Clement, "PSI to Close Madison Plant," Madison Daily Leader, 2007.10.17]. By August, the PSI had found acceptable terms and signed its letter of intent to merge with South Carolina's CBC. (The Madville Times will take the blame on this one -- instead of building a venture capital fund to save Madison, we've been too busy blogging.)

Nonetheless, in this departure, as in every such loss of a business, we see the true ethos of the free market. Consider the August 14 statement from the companies:

Calder and Thielbar family members will continue in similar job assignments. Both families are excited about the immediate and future opportunities from the expanded product line and dealer capabilities. The merged management team will be one of the most knowledgeable and experienced in the asphalt products industry, enabling CBC to deliver better products, better matched to industry needs. [Mauldin/PSI newsletter, 2007.08.14]

Similar job assignments... expanded product line and dealer capabilities... better products, better matched to industry needs... Such are the values we live by. No mention of the sadness of leaving home, of uprooting social connections. No mention of the value of staying and living in one place, of being a part of a community.

This is not to say that the Thielbars haven't been good community members; they have. (Plus, Thielbar scion Trevor was my patient debate partner for a full year at MHS.) But the imperatives of the free market can trump even the best community spirit... and for the most part, we accept that. The free-market theology says we must subordinate all other values -- home, community, connection -- to the needs of industry.

Mrs. Madville Times offers this observation from a rather different theology:

[Wendell] Berry supports his claim about rampaging professionals with two observations. First, such folk must be "'upwardly mobile' transients who will permit no stay or place to interrupt their personal advance." They "must have no local allegiances" for "in order to be able to desecrate, endanger, or destroy a place … one must be able to leave it and forget it." Success requires a transient mobility which necessarily results in homelessness. The kind of careerism taken for granted in much of American culture implies that "one must never be able to think of any place as one's home; one must never think of any place as anyone else's home." In such a context, successfully educated people "cannot take any place seriously because they must be ready at any moment, by the terms of power and wealth in the modern world, to destroy any place." Placelessness and perpetual homelessness lie at the root of ecological vandalism.
--Steven Bouma-Prediger, Hope College, and Brian Walsh, University of Toronto, "Education for Homelessness or Homemaking? The Christian College in a Postmodern Culture" [PDF format], presented at the "Christian Scholarship – for What?" conference, Calvin College, September 28, 2001.

Placelessness, perpetual homelessness... such is the price of casting our lot with free-market theology.

p.s.: South Carolina has individual (2.5-7%) and corporate (5%) income tax.