NIMBY

Harris County, Ga. Photo by Thomsonmg2000, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

To start with, let’s get this out of the way: Nikki Haley announced yesterday that she will be voting for Donald Trump despite having said in the past, “We shouldn’t have followed him, and we shouldn’t have listened to him. And we can’t let that ever happen again.”

I’m not surprised at her announcement. Dismayed, maybe, but not surprised.

Haley may be voting for Trump, but I and thousands of her voters won’t be. For many of us, it wasn’t so much that we were voting for Haley as for the vestiges of a once-proud, once-conservative party that no longer exists. We are loyal to principles, not to a politician or party.

But Haley no longer matters, so let’s talk about something else.

Our community Facebook group is usually good for a laugh or two. That was the case over the past few days when a local news outlet reported that our rural county was in the running for a semiconductor manufacturing facility.

You might think this would be good news. A lot of people are worried about the economy (unfairly since the US pandemic recovery leads the world) and the encroachment of artificial intelligence and automation on the job market. It seems likely that people would welcome a new source of jobs as well as a chance to wrest back some control over the manufacture of computer chips from China. After all, semiconductors and computer chips are not only vital to the modern economy but to national security as well.

You might think that, but you’d be wrong.

I’m going to qualify my observations by noting that the internet is not real life. If the opinions on the internet represented a majority of Americans, Elizabeth Warren would be president and I’d have seen a lot more people labeling their pronouns in face-to-face interactions than I have. (For the record, the number is one, and that person was very nice.)

Having said that, the reaction from the good internet citizens of my county was anger and suspicion. More than a few were very mistrustful of any industry that Senators Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock might bring to the area.

“With Warnock, Ossoff, and the United Way all being tied into this….I SMELL SOMETHING FISHY!” one poster commented.

“Be sure to thank Georgia Democratic Senators Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock come next election by replacing them. I’m sure they got their hands in a money jar somewhere,” another opined.

It seems that the good folks of red Georgia counties don’t want any jobs foisted on them by Democratic senators.

One of my favorite comments was the poster who screamed across the keyboard in all caps and with no punctuation, “KEEP IT IN CHINA WE DONT NEED THIS HERE.”

Now, my county voted for Trump by 74 percent in 2020, and I’ll guarantee you that most of the people in this Facebook group approve of Trump’s trade war with China and the goal of returning manufacturing to America. (Manufacturing never really left, by the way. US manufacturing hit an all-time high in 2023. We just build more with fewer workers.)

Do you see the inconsistency? They want to bring more manufacturing to the US, but they don’t want the factories that come with bringing more manufacturing to the US. The acronym “NIMBY,” which stands for “not in my backyard,” applies perfectly here.

A response to the China post illustrates this, as a commenter argued, “We definitely don’t need in China either, but not here, maybe North Dakota where we have a crap load of land.”

“Or west Nebraska,” the original commenter agreed.

So we don’t want China to have the plant after all, just not here. Put it in North Dakota or Nebraska.

The obvious problem with those options is the lack of a large, educated workforce. That and those states are where we grow food. Do we really want to destroy farmland to build factories?

Many of these people probably don’t realize that Governor Brian Kemp almost certainly had a hand in attempting to steer the plant to Georgia. The development is almost certainly a bipartisan effort with the Biden Administration’s CHIPS Act likely providing some impetus to move the semiconductor industry into the US and Gov. Kemp’s efforts at workforce development and higher education helping to prepare the labor pool.

Be careful what you wish for. If you want to increase American manufacturing, you’re going to have to have more factories. And factories have to be close to workers.

I’d say that these commenters are getting what they wanted, but they haven’t thought through the consequences. That’s an affliction that affects both sides at various times, but it’s one that Trump voters ought to specifically consider, especially given the former president’s agenda on reducing trade by implementing a 10 percent tax on all imports and intentionally devaluing the dollar. Both strategies would reduce international trade, which is what many Trump supporters want, but it would do so by making almost everything more expensive, which is not what they want.

Actions have consequences. That includes the actions of voters and politicians.

Opposing the shrill voices in the Facebook group, there is probably a group of young workers who want to find jobs that have more to offer than McDonald’s (not that McDonald’s workers have anything to be ashamed of) and who want to move into the county to get away from the congestion and crime of the city. This links to another frequent topic in the group, that of resisting new housing developments.

Economic growth brings factories. Factories bring jobs. Jobs bring workers. And workers bring new houses, congestion, crowded schools, and higher property taxes and costs. All that probably factors into some of the opposition to the possibility of the semiconductor plant as well.

Things seldom stay the same. Communities are either growing or dying. Some people are going to be unhappy either way, so I say bring on the growth and let the chips fall where they may.