No pulitzer for you, but I'm sure you'll appreciate this more:
Posted on 08/01/2003 2:05:33 PM PDT by Jeff Head
TODAY'S FREE TRADE IS NOT ABOUT THE FREE MARKET
We are in a very real battle in this nation and it is a battle for our heart and soul. It is spread out on many, many fronts...education, foreign policy, work ethic (individually and societally), immigration, the economy, moral values...and the list goes on.
Let's focus on the economy and one significant part of it...a major, growing part of it. Free Trade and foreign outsourcing.
I was going to entitle this article..."I used to make something"...or..."We used to make something in this country". But, I thought better of it and realized that such a statment was really focusing on the tail end of the issue as opposed to the root.
So, instead, I am simply calling it, "Today's Free Trade is not about the Free Market."
And it is so, today's Free Trade is NOT about the free market. Instead, in a very similar manner to other key issues in this battle for the heart and soul of America, what is happening is that a very craftily wordsmithed message of "Free Trade" has been put forth that people have bought into, thinking "How could anyone be against free trade? Why, isn't that all-American?".
Like with abortion, "How could anyone be against a woman's right to choose? Isn't that all American?".
In both cases, the craftily worded title has nothing remotely to do with what is actually going on.
The free market is the system our founders based our commerce on, where the intrinsic, underlying moral values of the people involved in the free market governed the equitable, free exchange of goods and services for other goods and services or currency. Sort of like John Adams said regarding the Constitution...
"We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for the government of any other."- John Adams, Oct. 11, 1798It is that underlying moral foundation coupled woth our liberty that made the Free Market in America the envy of the world, just like those same issues made our governmental form the envy of the world.
Well, as far as I am conerned, Adam's words could be tailored to this topic like so, ie... The Free Market was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for the economy of any other.
This is a basic truth. Like our government, our free market was not supposed to be very regulated or burdened with miriad rules. The people and the companies were to use their own moral foundation to govern themselves. But, when the moral foundation is removed, you do not have what was intended for the Constitution, and you do not have a true free market.
When we use our foreign policy and economic policy to set up shop and trade with countries, societies, organizations or to implement policies that exploit their people's mercilessly, who keep them down without a hope for true liberty or freedom, who trample the moral values our own system was based upon...and when we do it knowingly, without compuction for those very underlying values, then we do not create a free market...no, that free trade has nothing whatsoever to do with, and is in no way similar to the FREE MARKET, rather, it serves to corrupt it.
Such notions, such actions are in fact wordsmithing for popularizing and putting forth a policy to drain the United States manufacturing, technological, agricultural, energy and other critical industries in order to weaken us...plain and simple...and it is working.
Based on my own travels on behalf of US firms and then later consulting for them...that is what is really happening here in my own opinion, and until we refocus as a people on that underlying moral foundation and the absolute need for it...we will continue to lose ground.
By the way, those same principles that are working at the societal level, have equal application at the personal level too...in fact, in the end it is the sum of their working at the personal level that creates the issue at the societal level.
Jeff Head
Engineering Consultant and,
Author of The Dragon's Fury Series
How current conditions could lead to World War
August 1, 2003
Emmett, Idaho
If China starts trouble, including over Taiwan, I wouldn't oppose the idea. Their actions should have consequences.
Just blowing them up 'just to get it over with'...I don't nessesarily know about that...
Nuke? Right NOW? No.
Tax their products coming into the US and ecourage economic diversification away from China... YES.
They seriously underestimate the socialist mindset of the Chinese though. If Mr. Chen makes more money than Mr. Li, then Mr. Chen must have done something wrong. In China, Mr. Chen's excess will be taken and redistributed WAY more than anyone in America can imagine. This is the root of so much tax fraud in China.
More than that though the CCP won't allow people not under their thumbs to become successful. The last thing they want is competition, especially ideological competition.
The Chinese literally have a constant watch on income parity. If one person gets more rich than the other, then they howl about it.
So, in other words our businesses' proclaimed interests are in destroying the current ideological beliefs of the CCP.
No pulitzer for you, but I'm sure you'll appreciate this more:
Not so simple. Economically it's feasible to divide China into at least five "macro-regions" - their origins go back centuries. Nowadays the geographic division isn't very clear-cut. For instance, there are fairly well-developed cities all along the Yangtze river, just as there are huge swathes of third-world countryside even near the east coast. Generally speaking there aren't very neat faultlines for China to split along in case of social unrest. Historically China would fragment for extended periods largely due to inadequate infrastructure - i.e. it took months for officials from Beijing to reach Canton as late as the Manchu dynasty - and in the 20th century, due to Japanese aggression. Obviously these conditions can no longer arise in the 21st century.
When we use our foreign policy and economic policy to set up shop and trade with countries, societies, organizations or to implement policies that exploit their people's mercilessly, who keep them down without a hope for true liberty or freedom, who trample the moral values our own system was based upon...and when we do it knowingly, without compunction for those very underlying values, then we do not create a free market...no, that free trade has nothing whatsoever to do with, and is in no way similar to the FREE MARKET, rather, it serves to corrupt it.
Thanks much for writing this, Jeff.
Thanks for the pings, guys.
Having been there in the far east, having worked with Chinese, Indians...and also over in Eastern Europe with Romanians after the fall of the wall...we need to be very direct about how nations and societies who are the antithesis of everything it is based upon, can earn access to the free market.
Right now, we are letting those who do not practice, or intend to ever practice, those fundamental principles, have tremendous sway on our economic welfare and the free market...and it is corrupting it.
I agree.
Then why is the government on the border confiscating CD's and videos coming over the border from Mexico? Why is it the government's job to regulate how much the music industry make??? And it certainly is involved in regulated the health care industry, deciding how much doctors and hospitals can make. Also it's subsidizing health care, education, and agriculture in a very big way ---but apparently those are a couple of the only fairly healthly profitable businesses still going.
It's the American small businessman that the government is crushing along with the American worker. The politicians decided that American businesses have no purpose, and that Americans must lose their jobs to Communist laborers who have no self-determination, no right to bargain for a better lifestyle and who have no rights at all.
Ultimately the blame rests with the global capitalists, not the politicians. I can't bring myself to believe that we have that many traitors in our elected government - men and women who knowingly take measures to strengthen our economic rivals. But I'm quite ready to believe that this nation's top universities have churned out two successive generations of corporate leaders who often lack strong allegiance to American economic interests, who are heavily inclined toward moral relativism, and whose outlook has become subservient to a vague globalist ideology. Nobody elected these people to change everyone's lives - not to mention compromise the integrity of the politicians who still nominally heed the demands of the common voter. It's a painful but necessary realization that our business leaders - the capitalists themselves - have become an even bigger part of the problem than the socialist politicians we love to hate.
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