Like I've been saying. As a result of the policy of sanctions, asset freezes, and price caps, era of the free market, free trade and free flow of capital as the basis of global trade is over.For 70 years after World War II, global growth was underpinned by ongoing efforts to boost international trade by eliminating self-defeating trade barriers. Sadly, the United States started dismantling this source of shared prosperity under Donald Trump, and it has now accelerated the process under Joe Biden.
Reason? Lack of systems awareness leading to failure to accurately assess consequences of action. Likely caused by faulty reasoning resulting from cognitive-affective bias and informal fallacies. ("Believing your own bullshit.")
There is also the issue of not learning the lessons of history. The last time major jiggling with global trade was tried for national advantage, e.g., Smoot-Hawley, the outcome was aggravation of the persistent global depression that presaged world war. That was just protectionism. This is weaponizing and the target is just about everyone but the golden billion so that the golden billion can remain the golden billion.
Hmmm.
Project Syndicate
Sleepwalking Into a Global Trade War
Anne O. Krueger | former World Bank chief economist and former first deputy managing director of the International Monetary Fund; Senior Research Professor of International Economics at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, and Senior Fellow at the Center for International Development at Stanford University
Good riddance to globalism. Either we have mutually beneficial trade - or no trade.
ReplyDeleteThe push to unify the world under one belief and one banner is now causing wars.
ReplyDeleteGlobalism was birthed on the idea of preventing wars between countries. Now forcing different people into the straitjacket of dollar debt and dollar interest rate settings is bringing about conflict.
Neil if you are talking about Ukraine all that is going on there is Putin is trying to corner the wheat market…
ReplyDelete“ Likely caused by faulty reasoning”
ReplyDeleteRather: “ Likely caused by reasoning”… fixed it…
The globalism narrative is a cover story for exploitation and regime change. The last true believers in that system are Europe and China, for different reasons.
ReplyDeleteOpponents of NAFTA and the free trade impetus of the Reagan regime predicted that free trade would cause deindustrialization and a race to the bottom of global wages. Which is exactly what has occurred. (Though free trade is not the only cause - financial deregulation which unleashed speculation and usury are also major causes of the immiseration of the working class and the increasing precarity of the middle class.) The predictions were based on the work of the "American School" economists in the Hamiltonian tradition and policies which actually built USA, and were copied by Germany, Russia, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia among others. The most important "American School" economists were Henry Carey, Friedrich List, and E. Peshine Smith. Henry Carey - who was the guiding force behind the nationalist protectionism and "internal improvements" policies and programs of the Lincoln administration. As Leonard P. Curry entitled his 1968 book, these were the "Blueprint for Modern America: Non-Military Legislation of the First Civil War Congress." Transcontinental railroads, transcontinental telegraphs, a revolution in mining technologies, the Department of Agriculture and the mechanization of agriculture, homesteading settlement of the west, and the public university system, all flow out of Lincoln's rejection of free trade - while at the same time, incredibly, waging a war which defeated the slave holding oligarchs of the south. See also Gabor Borrit's magnificent and highly readable "Lincoln and the Economics of the American Dream." (1978).
ReplyDeleteAnother result of the Reagan / neoliberal policy of "free trade" has been the transformation of Mexico into a narcostate - exactly what happened to China when the British imposed free trade there in the early 19th century.
Regarding Smoot Hawley, the idea that it was a cause the Great Depression and World War 2 has been debunked. The time frame should make it obvious: Smoot Hawley was passed in 1930, a year after the October 1929 Crash, and a decade after the beginning of the farm depression that presaged the Great Depression.
...free trade would cause deindustrialization and a race to the bottom of global wages.
ReplyDeleteTrade is based on comparative advantage, not absolute advantage. Also, what matters is not labor costs, but unit labor costs. You're ignoring productivity. There's a chart in the link below for different countries.
Productivity - Unit labour costs
Unit labour costs are often viewed as a broad measure of (international) price competitiveness. They are defined as the average cost of labour per unit of output produced. They can be expressed as the ratio of total labour compensation per hour worked to output per hour worked (labour productivity). This indicator is measured in percentage changes and indices.
The theory of comparative advantage is horse shit, used by predatory elites to "explain" the ruin caused by free trade. Hamilton completely destroyed it in his December 1792 Report on Manufactures, contra Adam Smith's argument that North America's natural advantage was its abundance of raw materials and it would be a mistake to try and promote manufactures.
ReplyDeleteHamilton completely destroyed it in his December 1792 Report on Manufactures
ReplyDeleteWe've learned a lot about tariffs since then. Here, read this:
Lerner symmetry theorem
The Lerner symmetry theorem is a result used in international trade theory, which states that an ad valorem import tariff (a percentage of value or an amount per unit) will have the same effects as an export tax. The theorem is based on the observation that the effect on relative prices is the same regardless of which policy (ad valorem tariffs or export taxes) is applied.
The theorem was developed by economist Abba P. Lerner in 1936.
That's like when the US puts tariffs on steel imports from China, but it makes the cars you build more expensive, which means that you're producing fewer cars for export, not to mention that it raises the price of cars for US consumers because of the higher prices for US steel and that now-tariffed Chinese steel.
Also, the Chinese buy less of your soybeans and more soybeans from Brazil, which means your agricultural sector declines.
Rise of the machines: Fear robots, not China or Mexico
ReplyDeleteOne study by two Ball State University professors found that between 2000 and 2010, about 87% of the manufacturing job losses stemmed from factories becoming more efficient. The chief driver of more efficiency in factories: automation and better technology. The other 13% of job losses were due to trade.
Simply put: it requires fewer workers to make the same amount of cars as it did in 2000. In fact, as the industry has lost workers, the value of U.S. manufacturing production is hovering near an all-time high.
"That to me is first order evidence -- it's not trade," that's taking most jobs away, says J. Bradford Jensen, an economics professor at Georgetown University. "There's been a lot of technical change that has reduced the need for labor -- some of it is automation, some of it is design, more software, less hardware."
So why not crack down on robots if they're driving the job losses?
"It's harder to demonize what everyone sees as technical progress, it's easier to demonize the foreigner," Jensen added.
The link to the study is in the article above. Here is a direct link (opens in a pdf file):
The Myth And Reality Of Manufacturing In America - Ball State University
China’s Retaliation For Pelosi’s Taiwan Visit Could Worsen America’s Opioid Crisis
ReplyDeleteIn retaliation for a visit to Taiwan by U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi Aug. 2, Beijing has imposed a series of sanctions on the U.S. That includes the suspension of an anti-drug trafficking cooperation with Washington aimed to stem the smuggling of illicit narcotics, among them fentanyl, into the U.S. The countermeasure marks a temporary end to an agreement struck in 2018 between the Trump administration and Chinese President Xi Jinping and could make the already serious opioid epidemic in the U.S. a bigger crisis.
The spread of fentanyl, a type of synthetic opioid, in the U.S. over the past decade has resulted in record numbers of overdose deaths. In 2021, more than 100,000 Americans died of drug overdose, nearly 80 percent of which related to opioids, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The U.S. government has blamed this crisis in part on China, the primary source of fentanyl and fentanyl-related substances trafficked into the U.S.
So how Americans did Pelosi kill with that Taiwan visit?
Trade gives you leverage. If you don't trade with countries, they can just ignore you on things like this. That extends to actions on climate change, terrorism, etc.
Sure, it's pure coincidence that manufacturing in the US is more automated and employs fewer people. Trade policies had nothing to do with it at all. Foreign competition also had nothing to with it. These manufacturers just woke up one day with the urge to modernize their operations.
ReplyDeleteTrade gives you leverage. If you don't trade with countries, they can just ignore you on things like this. That extends to actions on climate change, terrorism, etc.
ReplyDeleteYour borders are your responsibility. If US made armaments were being smuggled into Tibet, that would encourage China to increase trade with the US. Because leverage.
Can you use the theory of comparative advantage to explain how Toyota became the largest auto maker in the world, surpassing USA firms? Or how Samsung became a leading manufacturer of cell phones and consumer electronics, while USA firms like Motorola and Zenith which were world leaders in the 1960s and 1970s, have almost vanished ? Can't be done. Because the theory of comparative advantage is a a god damned theological belief, not based on reality. Millions have lives have been destroyed by this horse shit. It's immoral to cling to this economic theology. I wish I could deal out the condemnation and vilification as well as Henry Carey condemned British policies toward China:
ReplyDeleteCarey - Commerce, Christianity, and Civilization, Versus British Free Trade. Letters in Reply to the London Times
By Henry C. Carey. Philadelphia, Collins, Printer, 705 Jayne Street. 1876.
https://archive.org/details/commercechristia00care
Low interest rates lower the cost of capital, which increases capital-labor substitution.
ReplyDeleteAs for your latter point, why should the Chinese divert resources into stopping drug trafficking instead of missiles to sink US naval ships?
Can you use the theory of comparative advantage to explain how Toyota became the largest auto maker in the world, surpassing USA firms?
ReplyDeleteYou're making the case for me, which tells me you don't understand what comparative advantage is.
It’s impossible for any person, entity, region, country, planet, or galaxy to have a comparative advantage – that is, an economic advantage compared to potential trading partners – at producing everything. To have a comparative advantage at producing X implies a comparative disadvantage at producing Y. —Don Boudreaux
Ricardo:
Though she [i.e., Portugal] could make the cloth with the labor of 90 men, she would import it from a country where it required the labor of 100 men to produce it, because it would be advantageous to her rather to employ her capital in the production of wine, for which she would obtain more cloth from England, than she could produce by diverting a portion of her capital from the cultivation of vines to the manufacture of cloth.
re: Iowa Car Crop (Steven E. Landsburg from David Friedman)
ReplyDeleteThere are two technologies for producing automobiles in America. One is to manufacture them in Detroit, and the other is to grow them in Iowa. Everybody knows about the first technology; let me tell you about the second. First you plant seeds, which are the raw material from which automobiles are constructed. You wait a few months until wheat appears. Then you harvest the wheat, load it onto ships, and sail the ships eastward into the Pacific Ocean. After a few months, the ships reappear with Toyotas on them.
International trade is nothing but a form of technology. The fact that there is a place called Japan, with people and factories, is quite irrelevant to Americans’ well-being. To analyze trade policies, we might as well assume that Japan is a giant machine with mysterious inner workings that convert wheat into cars. Any policy designed to favor the first American technology over the second is a policy designed to favor American auto producers in Detroit over American auto producers in Iowa. A tax or a ban on “imported” automobiles is a tax or a ban on Iowa-grown automobiles. If you protect Detroit carmakers from competition, then you must damage Iowa farmers, because Iowa farmers are the competition.
The task of producing a given fleet of cars can be allocated between Detroit and Iowa in a variety of ways. A competitive price system selects that allocation that minimizes the total production cost. It would be unnecessarily expensive to manufacture all cars in Detroit, unnecessarily expensive to grow all cars in Iowa, and unnecessarily expensive to use the two production processes in anything other than the natural ratio that emerges as a result of competition.
That means that protection for Detroit does more than just transfer income from farmers to autoworkers. It also raises the total cost of providing Americans with a given number of automobiles. The efficiency loss comes with no offsetting gain; it impoverishes the nation as a whole.
There is much talk about improving the efficiency of American car manufacturing. When you have two ways to make a car, the road to efficiency is to use both in optimal proportions. The last thing you should want to do is to artificially hobble one of your production technologies. It is sheer superstition to think that an Iowa-grown Camry is any less “American” than a Detroit-built Taurus. Policies rooted in superstition do not frequently bear efficient fruit.
In 1817, David Ricardo—the first economist to think with the precision, though not the language, of pure mathematics—laid the foundation for all future thought about international trade. In the intervening 150 years his theory has been much elaborated but its foundations remain as firmly established as anything in economics.
Trade theory predicts first that if you protect American producers in one industry from foreign competition, then you must damage American producers in other industries. It predicts second that if you protect American producers in one industry from foreign competition, there must be a net loss in economic efficiency. Ordinarily, textbooks establish these propositions through graphs, equations, and intricate reasoning. The little story above that I learned from David Friedman makes the same propositions blindingly obvious with a single compelling metaphor. That is economics at its best.
re: computer chips versus potato chips
ReplyDeleteThe “semiconductor chips versus potato chips” debate also underlined a different point. Many proponents of semiconductor chips also presumed that what you worked at determined whether, in your outlook, you would be a dunce (producing potato chips) or a modernist (producing semiconductor chips).
I have called this presumption a quasi-Marxist fallacy. Marx emphasized the critical role of the means of production. I have argued, on the other hand, that you could produce semiconductor chips, trade them for potato chips, and then munch them while watching television and becoming a moron. On the other hand, you could produce potato chips, trade them for semiconductor chips that you put into your personal computer and become a computer wizard. In short, it is what you “consume,” not what you produce, that influences what sort of person you will be and how that affects your economy and your society. —Jagdish Bhagwati
Bill Mitchell weighs in:
In Chapter 2, Cohen and Zysman argue that:
There are … other kinds of linkages in the economy, such as those which tie the crop duster to the cotton fields, the kethchup maker to the tomato patch, the wine press to the vineyards (to return to our focus on agricultures [as a parallel]). Here the linkages are tight and quite concrete … the linkage is a bind, not a junction or substitution point. Offshore the tomato farm and you close or offshore the ketchup plant. No two ways about it.
In his book Protectionism (page 114), Columbia University’s Jagdish Bhagwati noted that as he read that paragraph he was eating his favourite English marmalade and wasn’t aware that “England grew its own oranges”.
Do read the whole thing:
What you consume or what you produce?
A link to the first part above. Well worth the read for those who are interested in the "computer chips versus potato chips" debate.
ReplyDeleteThe Computer Chip vs. Potato Chip Debate
It's disgusting that someone supposedly intelligent believes crap like Hicks and Devaraj and Jensen. American workers witnessed their plants dismantled and shipped to Mexico or China, where those plants were literally reassembled. I personally know the project engineer who oversaw the relocation and reassembly of the Mettler Toledo plant from Spartanburg, SC to Guangzhou. No new automated equipment at all - just shipping and reassembling what had been in Spartanburg.
ReplyDeleteLook at REAL LIFE, not your god damn models. Go out and talk to some real working class people who lived through deindustrialization.
The excuse that it was automation, not trade, that drove the deindustrialization of the 1980s-1990s has been debunked by showing that economy-wide productivity gains are misleading because they were disproportionately centered in information technology.
However, I do believe that technological gains have significantly increased productivity in the two decades of THIS century in some specific industries, such as steel making and metal fabrication.
There's a chart in the link below.
ReplyDeleteChart: US Factory Jobs as a Share of US Payrolls Have Been in Steady Decline for 75 Years Starting in 1943, and It’s Not Because of Trade
We're moving to a service economy. There's a chart in the link below also. The decline in manufacturing as a percent of GDP is global.
Manufacturing’s Declining Share of GDP Is Inevitable, Global, and Something to Celebrate
re: neo-Luddites
ReplyDelete29th May 1812: Letter from "N. Ludd" mailed to Henry Wood, Leicester
Henry Wood,
IT having been represented to me that you are one of those damned miscreants who deligh in distressing and bringing to povety those poore unhapy and much injured men called Stocking makers; now be it known unto you that I have this day issued orders for your being shot through the body with a Leden Ball on or before the 20th Day of June, therefore it will be adviseable of you to settle your worlly affairs and make the best use of your spare time, as nothing can or shall save you from the Death you so justly deserve.
I am
a frend to the Poore
N. LUDD.
Ludd Office 29 May year Two
Tony it was all a big US soft power initiative… Cold War policy…
ReplyDeleteSeems though like it didn’t work in some cases (Russia) maybe China too…
But Japan , South Korea , Eastern Europe, Middle East are pretty solid non commie allies…
Last few years with the Covid pandemic supply chains have been disrupted and now Russia is going rogue…
So it is being rethought and “on shoring” is becoming more prevalent… this was started by Trump,,.
Even Biden people put out a tweet yesterday bragging about how they are “bringing our jobs back”….
It’s happening.,, will take years…
btw this Russia going rogue thing is being looked upon pretty serious and US spending over 100B for Ukraine…
ReplyDeleteThat is a ton of munnie..
As for your latter point, why should the Chinese divert resources into stopping drug trafficking instead of missiles to sink US naval ships?
ReplyDeleteThey shouldn't - unless you're referring to drug trafficking across China's borders.
Ahmed, your apologetic for "free" trade is tiresome. Lives and communities were destroyed, and there was no job guarantee to mitigate the damage. Smaller countries are asked to give up their sovereignty at the behest of the global narrative, only to end up more exploited and dependent.
Now China is leading the charge for alternative trade arrangements that will continue to exploit smaller economies. The bosses will change, but the scam will continue. That is, until nationalism and common sense reassert themselves. Protectionism and autarky are the historical norm.
We're moving to a service economy. There's a chart in the link below also. The decline in manufacturing as a percent of GDP is global.
ReplyDeleteA wonderful service economy where workers have to hold down several service jobs. Why? Because these jobs fail to provide the income and benefits of a single factory job. Ask old economy Steve, with his high school diploma. He'll tell you. Then he'll laugh and tell you to stop complaining, as if nothing has changed.
Are people's memories really that short?
Imported goods are also a form of immigration since the labor performed is embedded in the goods.
ReplyDeleteThis has resulted in two benefits to the world system.
The first is a beginning of the leveling of global wages, with workers in poor countries benefiting at the expense of workers in developed countries.
The second is capital (technology) substitution for labor through increased automation, robotics, etc.
While this result in some dislocation and seeming imbalance during the process, the overall result is beneficial for the world system.
The aim should be to smooth the process rather than prevent it as interfering in trade often does.
In other words, a systems approach is required and also recognition that while the process is in the works, there will be winners and losers as the system levels at an equilibrium that optimizes resource use, including human.
In the end, the need for labor will diminish as technology substitutes for labor, increasing the availability for leisure, which will produce more related demand, i.e., demand for education, entertainment, etc.
Depending on the ratio of self-interest to universality in collective consciousness, this process can be effective and efficient and go smoothly, or not. Presently, it is not going so well and bodes future trouble as nations focus on their own interests. Then the balance of competition and cooperation degrades, and the process becomes less effective and less efficient.
This can result in systemic dysfunction, e.g., not only trade war but hot war.
Because these [service] jobs fail to provide the income and benefits of a single factory job.
ReplyDeleteThe problem with this is that it happens to not be true.
For Robert Reich - Service Jobs Do Not Pay Less Than Manufacturing Ones
We've got Robert Reich trotting out another of his misunderstandings of economics today. He's saying that it's the decline of manufacturing employment which has done so much to hurt American in recent decades. He's correct at least in part: some small part of the decline in manufacturing employment is as a result of trade (although that makes no difference to overall employment of course). And he's also correct that the rest of the decline comes from technological change: we just need fewer people to make things as a result of our becoming more productive at making things.
However, where he does slightly off the rails is when he states that service jobs, which have to a great extent replaced those manufacturing ones, pay less. I'm sorry but this just isn't true:
We can see the actual service and manufacturing wages here at the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Average private sector wage is $25.38 an hour, it's $26.51 in goods production, $25.60 in manufacturing, $25.11 in services. OK, yes those numbers are different but we're really not blaming America's economic ills on that 49 cents an hour difference between service and manufacturing wages are we?
Well, OK, maybe we are. In which case that problem should be over now: for service wages in Feb 2016 are higher than manufacturing were in Feb 2015.
What's worse than this exposition of the simple facts is that for anyone who understood their economics this should be predictable from theory. Labour in manufacturing is largely substituitable with labour in services. Similarly, a job in services is largely substituitable for one in manufacturing. Thus the two pay rates of the two close substitutes are going to run pretty much in parallel. That's why, for example, burger flippers were making up to $20 an hour in the oil shale patch just recently.
The implication for public policy here is that if services end up paying about the same wages as manufacturing then there's no rhyme or reason to the idea of privileging manufacturing, is there?
Link to current data: Average hourly and weekly earnings of all employees on private nonfarm payrolls by industry sector, seasonally adjusted
This just popped up in an RSS feed:
ReplyDelete66 Kuka robots arrive at Giga Texas for Cybertruck production lines
If you are unfamiliar with Kuka robots, these are the big red and orange machines that you have probably seen in photos and videos from Tesla’s other factories. The robots are used to put together various parts onto the Model S, Model 3, Model X, and Model Y on their respective production lines at Fremont, Giga Texas, Giga Shanghai, and Giga Berlin. You can see them in action in this drone video from Giga Berlin below.
KUKA - Wikipedia
KUKA is a German manufacturer of industrial robots and systems for factory automation. It has been predominantly owned by the Chinese company Midea Group since 2016.
China’s Midea Has 86% of Robot-Maker in $4.4 Billion Bid
China’s Midea Group Co. said it has almost 86 percent of Kuka AG’s shares, advancing a 4 billion-euro ($4.4 billion) bid to buy the German robot maker that has seen opposition from German politicians.
@Ahmed,
ReplyDeleteThe comparison is between manufacturing jobs from 40 years ago to the service jobs of today, along with the requisite levels of education. The days of a high school education affording you a middle class lifestyle, or one income doing the same are long gone.
There is no shortage of 'professional economists' who make a living trying to bamboozle the public.
There is a chart in the link below:
ReplyDeleteHome grown: 67 years of US and Canadian house size data
I was an impressionable young boy back in 1971 when my parents were considering building a new home. I remember discussions about house size. 1,200 square feet was normal back then. 1,600 square feet, the size of the house they eventually built, was considered extravagant—especially in rural Saskatchewan. And only doctors and lawyers built houses as large as 2,000 square feet.
So much has changed.
New homes in Canada and the US are big and getting bigger. The average size of a newly constructed single-family detached home is now 2,600 square feet in the US and probably 2,200 in Canada. The average size of a new house in the US has doubled since 1960. Though data is sparse for Canada, it appears that the average size of a new house has doubled since the 1970s.
These are not the same houses. Cars are more expensive because we added safety features like airbags, etc. These are the two largest components in the CPI. We're not consuming the same basket of goods that we did when we had single-earner households.
Apples and oranges.
@Tom
ReplyDeleteThe first is a beginning of the leveling of global wages, with workers in poor countries benefiting at the expense of workers in developed countries.
Yet inequality has risen within countries, because that is how inequality is measured. Internationally, the outcome of such 'leveling' equates to the lowest common denominator in terms of labour and environmental standards.
The second is capital (technology) substitution for labor through increased automation, robotics, etc.
Globalism has delayed automation since capital can easily cross borders, in search of the cheapest labour costs. More recently, labour can cross borders as part of economic trade agreements, with the EU being a notorious example.
If we really wanted to advance technology, it would be open sourced. Discoveries in one country would be made available for use in another country. International competition and the need for trade secrets retards the development of technology. Fortunately, there is industrial espionage.
While this result in some dislocation and seeming imbalance during the process, the overall result is beneficial for the world system.
The aim should be to smooth the process rather than prevent it as interfering in trade often does.
The process never ends. It is designed to be forever transitory. When will people realize this?
In other words, a systems approach is required and also recognition that while the process is in the works, there will be winners and losers as the system levels at an equilibrium that optimizes resource use, including human.
A systems approach is impossible on a world divided into competitive nation-states who jealously guard their territorial sovereignty. Globalism has never resolved the arrangement that preceded it.
In the end, the need for labor will diminish as technology substitutes for labor, increasing the availability for leisure, which will produce more related demand, i.e., demand for education, entertainment, etc.
When you consider that fossil fuels act as energy slaves for humans, we could have achieved many of those objectives in the 1950s. Instead, we chose to believe in narratives that were cover for continued exploitation.
Abundant energy, selectively applied technologies and mutually beneficial trade are/were positive developments for humanity.
Global economic models, policies and agendas have set us on an unsustainable path. In the end, we will have little to show for it.
Capital is stored labor raised to a still higher or third power by being used to aid labor in the production of fresh wealth or of larger direct satisfactions of desire. —Henry George
ReplyDeleteTesla is building cars in the US with Chinese-owned German robots. When you think about it, capital-labor substitution is really labor-labor substitution. Those German robots are really German labor at one remove.
It's not the Chinese that are taking away US labor, it's the Germans.
Here, Germans are taking away labor from the Turks:
KUKA robots are on duty at one of the largest tea factories in the world
KUKA robots are on duty at one of the largest tea factories in the world located in Rize, Turkey.
In Caykur’s tea factory robotic packaging/palletizing lines and ASRS were integrated by KUKA Official System Partner Olbricht-Altinay.
These are not the same houses. Cars are more expensive because we added safety features like airbags, etc. These are the two largest components in the CPI. We're not consuming the same basket of goods that we did when we had single-earner households.
ReplyDeleteApples and oranges.
When apples and oranges are not affordable, the large homes will remain empty, and homeless encampments will remain full. Until enough desperate people get fed up.
Until enough desperate people get fed up.
ReplyDeleteThe problem is relying chiefly on "capitalism" on the assumption that left to itself "capitalism" results in the greatest good for the greatest number. To paraphrase Keynes, believing this about a system based on pursuit of self-interest is absurd.
As I have emphasized previously, a smooth transition to optimal use of resources will not occur in the absence of a sufficient rise in the level of collective consciousness in the direction of greater universality.
Why? Perverse incentives incentives for one thing. There are many others. In the final analysis, it is the human condition that this stage of development.
The human condition is no different to that of animals living in the wild. Most people don't get the point of having a civilization.
ReplyDeleteSo back to the wilderness we will go, at more realistic numbers.
@ Matt
ReplyDeleteSo it is being rethought and “on shoring” is becoming more prevalent… this was started by Trump,,.
Even Biden people put out a tweet yesterday bragging about how they are “bringing our jobs back”….
It’s happening.,, will take years…
How can anyone trust the Biden regime to bring about a populist agenda?
They want a cold war with Russia and China... and open borders to destroy ordinary Americans.
Well whether they do it or not they will say that they are doing it because it is the popular public opinion… they lie like you breath….
ReplyDeleteThe Russia thing is I would say effectively bipartisan at this point.., there is a small minority on gop side that doesn’t support the Ukraine assistance… the rest of gop side and whole Dem side support the Ukraine assstance…
They getting another 120 T-72s from Morocco now, Morocco had them being refurbished In Czech and US told Morocco when they are upgraded in cxech they will instead go to Ukraine…
Poland getting like 2,000 main battle tanks from US and South Korea…
Air forces activity is still all hush hush…
This Russia thing with Putin going off the reservation is pretty serious… right now still looks like Cold War 2 with sanctions and NATO arming to the teeth…. Xi playing both sides and will see how it goes.,.
Something is wrong when the US cannot produce armaments in real time, instead they're raiding stockpiles from around the world. Ukies must know they're doomed. Poles too, if they get involved.
ReplyDeleteDuring WWII, vehicle factories were switched over to making tanks and other equipment. NATO armed to the teeth only on paper...
Ukraine probably already familiar with T-72s so no training lead time… same thing with MIGs…
ReplyDeletehttps://www.thedefensepost.com/2022/07/18/poland-m1a1-abrams-tank-us/
ReplyDelete“ The units will replace the country’s Soviet-made T-72 tanks donated to the Ukrainian armed forces.”
Will Ukraine ever have enough Fire Power?
ReplyDeleteCol Doug Macgregor on Judge Napolitano - Judging Freedom
https://youtu.be/jH3iGOPNCiM
“ Will Ukraine ever have enough Fire Power?”
ReplyDeleteNobody is on the clock… just means more munnie for the defense industry…
I think new gop Congress will continue the policy but instead of “Ukraine!” the gop will say “NATO!”…
ReplyDeleteBut the USDs are going to continue to flow.., in fact even Dem Congress just passed DOD appropriation that was $45B more than what Biden people asked for.,,
🤑
How come they never say "We're out of munnie!"
ReplyDelete