Who’s Building the Do-It-Ourselves Economy?

[The Lawspeaker]

Who’s Building the Do-It-Ourselves Economy?

Corporations aren’t hiring, and Washington is gridlocked. Here’s how we take charge of our own livelihoods.

Corbyn Hightower was doing everything right. She worked long hours selling natural skin care products, flying between cities to meet customers, staying in posh hotels. She pulled down a salary that provided her family of five with a comfortable home in a planned community, a Honda SUV, health insurance, and regular shopping trips for the best natural foods, clothes, shoes, and toys.

Then the recession hit. Her commissions dried up, and the layoff soon followed. Life for Corbyn, her stay-at-home husband, and three children changed quickly.

First the family moved to a low-rent house down the street from a homeless shelter. They dropped cable TV, Wi-Fi, gym membership, and most of the shopping. Giving up health insurance was the most difficult step—it seemed to Corbyn that she was failing to provide for her young daughters. Giving up the car was nearly as difficult.

As our economy goes through tectonic shifts, this sort of adaptation is becoming the new normal. Security for our families will increasingly depend on rebuilding our local and regional economies and on our own adaptability and skills at working together. At the same time, we need government to work on behalf of struggling families and to make the investments that create jobs now and opportunities for coming generations. That will require popular movements of ordinary people, willing to push back against powerful moneyed interests.

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[Albion]

The coalition in Britain is very Tory-dominated and as a result very free-trade and individualist in outlook.
They came in and said they'd make cuts and really went on about how they would provide training for young people and encourage people to start businesses, but what businesses can people start?

As I see it the problem is that the UK's internal market is over-saturated by services.
I heard a few figures thrown about before, something like 70 to 90% of the UK economy is internal trade apparently.
But what are we trading? Retail and finance followed by... more retail and finance...

The problem is the businesses people start tend to be nice little retailers selling British and foreign produced items, especially food whilst a lot fewer companies actually make things or export!
People don't realise that we have to balance all these imports of cheap TV's and foreign-grown food (much of it unnecessary) by selling things to the rest of the world in return. We cannot simply keep buying things from around the world and then just selling to each other, we have to trade (unless we made an effort to becoming largely self-sufficient as a nation anyway).

We need more companies which make and export things. Even farming or exploiting oil or fishing are producing (or harvesting) something.

We need more manufacturers. We're the 13th largest exporter in the world, something people often forget when moaning about how little industry we have left, but to be honest they have a point when they see what we once had to what we have now.
We rank behind the Netherlands as an exporter (but the figures for the Netherlands will be inflated by the international use of it's ports anyway).

We mainly export oil, gas, pharmaceuticals, chemicals, white goods (washing machines, fridges), vehicles, heavy machinery, seafood and cereals amongst other things.