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
Actually, most folks weren't.
I bet you probably root for your stocks or 401k to go up and not down.
And I bet you invest whatever you can in their stock market, right?
You know, just my opinion and advise, but if you made a little more effort to get to know some of these folks, both those you agree with and those you disagree with, you might have a reasoned and cordial and revealing discussion...on both sides. Slash and burn rarely provides for that.
First, they are not "beloved" by anyone except professional threat-inflaters like you.
Second, the lineup will be Agricultural China vs. Smokestack China vs. the "Shang-Kong" International Trader China.
China is three nations, none of which really like the other two. Agricultural China takes the attitude that they're the "traditional China," and should run things. Smokestack China is roughly akin to the US Cotton Belt of the 1850s--clinging to an gradually obsolescent economic model, complete with chattel slavery, and unable to cope with modernity. The International Trader end of China--the region between Shanghai and Hong Kong, inclusive, which just happens to be the only region that actually makes a profit--is just sick and tired of carrying the other two deadbeat sections of China on its back.
Peasants with their pitchforks and the PLA with their tanks and machiner guns?
Nope. This will NOT be a typical foco guerrilla war. Fielded forces: Elements of the present-day PLA in each of those regions. They will be given their orders by those who happen to be senior Party leaders of those three regions when the trigger for disunion is pulled by one or more of those regions.
Think of the US Civil War--but fought with the weapons of 1961 instead of 1861.
Actually, it was Marx who was agreeing with the economic theories of Smith, Say and Ricardo. Engels explains it quite well:
If there is anything clearly exposed in political economy, it is the fate attending the working classes under the reign of Free Trade. All those laws developed in the classical works on political economy, are strictly true under the supposition only, that trade be delivered from all fetters, that competition be perfectly free, not only within a single country, but upon the whole face of the earth. These laws, which A. Smith, Say, and Ricardo have developed, the laws under which wealth is produced and distributed — these laws grow more true, more exact, then cease to be mere abstractions, in the same measure in which Free Trade is carried out. And the master of the science, when treating of any economical subject, tells us every moment that all their reasonings are founded upon the supposition that all fetters, yet existing, are to be removed from trade. They are quite right in following this method....
Thus it can justly be said, that the economists — Ricardo and others — know more about society as it will be, than about society as it is. They know more about the future than about the present. If you wish to read in the book of the future, open Smith, Say, Ricardo. There you will find described, as clearly as possible, the condition which awaits the working man under the reign of perfect Free Trade. Take, for instance, the authority of Ricardo, authority than which there is no better. What is the natural normal price of the labour of, economically speaking, a working man? Ricardo replies, “Wages reduced to their minimum — their lowest level.”...
Either you must disavow the whole of political economy as it exists at present, or you must allow that under the freedom of trade the whole severity of the laws of political economy will be applied to the working classes. Is that to say that we are against Free Trade? No, we are for Free Trade, because by Free Trade all economical laws, with their most astounding contradictions, will act upon a larger scale, upon a greater extent of territory, upon the territory of the whole earth; and because from the uniting of all these contradictions into a single group, where they stand face to face, will result the struggle which will itself eventuate in the emancipation of the proletarians....
~Frederick Engels, The Free Trade Congress at Brussels, October 9, 1847
Which most observers assumed would sort itself out in short order--and it did.
There was a palpable sense of pending disintegration. Then, enter the one two punch of Bruning and Hitler. What makes you think that if, indeed, chaos took hold in the PRC, something similar would not happen?
Simple: Germany was pretty much one nation.
Modern China, like ancient Gaul, is divided into three parts--much as the US in 1860 was in two very distinct parts.
Where is your historicaly basis and logic man!
Where's yours?
Nobody seriously anticipated that disunion and large-scale war would follow the US elections of 1860. But they did.
You wish to institute five-year economic plans, Comrade?
Heh...you crack me up.
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