Don't Kill the Goose That Lays the Golden Eggs!

In case anyone doesn't know the old fable: A fellow found that his goose was laying golden eggs. He became wealthy by selling the gold; every day or so there was another egg! But after a while he got greedy and wanted to find the source of the gold, which he figured was somewhere inside the goose. He killed the goose, and that was the end of it; there was no gold inside, and the goose naturally laid no more eggs. (I think he had to sell off his mansion and lands after that!)

There's lots of arguing and posturing going on in America about taxes, unemployment, recession, etc. Somehow most of it seems to fail in getting to the point or doing any good.
In brief, here's the golden egg analogy: when corporations try to minimize payrolls by automating and outsourcing as many jobs as possible, people are put out of work. And people who are out of work don't have the money to buy the widgets the corporations are selling! Yes, the worker is the goose that laid the golden eggs.

Take the City of Milwaukee, for example. When it was a hotbed of factories and manufacturing companies -- the Heil Company; Pabst Brewery; Ambrosia Chocolate; Allen-Bradley, to name a few -- it may not have been the coolest or most trendy city in America. Okay, it wasn't; the preponderance of blue-collar workers didn't make it a San Francisco, a New York City, or even a Chicago. But back in the 1950s and 1960s Milwaukee did have great schools; clean, attractive streets; and overall, a wholesome and thriving feel. Now it's a kind of sad testament to the past, with an amazing number of buildings that haven't changed for forty or fifty years except by getting older.

What changed? Well, all the companies I've listed above are gone. There were probably many more - some of them smaller, like Kearney & Trecker; some larger. Where'd they go? I heard that Allen-Bradley moved a lot of its operations to Texas, where wages are lower and unions weaker -- someone can write and correct me if that's wrong; I know that A-B was bought by Rockwell. The huge wide monolith of a factory building that stands in the near South Side of Milwaukee, with "Big Stash" (pronounce that 'stosh', please), the largest four-sided clock in the world at its top, is largely inactive; the marble bus-stop inserts at its corners are little-used now.
So some would say that the unions killed Milwaukee (some would say it was the welfare system, designed for out-of-work factory workers but mainly used by others, some of whom traveled to Milwaukee for that purpose), but I think this is a clear case of Golden Goose Death.
When the workers were well-paid, they bought all sorts of things -- houses, lawn mowers, beer (I guess they still buy beer, no matter what), baseball tickets, televisions, all of it. When the workers are out of a job, they buy almost nothing. Some move away, but a lot of them stick around, since their relatives are in the area -- the tendency of people to think they should be able to thrive anywhere is an interesting topic.

What do corporate leaders want or expect these workers to do? Work for lower wages? Not work at all? Live in "group houses" if they can't afford their own homes? Not have children if they can't afford them? Move to (where??)?

Corporations are not charities. I get that. But they could take a view of workers as partners and raisons-d'etre, instead of as enemies. Corporate leaders could remind themselves that money can't be made when nobody has any, because they've taken it all. Nobody in America will buy your widgets if all your widget-makers are machines and all your office workers are in India.

Because, duh, American workers won't have any money.