TobagoJack Re: "Can Americans Compete?" The only reason such a question would be of any importance is if you believe that things will continue on in the future pretty much as they have in the recent past. For a short while, maybe. But just on and on generation after generation? I don't think there is the slightest chance.
I believe that most of the posters here feel deep down in their gut that globalism is a rotten and unsustainable scheme, though for different reasons. The economists who post here point to the failings of the fiat currency system and its mismanagement and some of these talented gentlemen are casting bets on the odds of at least the beginnings of that failure. The lefties here are alarmed at the human disasters being wrought by globalism all over the third world. They also oppose the environmental destruction, pollution and waste of resources brought on by the needless orgy of consumption globalism encourages along with the accelerated production of greenhouse gasses. Those who think nationalism is important see globalism as a destructive force in the world. If a biologist posts here they hate it because all the unnecessary global traffic spreads invaisve species. Those concerned about energy and resource depletion realise that the devil himself could not have designed a more wasteful and less efficient system. US Populists hate to see interesting and meaningful work, even of the factory type, being replaced by the dullest and most mundane employment imaginable.
Global trade on the scale we now have is not the being pushed along by the dead hand of Adam Smith or the result of some "natural" process; it is pure and simply the result of policy. There is nothing "free" or "natural" about it. And the reason for the policy is mostly the result of rank corruption and payoffs to politicians, most of them in Washington, D.C. but also to a number of their peers scattered around the world.
Globalism, like Marxism and many other of the destructive "isms" didn't just arrive in the world, it was a human invention and has been nurtured and promoted as it evolved to its present form. You can see its it taking shape 100 years ago with Cecil Rhodes and was a project of the British Roundtables and other vectors. But in my lifetime you can point to those "big thinkers",and "one-worlders" like David and Nelson Rockefeller and their allies who did every thing in their power to set the globalist scheme in motion.
You see, even when Nelson was Vice President back in the 1970's the potential dangers of an expanded human footprint in the world were becoming known, indeed his administration was the first one to consider such problems seriously. But as young men David and Nelson watched our science bring us the atom bomb, nylon, penicillin, sulfa drugs and many other wonders and indeed they knew and had interviewed many of these inventors, even though the brothers knew next to nothing of science themselves.
But as VP Nelson was told not to worry about pollution or resource depletion or anything else. Science would solve all the problems. Nelson was told that nuclear fusion was just around the corner, that by the end of the century thats where most of our energy would come from. And with "unlimited" energy that fusion would provide pollution was no problem. He was also told that anti-gravity and many other wonders were soon to be developed and he was told this by folks he didn't understand any more that the Manhattan Project physicists he met thirty years earlier. But in his mind if we could do these things and go to the moon we could do anything.
And here we are thirty years hence and I don't think we are a bit closer to nuclear fusion or the other-worldly wonders than men of David and Nelson's circle were made to believe were forthcoming. But we are the heirs to a disaster in the making based on the misconceptions of those "futurists" of the generation past.
A return to the economic nationalism of the past will make such concepts as "can we compete" meaningless.
Slagle |
