Heavy Industry

People are always telling you to do what you love, and the money will follow. I could see how this maxim was useful if you were starting a restaurant, or a bookstore or a string quartet or something. There are millions of people who would love to do each of those things. It even makes sense that people would go into software, or airplane manufacture, or construction. I can imagine the appeal of seeing an airplane that you built yourself (with the help of thousands of employees.) It probably brings tears to your eyes, if you're that kind of person.

On the other hand, there are some industries where you have to wonder, why would anyone bother? This applies to foundries, industrial farms and container shipping, but take chemical plants as an example. Someone has to produce all the boron or chloromethane or whatever. But what's the incentive? I took this passage almost at random from Wikipedia:

A mixture of one part ammonia to nine parts air is passed over a platinum gauze catalyst at 850 °C, whereupon the ammonia is oxidized to nitric oxide. As the gas mixture cools to 200–250 °C, the nitric oxide is in turn oxidized by the excess of oxygen present in the mixture, to give nitrogen dioxide. This is reacted with water to give nitric acid.

You don't have to read that if you don't want to; I guarantee it is real boring. I suppose it's possible to find things like that interesting (but only barely), but it's a long way from that to setting up a factory in the Mississippi Delta and making nitric acid by the ton. I'm not even sure how you would if you wanted to. Suppose you have a big fondness for sodium hydroxide. What's the first step? Buying the huge vats and electrodes and consoles? Getting a license? Is there licensing? Where are you going to get the countless million dollars that you need? If I were a banker, you would be laughed out of my bank.

And even once you get the factory set up, what's the payoff? Well, obviously, money, but you would have to be a ridiculous miser to think that any amount of money was worth the sheer hassle. People hate chemical companies. Everyone needs methyl isocyanate, but nobody likes to think of all the Bhopals that go along with if. It gets worse, too, because heavy industry is the most likely to face A) government regulation and B) unions. That's probably how it should be, but dealing with the EPA and the shop steward must suck all the remaining joy out of business.

Of course, I'm exaggerating. Nobody starts factories nowadays. Not only is America being deindustrialized, but all the remaining factories are controlled by corporations. Dow Chemical is the one who has to deal with the government and the purchase orders and the teamsters, not you. And because they're a big corporation, the annoyance is diffused, and everyone's job is bearable. But those corporations had to start somewhere. Am I supposed to believe that Abraham DuPont got his start making nitric acid at home, before he worked up enough money to buy a factory? (He sealed off the linen closet in his bathroom. That was the nitric oxide closet, and then he ran a garden hose from the keyhole into the bathtub, and bottled it with a dipper and funnel. His wife thought it was exasperating.) Maybe getting into business was easier back then, but it couldn't have been much easier.

And if it *is* true that setting up a chemical company now is too much trouble, well, that's kind of sad too. There's a monopoly in the NaOH market, but nobody can be bothered to break it up. And our industrial economy is built on this ossified basis? William Jennings Bryan almost said it best:

Burn down your cities and leave our chemical plants, and your cities will spring up again as if by magic; but destroy our chemical plants and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country.