People left behind in globalism ghost towns don't sell pizza to each other, they sell drugs. And thus we have an OD disaster brought on by despair. The ghetto despair has come to the holler. Consider that J. D. Vance's favorite movie as a child was Boyz N the Hood.
This is where I really enjoy Oren's writing...When it's aimed a NeoLiberal/Libertarian Power to the Wealthy policies over the last 5 decades. That is where the most fundamental flaw of economic policy resides. The loss of our industrial base massively benefited the financial class at the expense of US workers and, as a previously unutterable externality we must now address, has imperiled US national security.
It seems to me now is way too premature to be introducing tariffs. Already in the news, the leverage China has over the US economy is both profound and intolerable. What should be happening now is a CHIPS act for chemicals and drug precursors as well as another for Steel and other metals. And anything else for which we are dependent on the policies of other countries. Those industries need to be in position to ramp up to meet our needs within 3 years should China pull the rug out for whatever reason. Trump's tariffs now aren't smart or strategic. They could be after our industrial base has gotten restarted. But right now, the medicines we rely on are created from Chinese precursors. That is horrifying. We don't have the steel capacity to ramp up to defend ourselves. That is horrifying.
With nearly 900 billion a year to work with, Plus explicit spending for Ukraine, our military is strained to supply Ukraine with missiles. The MIC is clearly a NeoCon scam monster run amok. For over 900 billion per year we should have missiles coming out of our yinyang. That's an area Elon and Vivek actually need to clean out. But I don't trust them with the time of day. They will be looking for "opportunities". I very strongly support a very strong military. (While I'm radically opposed to the NeoCon agenda.) But I perceive large parts of it as profoundly corrupt due to privatization with few restrictions on who can play. This is another area of "free market" failure. Weapons design and manufacturing should not be a for profit venture, full stop. I think it is profoundly immoral as a business venture. Those who would pursue it are inherently suspect. But that aside, the incentives are wrong because there's not much actual competition and zero price pressure. Instead weapons should be designed and built within the military. Engineers and scientists working with military strategists and our foreign policy objectives should create the weapons would be efficient and useful. Then those are produced by machinists and skilled factory workers trained by and in the military. See what's happening here? We would be using existing budget to help train the workforce we'll need when repatriating our industrial base. Ex Military do not get to live the high life scamming taxpayers through the MIC. Neither do unscrupulous weapons suppliers get to make obscene profits scamming taxpayers. All that should be ended entirely. The fact that we rely on Musk for military satellite communication and for space infrastructure, for example, is an abject failure of strategy, reliability, and independence. Except for being outrageously dangerous it is risibly pathetic. I'm interested in what Oren has to say on this topic.
From the video: "We don't see the faces behind the T-shirt at WalMart, or the video game we play, or the sweet new car we saved up to buy."
This isn't a bug; it's a feature. It is the entire point of globalized, industrial capitalism: make production and transactions more efficient by removing people (those pesky humans are inefficient pains in the ass anyway) to the greatest degree possible.
But we have to remember that while globalization decimated the west, it created a huge middle class in Asia, and brought millions of out of poverty. For the world at large, a win?
This is one of the things that makes globalization and immigration very hard for Christians. On the one hand, the faith teaches a universal dignity to all people, which implies a responsibility to care about not only your own but the "stranger" (the Biblical term.) On the other hand, nations and people groups are clearly acknowledged not only as necessary but as positive goods (see Tower of Babel), which implies some greater level of responsibility to your own than to others. Squaring this circle is not easy.
I support free trade but am going to push back on this narrative a little. I'd go back to Kissinger and China, the end of gold reserve to the start of this story. Globalization was/will happen. The UN in all it's muddled forms is a necessary organization to settle disputes. If we are to recognize each other's humanity and cooperate on global issues sharing the same planet. Possible going beyond that. I was a teenager during the first Mulroney/Bush agreement. The world had an utterly different set of ideals of what abundance, progress, technological advancement meant. The internet, global real time information was a fantasy. Free trade at the time was leverage from the dominant party to poorer nations, with strings of debt relief. That isn't free trade or real globalization in the spirit of the libertarian idea is it? It could have meant energy abundance, a green transition then. Greed/power gets in the way. The coalescence of a millions of choices that sets nations on a given path.
My argument that globalization/free trade in the 80s-90s were with more strings tethering all partners to stories that now no longer tell the full story of the present of possible futures.
Naive as always. What is the point in seeing the world any other way. :-D
I remember back in the late 70's Les Wexner the clothing retailer of Victoria's Secret, etc. fame and Jeffrey Epstein fame was called brilliant and a super unbelievable businessman in all the magazines, etc.. I thought, what? What's so brilliant about taking your manufacturing to Asia, mostly China, and making everything over there for pennies on the dollar. No labor costs there, no environmental regulations? That's brilliant? That seemed easy? Brilliant entrepreneur? Back as a young man i thought, wow seems pretty simply really, brilliant? whatever?! Of course, soon everyone followed.
I often wonder whose economy all the critics of ours would trade places with. Let’s leave aside the academic debates among competing elite-filled think tanks. In the political realm, many of the most vociferous critics of today’s economy are the ones benefitting the most, namely, Don, JD, Elon and the other tech bros. Fear not. After we slap on some politically driven tariffs (Don’s bargaining with corporate America has already begun), withdraw from NATO, cut Taiwan loose, renew the budget-busting tax cuts, jack spending akin to his first term, prosecute a few political enemies, deport 13 million brown people, and clamp down on legal immigration, things should turn around quickly. Maybe Don can even break his own record for accumulation of debt, surely a long term boon for the working class.
People left behind in globalism ghost towns don't sell pizza to each other, they sell drugs. And thus we have an OD disaster brought on by despair. The ghetto despair has come to the holler. Consider that J. D. Vance's favorite movie as a child was Boyz N the Hood.
This is where I really enjoy Oren's writing...When it's aimed a NeoLiberal/Libertarian Power to the Wealthy policies over the last 5 decades. That is where the most fundamental flaw of economic policy resides. The loss of our industrial base massively benefited the financial class at the expense of US workers and, as a previously unutterable externality we must now address, has imperiled US national security.
It seems to me now is way too premature to be introducing tariffs. Already in the news, the leverage China has over the US economy is both profound and intolerable. What should be happening now is a CHIPS act for chemicals and drug precursors as well as another for Steel and other metals. And anything else for which we are dependent on the policies of other countries. Those industries need to be in position to ramp up to meet our needs within 3 years should China pull the rug out for whatever reason. Trump's tariffs now aren't smart or strategic. They could be after our industrial base has gotten restarted. But right now, the medicines we rely on are created from Chinese precursors. That is horrifying. We don't have the steel capacity to ramp up to defend ourselves. That is horrifying.
With nearly 900 billion a year to work with, Plus explicit spending for Ukraine, our military is strained to supply Ukraine with missiles. The MIC is clearly a NeoCon scam monster run amok. For over 900 billion per year we should have missiles coming out of our yinyang. That's an area Elon and Vivek actually need to clean out. But I don't trust them with the time of day. They will be looking for "opportunities". I very strongly support a very strong military. (While I'm radically opposed to the NeoCon agenda.) But I perceive large parts of it as profoundly corrupt due to privatization with few restrictions on who can play. This is another area of "free market" failure. Weapons design and manufacturing should not be a for profit venture, full stop. I think it is profoundly immoral as a business venture. Those who would pursue it are inherently suspect. But that aside, the incentives are wrong because there's not much actual competition and zero price pressure. Instead weapons should be designed and built within the military. Engineers and scientists working with military strategists and our foreign policy objectives should create the weapons would be efficient and useful. Then those are produced by machinists and skilled factory workers trained by and in the military. See what's happening here? We would be using existing budget to help train the workforce we'll need when repatriating our industrial base. Ex Military do not get to live the high life scamming taxpayers through the MIC. Neither do unscrupulous weapons suppliers get to make obscene profits scamming taxpayers. All that should be ended entirely. The fact that we rely on Musk for military satellite communication and for space infrastructure, for example, is an abject failure of strategy, reliability, and independence. Except for being outrageously dangerous it is risibly pathetic. I'm interested in what Oren has to say on this topic.
From the video: "We don't see the faces behind the T-shirt at WalMart, or the video game we play, or the sweet new car we saved up to buy."
This isn't a bug; it's a feature. It is the entire point of globalized, industrial capitalism: make production and transactions more efficient by removing people (those pesky humans are inefficient pains in the ass anyway) to the greatest degree possible.
This has been phenomenally successful materially and phenomenally destructive spiritually. Iain McGilchrist makes this case persuasively in his book "Master and Emissary" https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqBHk3itxyPDKFnwj8-SmlwHra64cCrky
Cato is a great example of Lenin's axiom about capitalists and rope.
But we have to remember that while globalization decimated the west, it created a huge middle class in Asia, and brought millions of out of poverty. For the world at large, a win?
This is one of the things that makes globalization and immigration very hard for Christians. On the one hand, the faith teaches a universal dignity to all people, which implies a responsibility to care about not only your own but the "stranger" (the Biblical term.) On the other hand, nations and people groups are clearly acknowledged not only as necessary but as positive goods (see Tower of Babel), which implies some greater level of responsibility to your own than to others. Squaring this circle is not easy.
I support free trade but am going to push back on this narrative a little. I'd go back to Kissinger and China, the end of gold reserve to the start of this story. Globalization was/will happen. The UN in all it's muddled forms is a necessary organization to settle disputes. If we are to recognize each other's humanity and cooperate on global issues sharing the same planet. Possible going beyond that. I was a teenager during the first Mulroney/Bush agreement. The world had an utterly different set of ideals of what abundance, progress, technological advancement meant. The internet, global real time information was a fantasy. Free trade at the time was leverage from the dominant party to poorer nations, with strings of debt relief. That isn't free trade or real globalization in the spirit of the libertarian idea is it? It could have meant energy abundance, a green transition then. Greed/power gets in the way. The coalescence of a millions of choices that sets nations on a given path.
My argument that globalization/free trade in the 80s-90s were with more strings tethering all partners to stories that now no longer tell the full story of the present of possible futures.
Naive as always. What is the point in seeing the world any other way. :-D
Thanks. The Solow quote was especially revealing.
Thanks!
I remember back in the late 70's Les Wexner the clothing retailer of Victoria's Secret, etc. fame and Jeffrey Epstein fame was called brilliant and a super unbelievable businessman in all the magazines, etc.. I thought, what? What's so brilliant about taking your manufacturing to Asia, mostly China, and making everything over there for pennies on the dollar. No labor costs there, no environmental regulations? That's brilliant? That seemed easy? Brilliant entrepreneur? Back as a young man i thought, wow seems pretty simply really, brilliant? whatever?! Of course, soon everyone followed.
Oren, looks like the trolls are out again!
I often wonder whose economy all the critics of ours would trade places with. Let’s leave aside the academic debates among competing elite-filled think tanks. In the political realm, many of the most vociferous critics of today’s economy are the ones benefitting the most, namely, Don, JD, Elon and the other tech bros. Fear not. After we slap on some politically driven tariffs (Don’s bargaining with corporate America has already begun), withdraw from NATO, cut Taiwan loose, renew the budget-busting tax cuts, jack spending akin to his first term, prosecute a few political enemies, deport 13 million brown people, and clamp down on legal immigration, things should turn around quickly. Maybe Don can even break his own record for accumulation of debt, surely a long term boon for the working class.