Cars vs. Pianos: What if FDR Had Bailed Out The Piano Industry in the 1930s As Demand Declined?

In 1960, we began to see the first major international challenge to what was left of the US piano industry. By 1970, Japan's production outstripped the United States, and it has been straight down ever sense. By 1980, Japan made twice as many as the United States. Then production shifted to Korea. Today China is the center of world piano production.

And what happened to the once-beloved American piano industry? Only Steinway survives to make luxury instruments that few can afford. The rest moved overseas under new ownership or were completely wiped out. Does anyone care that much? Not too many. Have we been devastated as a nation and a people because of it? Not at all. It was just a matter of the economic facts. The demand went down and production costs for the pianos that were wanted were much cheaper elsewhere.

In the same way, many people will bemoan the loss of the US car industry and wax eloquent on the glory days of the 1957 Chevy. But we need to deal with the reality that all that is in the past. Economics demands forward motion, a conforming to the facts on the ground and a relentless and realistic assessment of the relationship between cost and price, supply and demand. We must learn to love these forces in society because they are the only things that keep rationality alive in the way we use resources. Without them, there would be nothing but waste and chaos, and eventual starvation and death. We simply cannot live outside economic reality.

Let's say that FDR had initiated a bailout of the piano industry and then even taken it over and nationalized it. The same firms would have made the same pianos for decades and decades. But that wouldn't have stopped the Japanese industry from taking off in the 1960s and 1970s. Americans would have far preferred them because they would have been cheaper. American pianos, because they would be state owned, would fall in quality, lower and lower to the point that they would become like a Soviet car in the 1960s. Of course you could set up tariff barriers. That would have forced American pianos on us.

In the end you have to ask, is it really worth trillions in subsidies, vast tariffs, impositions all around, just to keep what you declare to be an essential industry alive? Well, eventually, as we have learned in the case of pianos, this is not essential. Things come and things go. Such is the world. Such is the forward motion of history in a world of relentless progress generated by the free market. Thank goodness that FDR didn't bother saving the US piano industry! As a result, Americans can get a huge range of instruments from all countries in the world at any price they are willing to pay.

~Jeffrey Tucker of the Mises Institute, "The End of the U.S. Piano Industry"