The myth of global free trade is what is killing us.
It doesn’t take an advanced to degree to understand certain basics of economics, nor does it take such a degree to see the big holes in common economic theories. Global free trade is not the panacea we have been led to believe. Neither is protectionism. It’s a false dichotomy.
Let’s kill one lie right now: Are you willing to allow labor to move as easily as goods? No? Then you do not have free trade by definition. When people can freely move to the work they prefer to do, wherever it may be, then we have full free trade. Competitive good swapping while keeping your labor barriers up is not free trade.
That’s the reason the US economy is dying. It doesn’t help we’ve convinced ourselves we are entitled to the cheapest goods in the world. It’s flaw enough to believe mere consumption on credit is somehow justified on the same terms as investment in better products (R&D) and better production efficiencies. Having a better house in the suburbs does not make you more productive; it makes you more arrogant. We give only lip service to investment in better personnel, but blatantly exploit and dumb down the consumers. We understand all too well how advertising, with all it’s manipulative tricks and mind games, is an investment in consumer desire, but we engage it while cutting our own throats. It’s not something which can be sustained.
Creating a false sense of entitlement is what the advertisers do best. It’s also an attack on the economic foundations of the nation. People who buy wisely keep buying generation after generation, just not as much. They also keep working making stuff other people need. When some schemer wants to get rich off the system, he begins herding the consumer into frantic demands for things he can’t normally afford. No one denies certain specialized appliances do make life easier, and do tend to free up more leisure time, but no one wants to discuss how the whole pursuit is morally wrong.
This is not about stern self-denial, but intelligent appraisal of reality. People who are willing to hock their futures for a few extra toys are destroying that future. The system which rewards that willingness, encourages it, is the system which destroys the very foundation of what keeps a country’s economy going. We are stuck here while our jobs are moved overseas to places with more competitive labor costs because we want more, want it now, and we can’t afford it if we make it ourselves.
I’m not sure how we got the place we value leisure time so much, since we then only have to find ways to fill it with more garbage. I suppose it comes with the intense hustle and bustle of wage-slavery versus the leisurely pace of self-employment. Centralized efficiencies of scale are a mirage. (It’s the same lie used to justify bigger and more intrusive government.) Commoditizing stuff makes it cheaper in every sense of the word. The point is, this is an appeal to the worst part of human nature. And when you debase the morality of a nation, you destroy it.
So now we have an economy where very few people know how to make or produce anything at all, but do know how to consume more than our fair share of the earth’s resources. Thus, we don’t produce anything anyone wants, we just consume. We have commoditized bologna so it’s dirt cheap and unfit to eat, but are all unemployed, so now it looks like steak. Welcome to baloney economics.
