Market Anarchy in Roofing, U.S. Manufacturing Up, and China's Down

Mark R. Crovelli has a fantastic article on LewRockwell.com today on free market anarchy in the roofing industry today.  Here are some excerpts:

The answer, quite frankly, is that the vast majority of roofing companies don’t give a rat’s ass about the governments’ laws. Most don’t care a whit whether the rich scumbags in congress don’t want them to hire Mexicans. They hire them in droves in order to drive down their prices. Most don’t care one iota whether fat OSHA office workers want them to wear unwieldy and dangerous harnesses. They simply don’t force their workers to wear them, as if the law were voluntary. Most don’t give a damn what the federal minimum wage laws say. They pay their workers as little as the workers will accept in this bad economy and the workers are fantastically happy to have the job. And most don’t give even a moment’s notice to the licensing laws for roofers in certain jurisdictions. They simply have licensed people pull permits for them as quickly as they please. Call me if you need one pulled!

I am terribly sorry to have to burst your bubble if these objections are running through your naïve little head, but city roofing inspections and building codes are a complete and utter joke. In the first place, as far as building codes and roofing codes are concerned, cities basically lift the codes from manufacturer instructions or from non-profit organizations, like the ICC. Most commonly the "codes" are simply awkward bureaucratic rehashes of what roofers can read for themselves on the felt rolls or shingle bundles. In other words, the cities basically tell roofers to follow the instructions on the package. If you think that telling roofers to follow instructions is the reason you are getting a good roof, then I have a bridge I’d like to sell to you!

Wow, it's nice to see an industry that would be normally constrained by government regulations but decides not follow and yet reports of collapsing roofs aren't in the news every day.  Imagine that!

The new ISM manufacturing report is out and wouldn't you know it, the expectations are off:

The Institute for Supply Management (ISM) rises unexpectedly in June, up 1.8 points to 55.3.

Don't get too excited yet though, most of the growth was due to increasing use of inventory stock.  From Mish:

• New orders barely rose and flirt with contraction.
• Backlog of orders is in contraction for the first time.
• Imports dropped 3.5 points and flirt with contraction.
• Prices paid dropped along with commodity prices and most likely will drop again next month. 

Even with a better than expected manufacturing in the U.S., China continues to contract:

Chinese manufacturing growth has fallen to its lowest level in more than two years, while soft data from India and South Korea have added to the picture of a slowdown in Asia after moves to tame inflation.

And the slowdown continues.