A column about history, culture, policy, and things in between.
You don't need some blogger with a day job to tell you that what has been happening at Harley-Davidson recently is not happy news for our community or the greater Milwaukee area.
But there is a lesson here that we should consider and hopefully learn. The lesson is that people who own and manage capital will deploy that capital where they believe it will render the greatest return. We can spend countless hours debating whether this is "right" or "fair" or "good". But if we are interested in developing effective public policy in response to such developments, we must come to understand that it is TRUE.
This is certainly true in our personal lives, and we execute hundreds of decisions each week that reflect this reality. Ludwing von Mises, the founder of the Austrian School of Economics, understood that at its seminal level, economics is nothing more than the study of how people make decisions relative to their finite resources. His ground breaking treatise on economics was subsequently entitled Human Action.
If the bank down the street offers a better rate on deposits or CD's, we bid farewell to our current bank. If realtor "X" will sell your house for a lower commission than realtor "Y", and can offer comparable service, you choose "X", and so on. Now these are simplistic examples to be sure. But we err if we think that men and women who are responsible for the stewardship of capital and the long term interests of their share-holders, employ a different rationale.
You can draw your own conclusions about what has happened at Harley. But a clear thinking approach to the formation of public policy should at least begin with the recognition of this reality. And because the driving factors of this dynamic lay in the foundational constructs of human behavior, no politician from either party, no matter how insistent, can change it. No legislation, no matter how well intended or artfully crafted, can change it. And no podium-thumping rhetoric from social activists of either political persuasion can change it.
The laws of economics are immutable. It is within our power to ignore them, but we cannot suspend them.
That is the lesson of recent developments at Harley-Davidson.
