Yes, We Can Build a Moat
Mon Mar 03, 2008 at 12:28:54 AM PDT
I've heard twice now Obama say that we can't build a moat around America. He says we should "embrace globalization" and that our workers "can compete".
So it looks like the change that Obama is advocating doesn't much include trade policy. This is to be expected. I still want him to win.
But I would like to point out that if there is one country in the world that could build a protectionist moat around its borders, the US is it. And this is important because it goes to the lie that has been propagated for decades.
We hear it all the time: the US economy cannot survive protectionist trade policies. You hear it from politicians, leaders of trade groups, of course, and you hear it obedient economists - the stupidest single group of individuals on Earth.
But the fact is, the US could completely cut off all trade with the rest of the world and not only survive, but be better off for it - that is, after the initial shock it would cause the global economy.
The history of globalization is instructive here. About a century ago a bunch of uber-wealthy business men, mostly British, saw sovereignty as an impediment to their ability to own the world. They formed little groups to plot and scheme how they could globalize the economies of nations so their capital and goods could flow freely back to their banks in London and New York and Geneva. So pervasive was their influence, sparing no expense even to the point of erecting an entire universityto park their globalist views, that it is rare to even see debate on the subject anymore.
One thing however, that is often missed in this almost secret history of the 20th Century - they got the idea from the US. Many will not remember but the United States wasn't always called that. We used to call it these United States. Plural. And this gets back to our moat.
What these British business men saw in those United States was David Ricardo's wet dream - a tariff free trade zone. Everything you could want from a truly globalized world was always here in these United States. And Europe wanted what we had.
So this sounds like I'm using the US, with its tariff free interstate commerce as a model for why globalization is good right. Not quite. The key word is sovereignty. Our United States are also under a common federal legal framework. A common currency. Common language, up until recently.
We could trade with ourselves exclusively. We would be incredibly prosperous in doing so, with each state representing a country with its own factors of production. We sit on the cream of the crop in world's resources - a benefit most countries do not share. And we have one of the best trained work forces on the planet - although that is changing rapidly.
So the US could be a self-contained economy, no problem. But I'm not advocating that. I just believe we need to stop the lying about trade. And the idea that the US is dependent on free trade to survive is a lie. Large trans-national corporations are dependent on "free trade" for their excessive profits. But not the US economy, and certainly not labor.
And this brings me to my final point. What exactly is "labor" anyway. We've done our country a severe disservice by defining labor in strictly economic terms. I said economists were about the stupidest group of human beings on Earth. This is one of the reasons why.
As progressives, and as Democrats, we have to start reconnecting labor with society. And it's easy to do. When you see a company move overseas or to Mexico, look at what it really does to American society. This isn't just about labor or wages. This is about life.
The manufacturing exodus of the last 40 years has destroyed American society. It has destroyed families, schools, communities.
The jackals of free market capitalism, and the national media they control, have done a smashup job of selling this exodus as inevitable. And they've done quite well at concealing the real consequences from millions of American television viewers.
But only the economics of stupidity decouples such changes to the economy from the real life effects of our citizens. They dress it up in corporate speak like labor mobility instead of calling it what it is - societal devastation.
The catchy new phrase of the nineties was portability where workers were "flexible" and could up and move to Seattle on a dime. I'm sorry, but only a PR firm like Mark Penn's could come up with this shit. This is not how human society works. Families are not portable. They are connected to communities. They have friends, churches, schools. Children involved in plays, music recitals, sports teams.
But not anymore. Now we have portable families. Credit card communities, and failing society. It is not a coincidence. The degree to which we have allowed a bunch of greedy sacks to destroy American lives, the American way of life, with their economics of greed and stupidity cannot be overstated. We've been sold a bill of goods. Duped.
In fact, the selling of free trade may be the biggest con ever played on a gullible nation. And what we as Americans have to do is demand that the economy serve humanity and not the other way around. And we have to stop listening to idiot economists - and that includes Paul Krugman who in a column less than a year ago couldn't even decide if Americans are worse off than they were 40 years ago. And we have to stop listening to idiot amateurs on blogs who feel safe echoing the theories of Ricardo and Smith because that's what they learned from their idiot economics professors.
Our economics needs to be based on results. Not theories. And those results need to be stable societies, stable communities and stable families. Not corporate profits.
So no, it's not the economy, stupid. It's life. Stupid.
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