Stability, a Subway, and the U.S.

If you read articles from several publications and listened to certain presidential candidates in 2016, you might conclude the U.S. is corrupted to its core.  You heard it. Examples like the wealthy control everything. Big business is in cozy partnership with government.  You are wrong. Sometimes it helps to offer some perspective. 

As for the subway, you will find a reference to that at the end of the post. 

Back to stability.  Last week I was reading Bloomberg BusinessWeek and one of the featured articles is on Operation Car Wash. It is an investigation starting out in 2014 as a money laundering operation. It has since grown to a massive corruption investigation with over 100 search warrants issued and arrests of leading public and private leaders. The following article does an excellent job noting the origin of this scandal and where it it apparently headed. Link:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-05-25/brazil-s-car-wash-scandal-reveals-a-country-soaked-in-corruption

I bring this up because the U.S. does not experience corruption to any degree like this.  Yes, we have investigations, trials, sentencing, etc.  But never to this scale.  Why? I suspect that by and large, the U.S. is a country of laws, not of men.  What does that get you?  Keep reading.

When I started in economic development I had a conversation with an executive associated with the Tandy Corp. Tandy (now known as Radio Shack) was headquartered in Fort Worth, Texas. This was the late 1980s.  At the time Tandy was in the process of moving manufacturing operations from the Far East back to Fort Worth. I asked the executive why, after all, business costs were far less expensive in the Far East.  His answer was stability.  The U.S. offered stability and that was worth the premium a U.S. manufacturing operation may cost.  

Stability.  We cannot always see it. We may not realize it. But when you lose it, you definitely experience it.

On personal note, when I started my career at the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce, I parked in the Tandy lot and took the only private subway in the U.S. to work.  If you got to a lot early enough, you got a coveted spot under the overpass. That meant your car was shaded.  In writing this, I ran across this piece on the Tandy Subway. It ceased operations in 2002. But for me, it was a real thrill.  Link to story:

http://www.jtbell.net/transit/FtWorth/