Make no mistake. This marks the end of tightly integrated international trade.
“This marks the end of tightly integrated international trade.”
All of us have benefited from that trade, but a significant number have been greatly harmed by it. The way trade is formerly and is currently implemented has been a double-edged sword. It made things like cell phones available cheaply to millions. The cost of that was hundreds of thousands of Chinese who are very nearly slave labor. (Not to discount the Chinese labor that is actually slave labor.) The other cost of that is the thousands of lost American jobs. It used to be someone with only a high school education started in the mail room and twenty years later might be running the company. All of those ladders to success went abroad.
The cultural and economic impact to America’s working class is huge. Recovering from this will take decades and the problem is that governments and regulations are dead set against starting a company or hiring people. And the attempt to tax everything will make recovering even more difficult. Somehow, we need to get government and probably unions out of the equation or we’ll be sitting on disaster for decades to come.
I asked my mother how her family survived the Depression. She told us about the many, many jobs her father undertook. Each of those jobs today requires a license, insurance and bonds. Some of them require a contractor’s license and those are purposely lengthy and hard to get. The problems facing “recovery” are lengthy and structural.
Could you elaborate what you mean?