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
I don't and never have hated Jewish people as some idiot who put a swasticker in a reply to me , wants to make it look.
I'm talking from a purely historical point of view.
There are many Jews who dislike the Zionist tactics of Israel.
But scream anti-Semite and everybody jumps , especially the Free Republic censor hounds.
unFree Republic , just like the one we live in.
I doubt anyone would even get close to you, let alone 'surround' you. :-)
Such policy would protect the Free Market and keep it from being corrupted by nations wholly incompatable with the free market that took advantage of it without providing any benefit off freedom to their people (which would provide us with the benefit of a compatible market to trade in).
If a nation did conform, and if they practiced proven republican prinicples of government that allowed their people true liberty based on fundamental moral principle, then their access to our markets and our access to their markets would be open and principally subject to the true free market control.
But that access would have to work both ways, and the people there would have to truly be free to excel, to innovate and to raise themselves up in their own society...purchasing whatever our economy could provide for them while we did likewise.
IMHO, that's free trade as it should be, and it means free market trade between FREE nations...which enhances, grows and strengthens the free market, instead of watering it down, diluting and corrupting it which is what we are presently doing.
Such an agreement would not be offerred at all to nations who were the anti-thesis of those Republican principles.
Hey, I just found someone else who wants to "reign in" capitalism. Like you, she objects to: Who was it? Hillary Clinton.
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How dare you compare me to that corrupt whore? And you know nothing about me.
I believe in capitalism, but in the same way that Teddy Roosevelt did. I HATE Robber Barons and Slave Labour, and I DO think we need labor laws in this country, else we WOULD be running sweatshops full of children just like we did before the turn of the century.
Capitalism is great, if practiced with morality.
Unfortunatly, the moral fiber of this country has been frayed for generations.
Since you like ugly comparisons and name-calling, I will not address you further on this subject.
Tia
Do you have a sister?
P.S. I would only nuke someone who repeatedly asks stupid questions.
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I try hard not to get into pissing contests on FR.
I have two sisters. I am not on speaking terms with either.
The one is a spoiled liberal who has had everything handed to her because she was the baby . She thinks Hillary Clinton and the UN are a good idea, hates the military and likes socialism.
She Is very pretty though, far more so than I ever was. she is a figure-skater.
The other is just plain crazy, a diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic who likes drugs and guns and last I checked was under arrest for having punched out a cop.
You want nothing to do with my immediate family .
*I* am the Black Sheep of the family, pro-military and for school-vouchers. The last big argument I had with my father ( a proud member of the NEA and the National Federation of Teachers) was over Gulf War I and his later fascination with Bill Clinton.
I have since disowned them.
Tia
I prefer to use the term free enterprize and free market and couple them with morality. Because when you apply free...as in individual liberty and accountability...it necessitates morality. That's what is so galling and insidious about the use of the term free trade ... it is very misleading and disenginuous IMHO, meant to lull people into an acceptance of something that has nothing to do with true freedom.
Just like our Constitutional Republic MUST be coupled with morality in order for it to work for the same reasons.
Best Fregards...and per your profile, copngrats on your 21st anniversary this year. My lovely wife and I celebrated our 25th in April.
Bingo!
Business plans are usually 5 yr plans.
How far out is the Bush "economic plan"...Komrade?
Capitalism is a word that can mean so many things. Just a little too general for me because anyone, regardless of motive, who seeks, trades in, gathers, spends or deals in it is a capitalist.
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Jeff,
That is interesting, and thank you!
Under that defination of capitalism, I am definately a capitalist. I do a lot on the Net and with Ebay and I once paid for most of a trip to Disney by brokering Beanie Babies. During the 90's, I got into the stock-market and turned the left-over Beanie money into enough to build a sun-room and put a deck on the back of the house.
Thank God I got out in time too! LOL!
I guess what I object to about how people do business these days is that personal responsibility and accountability have gone by the wayside, so some business and people gouge.
I am no fan of unions and consider them a Neccessary Evil.
I was completly disgusted at 9-11, where CEOs of airlines, simultanoiusly laid people off, begged the Fed for yet more money
( yet some of them were going bank-rupt years before 9-11 due to corruption or mis-management) and yet many of these same CEOs got HUGE year-end bonuses.
That is just not right, and it is the sort of behavior that spawned unions in the first place.
With power and position goes responsibility and that means looking out for your workers ( within reason) and showing them the same loyalty you expect from them.
Too few business do that . I know WAY more than I ought to about GM and it's machinations. And I won't even begin with WorldCom! LOL!
I like what you write!
And Happy Anniversary to you and your lady, too!
FReegards!
Tia
I did no such thing. I compared what you wrote about capitalism to what hillary clinton wrote about capitalism and noted the similarities.
If you insist upon taking that observation personally, so be it.
Thank you. Five kids and two grandkids later (a third is being born later today and we are about ready to head to the hospital), we look back and wonder at how the time has passed.
...it has passed, as it were, a dream to us.
But despite the bumps along the way, and the times of sorrow...the dream has been a good one, a true all-American one. I am focused and committed on making sure it stays that way for my kids and grandkids.
Fregards.
”The floor of misinformation, misrepresentation, distortion, and outright falsehood about capitalism is such that the young people of today have no ided (and virtually no way of discovering any idea) of its actual nature. While archeologists are rummaging throught te ruins of millennia for scraps of pottery and bits of bones, from which to reconstruct some information about prehistorical existence – the events of less than a century ago are hidden under a mound more impenetrable than the geological debris of winds, floods, and earthquakes: a mound of silence.”(Laz: Did you think I was joking about Russia being more capitalist these days than America? I wasn't.)--Ayn Rand, Capitalism, the Unknown Ideal, 1966”The nineteenth century was the ultimate product and expression of the intellectual trend of the Renaissance and the Age of Reason, which means: of a predominantly Aristotelian philosophy. And for the first time in history, it created a new economic system, the necessary corollary of political freedom, a system of free trade on a free market: capitalism.
No, it was not a full, perfect, unregulated, totally laissez-faire capitalism - as it should have been. Various degrees of government interference and control still remained, even in America – and this is what led to the eventual destruction of capitalism But the extent to which certain countries were free was the exact extent of their economic progress. America, the freest, achieved the most.
”Never mind the low wages and the harsh living conditions of the early years of capitalism. They were all that the national economies of the time could afford. Capitalism did not create poverty – it inherited it. Compared to the centuries of precapitalist starvation, the living conditions of the poor in the early years of capitalism were the first chance the poor had ever had to survive. As proof – the enormous growth of the European population during the nineteenth century, a growth of over 300 percent, as compared to the previous growth of something like 3 percent per century.
--Ayn Rand, Faith and Force: The destroyers of the Modern World, 1982Observe the paradoxes built up about capitalism. It has been called a system of selfishness – yet it is the only system that drew men to unite on a large scale into great countries, and peacefully to cooperate across national boundaries, while all the collectivist, internationalist, One-World systems are splitting the world into Balkanized tribes.Capitalism has been called a system of greed – yet it is the system that raised the standard of living of its poorest citizens to heights no collectivist system has ever begun to equal, and no tribal gang can conceive of.
Capitalism has been called nationalistic – yet it is the only system that banished ethnicity, and made it possible, in the United States, for men of various, formerly antagonistic nationalities to live together in peace.
Capitalism has been called cruel – yet it brought such hope, progress and general good will that the young people of today, who have not seen it, find it hard to believe.
As to pride, dignity, self-confidence, self-esteem – these are characteristics that mark a man for martyrdom in a tribal society and under any social system except capitalism.
--Ayn Rand, Global Balkanization
off-ramp: "Excellent! Exactly my sentiments, except I would have used the term "Third World" instead of "slave." "
The dream of wannabe global governors -- those who have taken free-trade to the max and will not be satisfied until they can exploit and control the natural resources and labor pool (fondly referred to as 'human resources' even by our own gummint) of the world.
The only things holding up the globalists plan is the jealously-guarded claim to sovereignty, independence and self-determination by middle-class Americans, who, by the way, might be the only people on the planet who claim and practice 'inalienable rights.' Certainly the elitists don't -- nor the welfare/slave class.
But how long can the middle-class hold out when the would-be global governors are chewing around the edges, inflicting a pretty deep gash into middle-class wealth and limiting it by taxation? Wealth is not a relative thing, for it denotes personal independence and free-will. And having independence keeps real political power in the proper hands. In the hands of a free people.
Once America is turned into an 'inter-dependent' nation, the clean-up operation for the rest of the world will be a cake-walk. And the bottom tier of the elitists -- those who stand in the 'wings' and hold the coats of the rapists will be manning the largest bureaucracy ever to exist on Planet Earth. (There ya go, NGO's. Something you've always looked forward to.)
And who then will be concerned when everyone is laying back saying, 'I got pipe, I got hash, I got mat and 'mate.' What more could I ask for?'
It's a multi-front war against personal independence and the independence of any nation. The economic front seems to be on the front burner, right next to the 'moral/cultural' front which is about to boil over.
So there you have it. Everything is related and working in concert to reduce the world to rubble, as the elitists would have it, as long as they are on the top of the heap.
(Nuke China? Why even think about it? China has always 'nuked' its own.)
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