America’s Hegemonic Status Slipping Away
Former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan's memoir has put him in the news these last few days. He has upset Republicans with his comments on various presidents, with George W. Bush getting the brickbats and Clinton the praise, and by saying that Bush's invasion of Iraq was about oil, not weapons of mass destruction.
Opponents of Bush's wars welcomed Greenspan's statement, as it strips the moral pretext away from Bush's aggression, leaving naked greed unmasked.
It is certainly the case that Iraq was not invaded because of WMD, which the Bush administration knew did not exist. But the oil pretext is also phony. The United States could have purchased a lot of oil for the trillion dollars that the Iraq invasion has already cost in out-of-pocket expenses and already incurred future expenses.
Moreover, Bush's invasion of Iraq, by worsening the U.S. deficit and causing additional U.S. reliance on foreign loans, has undermined the U.S. dollar's role as reserve currency, thus threatening America's ability to pay for its imports. Greenspan himself said that the U.S. dollar "doesn't have all that much of an advantage" and could be replaced by the euro as the reserve currency.
By the end of last year, Greenspan said, foreign central banks already held 25 percent of their reserves in euros and 9 percent in other foreign currencies. The dollar's role has shrunk to 66 percent.
If the dollar loses its reserve currency status, the United States would magically have to move from an $800 billion trade deficit to a trade surplus so that it could earn enough Euros to pay for its imports of oil and manufactured goods.
Bush's wars are about American hegemony, not oil. The oil companies did not write the neoconservatives' "Project for a New American Century," which calls for U.S.-Israeli hegemony over the entire Middle East, a hegemony that would conveniently remove obstacles to Israeli territorial expansion.
The oil industry asserted its influence after the invasion. In his book "Armed Madhouse," BBC investigative reporter Greg Palast documents that the U.S. oil industry's interest in Middle Eastern oil is very different from grabbing the oil. Palast shows that the American oil companies' interests coincide with OPEC's. The oil companies want a controlled flow of oil that results in steady and high prices. Consequently, the U.S. oil industry blocked the neoconservative plan, hatched at the Heritage Foundation and aimed at Saudi Arabia, to use Iraqi oil to bust up OPEC.
Saddam got in trouble because one moment he would cut production to support the Palestinians and the next moment he would pump the maximum allowed. Up and down movements in prices are destabilizing events for the oil industry. Palast reports that a Council on Foreign Relations report concludes: Saddam is a "destabilizing influence . . . to the flow of oil to international markets from the Middle East."
The most notable aspect of Greenspan's memoir is his unconcern with America's loss of manufacturing. Instead of a problem, Greenspan simply sees a beneficial shift in jobs from "old" manufacturing (steel, cars and textiles) to "new" manufacturing such as computers and telecommunications. This shows a remarkable ignorance of statistical data on the part of a Federal Reserve chairman renowned for his command over numbers and a complete lack of grasp of offshoring.
The incentive to offshore U.S. jobs has nothing to do with "old" and "new" economy. Corporations offshore their production because they can more cheaply produce abroad what they sell to Americans. When corporations bring their offshored production to the United States to sell, the goods count as imports.
Had Greenspan bothered to look at U.S. balance of trade data, he would have discovered that in 2006, the last full year of data, the United States exported $47,580,000,000 in computers and imported $101,347,000,000 in computers for a trade deficit in computers of $53,767,000,000. In telecommunications equipment, the United States exported $28,322,000,000 and imported $40,250,000,000 for a trade deficit in telecommunications equipment of $11,883,000,000.
Greenspan probably has given offshoring no serious thought, because like most economists he mistakenly believes that offshoring is free trade and learned in economic courses decades ago before the advent of offshoring that free trade can do no harm.
For most of the 21st century, I have been pointing out that offshoring is not trade, free or otherwise. It is labor arbitrage. By replacing U.S. labor with foreign labor in the production of goods and services for U.S. markets, U.S. firms are destroying the ladders of upward mobility in the United States. So far, economists have preferred their delusions to the facts.
It is becoming more difficult for economists to clutch to their bosoms the delusion that offshoring is free trade. Ralph Gomory, the distinguished mathematician and co-author with William Baumol, past president of the American Economics Association, of "Global Trade and Conflicting National Interests," the most important work in trade theory in 200 years, has entered the public debate.
In an interview with Manufacturing & Technology News (Sept. 17), Gomory confirms that there is no basis in economic theory for claiming that it is good to tear down our own productive capability and to rebuild it in a foreign country. It is not free trade when a company relocates its manufacturing abroad.
Gomory says that economists and policymakers "still are treating companies as if they represent the country, and they do not." Companies are no longer bound to the interests of their home countries, because the link has been decoupled between the profit motive and a country's welfare. Economists, Gomory points out, are not acknowledging the implications of this decoupling for economic theory.
A country that offshores its own production is unable to balance its trade. Americans are able to consume more than they produce only because the dollar is the world reserve currency. However, the dollar's reserve currency status is eroded by the debts associated with continual trade and budget deficits.
The United States is on a path to economic Armageddon. Shorn of industry, dependent on offshored manufactured goods and services, and deprived of the dollar as reserve currency, the United States will become a Third World country. Gomery notes that it would be very difficult—perhaps impossible—for the United States to re-acquire the manufacturing capability that it gave away to other countries.
It is a mystery how a people, whose economic policy is turning them into a Third World country with its university graduates working as waitresses and bartenders and driving cabs, can regard themselves as a hegemonic power even as they build up war debts that are further undermining their ability to pay their import bills.
COPYRIGHT 2007 CREATORS SYNDICATE INC.
Entries(RSS)
"Shorn of industry, dependent on offshored manufactured goods and services, and deprived of the dollar as reserve currency, the United States will become a Third World country"
More likely you'll end up more like Britain, ie roughly a 25% cut in living standards.
This is an interesting article, in particular this paragraph:
"the American oil companies’ interests coincide with OPEC’s. The oil companies want a controlled flow of oil that results in steady and high prices. Consequently, the U.S. oil industry blocked the neoconservative plan, hatched at the Heritage Foundation and aimed at Saudi Arabia, to use Iraqi oil to bust up OPEC"
makes a lot of sense, and explains a lot.
Mr. Newman, we will be much worse off than Britain because we are a lot less smart in investing and existing wealth is concentrated in far fewer hands.
This good article is so busy Bush-bashing -- reasonable enough to do -- that it misses the real cause of Gringoland going the way of Bourbon Spain and Windsor England.
Jobs in a high tech economy require good schools, ones that oblige the kiddies to memorize Mendeleev's Periodic Table, to master both differential and integrated calculus, to obtain proficiency in 4 or 5 foreign languages, to learn how to craft arguments and avoid logical fallacies, to excel in a good prose style, to sharpen the imagination so as to discover what consumers in other countries might like to buy; and when kiddies engage in "inappropriate conduct", to toss them out on their ear, and to keep them from coming back. Such a system would also damn the comprehensive high school to perdition and offer different schools for different kids with different abilities.
We ain't got no good schools. And the public fool system ain't gonna be scrapped any time soon, come Dimmykrat, come Repub; and even if it were, Gringos stilll would come off 5th rate in comparison to folk from Germany, Jordan, India, or Kenya. For in Tierra del Gringo to be well educated isn't even on the list of life goals and personal values (save for Asians and Jews). To play some really swell football or to take some really groovy dance lessons is vastly more important to the American. I have commented elsewhere, following Mencken, that the Anglo-Saxon-Celtic, as a culture, never was much for book-larnin' anyway. Following Mencken further, The US of A was settled not by the cream of the crop but by peasants, and specifically from those particular peasants who never had an idea to uplift their minds. Richard Hofstadter didn't mention this, but put his finger on the other sources of Yankeedom's lust for ignorance: religions that emphasis emotion and witch-burnings, not erudition; business culture's dislike of calm reflection; general pragmatism; and politicians appealing to emotion and prejudice, not argument and debate. See Anti-Intellectualism in American Life
(Hofstadter, in his otherwise fine book, doesn't mention that from our first intellectual, Cotton Mather, through Woodrow the Worst to Arthur Schlesinger, American intellectuals have merited only loathing scorn. Ol' Cotton privately wrote friends that he was alarmed about the what the public authorities were up to in Salem; publicly he tried to defend it. )
By the way, and to bash the party that gave us the public fool system: I spent the weekend with public school teachers (actually fine folks), thus with petite functionaires of the Empire and fiscal beneficiaries of the Dimmykrat largess. Full disclosure: I too, brothers and sister, was once such a sinner. One flaunted her Hillary button "to irritate Sid". So I asked her: Nurse Ratched and Slick Willie didn't send Chelsea to DC city schools, did they?
Let's junk the Public Fool System, have only private schools, with vouchers for the needy. Jews and Asians are setting up there own private schools in Lincoln's America, as do most foreign businessmen do for their nationals where they relocate here. Bully for them. In 1945, all other countries were in smoldering ruins, so the Yankee Yahoo got a stay of execution. Now it's time to pay the piper.
PCR decided to meet Greenspan halfway rather than make him an actor in this horrible war, sort of like the way some folks treat Powell who has covered up a couple of jobs for the Man in his time.
Greenspan paid for the war, either because he was weak and feeble, and lacked courage and integrity to resign, or because he was very much a part of it. Seeing the bankers complaing about the oil folks-- oh, those Trilat parties must be something- reminds me of a Thomas Fleming line (from memory), "someone at the Spotlight called someone at the IHR an anti-Semite."
Mr Wilson - yes, I can see a risk of Latinisation, with the rich staying rich and the middle classes joining the poor. In the UK the vast welfare state nourishes the poor and maintains a vast lower middle class lumpen intelligentsia of public sector white collar workers.
"We ain’t got no good schools. And the public fool system ain’t gonna be scrapped any time soon, come Dimmykrat, come Repub; and even if it were, Gringos stilll would come off 5th rate in comparison to folk from Germany, Jordan, India, or Kenya. For in Tierra del Gringo to be well educated isn’t even on the list of life goals and personal values (save for Asians and Jews). "
Jordanians, Kenyans and Indians are so much smarter than Americans that they live in huts warmed by burning ox dung. Speaking of dung, that has got to be the most idiotic statement you've made yet at this site, Sid.
The myth of the ignorant American has been dispelled by numerous researchers who, unlike you, have closely and objectively studied the facts. For example, see this article:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/19/AR2007011901360_2.html
When Mr. Miller answers these questions, I'll take what he says seriously:
1. Taught school lately, Mr Miller? Got kids in public schools?
2. Pray tell, why is my pharmacist from Pakistan?
3. How many PhD's in math at USA universities last year are Gringo?
4. Washington Post -- a real swell conservative paper? Must hate the NEA.
5. Tell us the name of your broker. What does he say about India, Kenya, Jordan?
Profundus est. "Washington Post" ... a "Washington-based business [:-!] advisory group" ... "Newsweek" ... (... and Mr. T. Miller, judging by the civility accorded this morning to a colleague at this forum).
(Re. comment #7)
The answer to question #3 is easy: next to none. Most are from China, India, Nigeria, Middle East, etc. The AMS might keep some detailed statistics, though I vouch for the last thirty years (my own doctorate is in mathematics). Attractions for Asians et al. apparently have prominently included the financial support dimension (TAs and scholarships, i.e., survival) plus the fact that the university admissions are limited and incomparably tougher in their countries.
(Re. comment #3)
True. The indigenous deadly cross is between hubris and ignorance.
The USA was a wealthy country long before most people graduated from high school. It was large, rich in natural resources, allowed the ingenious to prosper and conserved its capital with a protective tariff (i.e., no labor arbitrage). Eventually it severely reduced immigration to further reduce the potential for labor arbitrage. Those days are long gone. It's the World Economy now and all the memorized Periodic Tables and foreign languages in the world won't underbid Third World labor (hence Mr. Cundiff's Pakistani pharmacist).
Sid Coniff
Thousands of White Engineers were robbed of theor wages and jobs throughout the seventies. They told their sons and daughters to stay out of the engineering profession. I know people whose fathers threatened not to pay for college if they majored in engineering. Some of them majored in engineering. They are now out of work as engineers or barely hanging in there.
The situation has gotten worse because of the H-1 B and L-1 visa program.
There has been a 35 year long policy of deskilling the Native Born White American population. This policy continues apace with no end in sight. It is genocidal in intent . ASIAN LEGAL IMMIGRANTS are a powerfull force behind the continuation of this GENOCIDAL policy.
If the LEGAL IMMIGRANT ASIANS were not here in America, America would be quite capable-like she was in the past-of producing her own doctors,scientist,engineers and computer programmers.
You are not even asking the right question. The crucial policy question is: What can be done so that America produces Many more White American engineers,scientists and progammers.
First step would be to shut off all asian LEGAL IMMIGRATION.
The problem with you is that you don't think America should pursue policies that would increase the number of Native Born White Christian American scientists,medical doctors,engineers and computer programmers.
You and your fellow JEWS are the enemy of the majority Native Born White Christian population. WE won't tolerate OUR genocide at your people's hands.
If you are not a Jew, then stop using a jewish fake name when you post here.
Start with bringing back the Chinese Exclusion act. It was a wonderfull thing.
Instead of importing asian LEGAL IMMIGRANTS, policies can be put into place to develope home grown Native Born White Christian American talent who reside in Professor Clyde Wilson's neck of the woods(Appalachia). This of course would be anathema to the filthy Clintons, JEWS and the homesexuals degenerates that infest the Republican party at the highest levels.
If there had been a policy of developing Appalachia's White youth- along with not passing the 1965 immigration refrom act- in place since 1965, there would have been no mass slaughter of Southern White teenagers at Virgina Tech. 9/11 would not have happened either. There are good goverment policies and bad goverment policies(the aforementioned 1965 immigration refrom act and the fugitve slave act)
First off, in regards to Mr. Dieckmann's comment #8, Mr. Cundiff does not deserve to be treated with any civility. He is nothing more than what is known in the blogosphere as a "troll". His constant posting at this site to the effect that all Americans are dolts deserving of Third World penury, except for Asians, Jews and himself, is extremely tedious and doesn't even warrant an intelligent response. I probably should just ignore him like other frequent visitors to this site do.
But to answer his questions in post 7:
1)No, I have nothing to do with the public schools. America's public schools are indeed a disgrace. And more and more Americans (besides just Asians and Jews) are educating their children by alternative means. The public school system is well on its way to becoming irrelevant.
2)Mr. Cundiff's pharmacist is a Pakistani probably because his pharmacy wanted to increase its profit margin by hiring cheaper help.
3)I have no idea how many U.S. math PhD.s are white men. But I can attest that all the math instructors at my private, liberal arts college in the 1990's were white men, and they were good instructors.
4)I only cited the Washington Post article as one example. But it is common knowledge that the claim that the United States is academically the worst in the world is a canard spread by self-hating Americans like you, Mr. Cundiff.
5)I don't and never would use a broker, or follow the advice of any other lying shill for Wall Street.
"... home grown Native Born White Christian American ..."
Brian, are you .... a ... Mick?!...
A Japanese (... yes Brian ... a Jap, right ... lemme continue ...) acquaintance of mine who had lived a few years in Boston told me of your people: "They are not very smart, but they have beautiful music!"
Needless to mention, I disagreed with him. On the latter part of his claim I mean.
mick irish paddy irish-american spick brick italian nigger wop pogue black irish chink cracker dago guinea immigrant ireland iretalian irishman kyke lepracauhn padraig
Happy Haloween!
"... and doesn’t even warrant an intelligent response ..."
Can anyone please tell that author not to worry: his certainly was not.
There are of course many causes of US economic decline. Dr. Roberts mentions most of them. I have mentioned only one. I think it a major cause. I add second, one in need of no proof: oil dependency.
Most European countries transport via a combination of auto, mass transit, and shoe leather. And urban sprawl, shopping centers and mall, and strip streets -- the product of the car – are at a minimum there. In a fix, they could probably get along without the auto.
The US is utterly a automobile culture, save for the other petroleum consumer, jets. As petroleum prices and foreign dependency increases, so expect American decline. The cost of restructuring American sprawling cities for the post-auto age is too prohibitive. Electricity as an alternative will oblige more power plants. The safest are the pebble-bed reactors – as far as I can tell. The Greens forbid these reactors.
Now a third cause. It’s a world market. And any country that wishes to prosper will have to sell on that market. It’s also a world labor market. Nationalists might pit “US labor" against “foreign labor”; everybody else knows that these terms are meaningless in a world market. Also: in the age of the Internet, when a job (well paying jobs, that is) can be located anywhere where there’s Internet access, it then isn’t going to work anymore to build a tariff wall or add some corollary nationalities to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. If some above would exclude my Pakistani pharmacist, she in Pakistan can be contacted by digital or cell phone and the pill counter around the corner from my house can do the rest. If she works for less, she’s saving me money. If she’s living here and no Gringo qualifies for her job, then it's a seller’s labor market, and she can get any pay she wants. If she’s living in Pakistan, with a much lower cost of living, her lower pay doesn’t hurt her and it helps me.
Trade deficits are also a 19th C. nationalist concept, meaningless in a world market. If there’s one market, a world market, there are no trade deficits. Lew Rockwell’s got it right: It makes just as much sense as to say there’s a trade deficit between the Sovereign States of Alabama and North Carolina. So also if a factory moves from NC to Alabama; just as much “off-shoring, and the nationalists don’t make a peep. They didn't weep over the Yankee rust belt losing jobs to the sun belt. Someday there will be a geo-currency as well (Troy ounce?). Then “decline of the dollar” will be equally meaningless.
Let’s go further with the libertarian argument a moral one. Why do I owe a Gringo a job? (especially the non-Dixie Gringo) (especially if he or his tariff charges to much). Portugal and Spain ate Venice's lunch. The British and the Dutch ate Spain's and Portugal's. British textile workers in 1832 were riding a wave. Then with a little help from the Morrill Tariff, New England textile workers ate England’s lunch, and the English wave crashed. Then then wave crashed for New England textile workers when Dixie’s ate New England's lunch (without help of a tariff, by the way). Now the wave is crashing for Dixie textile workers.
Or is it?: North Carolina State University has a textile institute. Representatives of that institute are going around to NC high schools and showing quite exotic fabrics. So there’s plenty of jobs in textiles, developing them that is, so the institute says, in NC (and Dixie). You’re just going to have to know chemistry ... and that means ol' Mendeleev’s Table, and were back to #3 above. Of course it’s easier to blame “foreign labor” or “les juifs, les protestants, les francs-maçons, et les métèques"; that way you don’t have to do your homework.
Real Conservatism might have an answer to the libertarian argument. But it isn’t the nationalist-racialist Lieder of Heinrich von Treitschke, Delcassé, Cecil Rhodes, Austin Chamberlain, Dishonest Abe, T. Roosevelt, Albert J. Beveridge -- sung with R. Kipling am Flügel (“dominion over palm and pine... lesser breeds without the law”, etc.). Real Conservatism’s metaphor isn’t the Blut und Boden of the nationalists, or “the petrified” of the Ultras of 1830, but “the organic”. And what is organic changes with growth. Until Real Conservatism can develop this idea and do better, then stick with the libertarians:
“Austrian” Economics can be said in four words: The Customer is King. Or hegemon. Nations (and maybe states) are going the way of the buggy whip factory. Good riddance.
Post #17 above thoroughly proves that Mr.Cundiff is an irredeemable, dogmatic moron.
And so are you Mr. Dieckmann, if you're in agreement with this pretentious twit.
I have had the fortune to have worked with a rich tapestry of diversity in my years in high tech electronics. Consequently I have experience with numerous foreign engineers and managers. A few of the Indians and Chinese were truly superb. Then there were most of the rest. When working in an alleged engineering educational institution, my fellow benighted natives and I often wondered what many of the subcontinental contingent were going to do when they got a job and no longer had anyone to cheat from. To put it mildly, academic misconduct was epidemic. Cultural aspects of engineering are most interesting. Most of the Asians I knew did not like to get their hands dirty with actually building things. A notable exception is a good friend of mine who is a Brahmin and who is a far better tuner and tweaker than I am. He also managed to learn how to cook extremely well when covertly taught by his parents servants. What a glorious exception! One of my Chinese colleagues was ostracized by his fellows for actually enjoying designing and building equipment. Another glorious exception. One of my old bosses was a Greek immigrant with a Ph.D. from IIT in Chicago. Pete is a mathematical marvel and also an excellent technician. I learned an immense amount about antennas from him. But, he once lost our company a contract with a Swiss firm because their senior management caught him eating lunch with their technicians, and also shinnying out on a cannon barrel to adjust his invention himself. A Herr Ing Doktor does not do such things! We used to kid Pete that such a title implied he was a guy who healed sick fish. He once told me that American trained engineers tended to be better than those from Europe because they knew practice along with theory. but that European technicians were better than Americans because they had to get the European designs actually working. Also contra Mr. Cundiff, I have considerable experience in substitute teaching at the secondary school level and am currently an academic at an institution of higher learning. Are my students stupid? Not most of them. Are they ignorant? Most definitely, but that is what I am supposed to help them overcome. My biggest concern is that they do not understand that success comes more with hard work than with luck. Many seem to view the educational process as being akin to that for producing foie gras. I also work to overcome this. I use essay exams and multiple term papers. So, despite our being ruled by fools and idiots, I do not despair over the state of our country. Once the house of cards falls down, we will have no choice but to put our shoulders to the wheel, work hard, and put things to rights.
"If the dollar loses its reserve currency status, the United States would magically have to move from an $800 billion trade deficit to a trade surplus so that it could earn enough Euros to pay for its imports of oil and manufactured goods." -PCR
If IMPEACHMENT IS PATRIOTIC as one bumper sticker reads (and it is) so is decoupling from the monstrous state of Israel and its demonic lobby in the U.S. AIPAC. Since what Bush does isn't even good for "oil" one wonders what they have on the Bushes. Does George H.W. Bush dance in the ballet (besides jump out of planes), and mama Bush wear combat boots? ... Soo georgie W. had to go along with the neocons... if so - ok we've said it - now W. that's over, wake-up. http://www.peacepalestine.blogspot.com wake up - we're all the palestinians now. No? [still in denial?] I know it's not just a river in Egypt. Instead though as we all swirl down the tubes a bush daughter is going to be married at the white house. Awhh. sweet.
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"Trade deficits are also a 19th C. nationalist concept, meaningless in a world market."
Aha, so as soon as trade becomes "free" in my commune, the fact that I spend more money than I make makes no difference to myself or to my family! Mr. Cundiff is really reaching now.
I'm still waiting for "Real Conservatism"'s answer to the libertarians. If none can be produced soon, I may well have to start calling myself a "nationalist" just to feel like I'm getting something--even the wrong thing--done.
Between the nationalists and the unholy SDS-neoliberal materialist hippie alliance, I definitely prefer nationalists.
It is completely irrevelant if asian engineers and programmers are highly talented. The fundamental issue is the racial survival of Native Born White Christian Americans within the borders of America.
Either American becomes largely labor self-sufficient-like she was in a previous era-or Native Born White Christian Americans will face complete economic and racial dispossesion within the borders of America.
The racial and economic survival of Native Born White Americans requires completely shutting down post-1965 non-white LEGAL IMMIGRATION.
.Once the house of cards falls down, we will have no choice but to put our shoulders to the wheel, work hard, and put things to rights [sic].
Indeed! Someone, just barely, got my hint.
The house of cards in fact isn't (just) bad leaders. It's the entire Faux Patria called America and the entire faux nationality called "Americans", the work of the real founding in 1861 by its founding father, Dishonest Abe.
The tenor of argument from some posters here is that everything is just peachy with Gringo "nation", and if we could just get rid of the Hamiltonians, everything would be mighty fine. Put differently, it seems like folks here just love how this Faux Country -- this Behemoth, Leviathan, and Great Whore of Babylon central state and its assorted functionaries, serfs, and gullible goose-steppers and flag-wavers -- was and is constituted , and just don't like the bad things it's doing. But it's doing bad things because the way it's constituted. Thus as constitutionalists, the Hamiltonians (I refuse to call them "Neocons") and the Paleoconservatives don't seem very different. Land of Lincoln indeed!
My other hint at the end of my libertarian argument: The Paleolibertarians, the Neo-Confederates, and the last Jeffersonian, Clyde Wilson, are doing better work than the Paleoconservatives, a movement that died with Sam Francis anyway, he having refused to join the League of the South. Real Conservatives (the Burkean-Kirkans)-- unlike racialist-nationalists, Hamiltonian-nationalists, and Cultural Marxists -- might be able do even better work, were Real Conservatism to exist this side of the Atlantic.
In the meantime, until we get something better, to borrow a phrase from my students, Tom DiLorenzo rocks.
Mr. Van O. I agree with you 100 per cent that the present labor arbitrage is not free trade and is an abomination on the American people. However, I humbly submit that you persist in getting the history wrong. The Republican era of Protection from the 1860s to the 1920s was not a benefit to American prosperity but a drag on an economy that prospered anyway because of its smart, hard-working people and natural resources. During most of that period the same Republicans who dictated tariffs also encouraged mass immigration in order to keep down the wages of labour---otherwise, AMERICAN workers would not be in the fix they are in today. And the protective era saw three great depressions, 1876, 1897, and 1929 which brought about immense unemployment and poverty, and kept a large part of the agricultural population impoverished as well.
Sid's still baby Moses in his mind's eye floating down deNile or deNial to eternal fame and prosperity. He believes as long as we don't all yet realize it's myth so what's the harm?
No, seriously in state-capitalism there's no such thing as 'free' trade domestically OR globally... that's the point... idiot/s
fortunately the real Moses i.e. Nicholas G.P. even at his ripe young age has already figured it out. sid's still floating... floating... with his cell phone and a direct line to E.T. in his waterproof bassinet of lore... he glances childlike Up at the sky and sees Alan Greenspan's face reassuring him ....................... and buys his new book. hahahha
sorry it's not ad hominen... it's humor ... it's humor ... wait there's sid's cell phone going off now... it's E.T.
profundus excretum y'all
take a dump joe... you'll 'think' better... we know you can IMAGINE to beat the band, and NOT feel... but if you *can't* think either, what's left? - the neocons? ... study navrazov a "techno-phobe" who's alienated not- from life per se... but understandably from folks like you? And understandably as well, from himself.
Questions... idiot? - of course not... you cannot even form them - l'est I give them to you... at this point.
It's why I don't blame you Yet... when I Do - guess what-?- You'll KNOW it.
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"Economics can be said in four words: The Customer is King. Or hegemon. Nations (and maybe states) are going the way of the buggy whip factory. Good riddance. - Sid Cundiff"
Wonderful, what is a cretin like this doing posting here anyway?
Can't you guys ban him? Is there a need to suffer through his WSJ propaganda?