We are in the middle of a crisis unlike any we have ever
known.
I am not talking about the virus. I am talking about the forced shutdown of our
society, the forcing of millions of businesses to close and the forcing of tens
of millions of people out of work.
All this raises questions of what can be done to prevent
this from happening again, how this will change society and culture as we know
it, and what things should be changed in light of problems in our current
society and culture that have now been made prominent.
I have been told numerous times to keep my writings short,
so I will have to come back to this subject a number of times.
I have never been a fan of globalism. We sent millions of jobs to China to save a
few dollars on our small appliances, and we spent hundreds of millions of
dollars combatting the emerald ash borer, the Asian long-horned beetle, and I think
there was another one, all of which came over with the imports. We lost 22 million ash trees in Michigan
alone, and that number is probably ten years old.
We have medical companies in China that couldn’t export
needed medical supplies to the United States, because China wanted them
first.
I think it is unwise for a country to be dependent on another
country for anything. Some countries
have to, but we don’t.
Companies move their production overseas, because it is
cheaper. Most of these countries do not
have an Environmental Protection Agency, minimum wage laws, labor unions,
company-based medical insurance, OSHA, child labor laws, labor protection laws,
OT rules, and all sorts of other inconveniences companies here have to deal
with.
You can always make something cheaper somewhere else in the world.
This is why our country for most of our history taxed
imports. We didn’t even have an income
tax until 1913. Taxes on imports paid
for almost our entire federal budget.
Recently, when the government imposed some taxes on imports,
the newspapers howled that this tax was hurting the American consumers. Well, for that matter, all taxes hurt the
American consumer. At least, this was a voluntary tax. You didn’t have to buy that foreign-made product.
Except, of course, that we didn’t make most of those things
here anymore. When we tax imports, we
should end up making these products here again.
Won’t the prices be higher? When
you have 5 American companies making that same small appliance, prices go
down.
When companies leave our country, people here lose jobs and
leave the workforce in many cases. And
that costs our society enormous amounts of money in other ways. So we think we’re saving money on that cheap
appliance from China, but we pay for it a dozen times over in many subtle,
unnoticed, secondary ways.
When we make our stuff in other countries, then that other
country is able to have control over us to some extent. If we don’t do something they want, they can
just withhold our products, or worse.
Foreign products have always been available in our country. They were always more expensive, and nobody
cared. But they were true foreign products,
like Swiss chocolate and French wine.
They weren’t American products made somewhere else and then shipped back
here.
If this experience brings a lot of our jobs back home, then
some good came out of it. We won World
War 2 due in a large part to our extraordinary manufacturing capability. We gave most of that up through globalism. We should make all of our own stuff here
period.
