Friday, December 20, 2019

Fanatical pursuit of the last penny of advantage.

From a ZeroHedge post on the failure of the European Union:
A multi-polar world became a uni-polar world with the fall of the Berlin Wall and Francis Fukuyama said it was the end of history.

Those were the days my friend, I thought they would never end, but they have.

During globalisation the balance of power shifted from West to East.

During globalisation China went from almost nothing to become a global superpower.

During globalisation the influence of the US and the West went into decline.

What went wrong?

The idea:

If we leave the wealth in private hands it will create more jobs and wages.

The problem:

The wealthy could get better returns on their capital in the faster growing Asian economies, and this is where the jobs and wages were created.

What did they miss?

The Government may not spend the money as efficiently as the private sector, but they do spend it in your country.[1]

Millions also missed the fact that their political class would be filled to the brim with malevolence for them. And that, thus, no government would lift a finger to stop the export of tens of thousands of manufacturing jobs and the import of millions of hostile, parasitic primitives.

Too, Batman11 defines the problem too narrowly. Leaving commerce and innovation to the private sector is indeed the correct policy. However, as I frequently point out in comment streams, free enterprise or capitalism or free markets were never intended to operate without an eye to the requirements of ordered liberty. Monopolies are properly regarded as a distortion and abuse of free enterprise. As are breach of contract, fraud, unfair competition and the like.

After our horrendous experience with globalism, we now know that to the list of such distortions of free enterprise we must add addle-brained worship of foreigners and chasing the last penny of wage advantage to the lasting harm of one's own people.

Notes
[1]  Comment by Batman11 on "Europe's Age Of Humiliation." By Slawomir Sierakowski, ZeroHedge, 12/19/19 (emphasis removed).

2 comments:

  1. This article misses the main advantage of globalism, the transfer of wealth from regular people to government leaders, multi-national oligarchs and their claque.

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  2. A whole lot of people have been missing that, myself included. I really don't mind if my neighbor has a swimming pool or a winter home in Florida. I have very modest needs like the occasional $2,000 camera but it starts to get personal for other people like me when you realize your job has been shipped to China or low-wage legal and illegal immigrants are being invited by the elites to drive me to the wall with lower wages. Not to mention criminal mismanagement of fiscal and monetary matters that send the prices of necessities creeping steadily upward. The Big Squeeze isn't all that amusing or something that people are willing to overlook.

    ReplyDelete

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