by Josiah Lippincott via American Greatness,
Independence is freedom. Dependence is slavery. The more independence you have, the more choices you can make and the freer you are.
The more you need things from other people, the fewer choices you have, and the more you must obey the whims of others.
If you are poor, then you must work in order to live. You must trade your time and energy for sustenance, or you will die. Therefore, you must give up your freedom of choice to live.
Necessity constrains you.
Wealth, by contrast, gives you choices. You don’t have to take the first menial job you see just to put food on the table. Your money gives you power and flexibility. You can be your own boss.
Self-sufficiency—being independent—is critical to freedom and happiness. Relationships of desire replace those of necessity and convenience; friendship replaces subordination.
In this life, we can never wholly be free of necessity, but it is best to minimize our needs as much as possible. The frugal and prudent man sets up hedges around his wealth. He takes out “insurance” against the possibility of trouble and saves for a rainy day. He is moderate in his spending, avoids debt, and pays off his creditors quickly.
This common-sense wisdom is just as applicable at the national as at the individual level. A prudent nation does not sell off its future for cheap pleasures in the present; it works to liberate itself from dependence on foreigners and enemies; it prepares for hard times.
A prudent nation is, to the maximum extent possible, self-reliant and frugal.
The globalist liberal economic regime is none of these things. Indeed, the free traders insist that the wisdom of prudence and frugality is folly and even tyrannical, that autarky, or self-sufficiency, is ruin, and that dependence on foreigners is prosperity and power.
They are wrong.
Trade, of course, is a source of wealth. Specialization creates efficiency, and efficiency creates wealth. Instead of doing many things poorly, a worker can focus on doing one thing extremely well. He then trades the excess of his labor with others for what he needs and wants.
On a large enough scale, this trade between different specialists or workers creates far greater prosperity than if every man had to care for himself. In the state of nature, self-sufficiency is painful and hard to acquire. The individual by himself is vulnerable to injury, death, robbery, and famine.
A thousand dangers threaten him on every side. But when he allies with others, he is less weak. The more cords you wrap together, the stronger the rope becomes. Strength compounds strength.
But this strengthening has an upper limit. An alliance between men must be a true alliance. The members must care for one another and share their mutual commitment to the same high degree.
You cannot ally with people who hate you or who seek to defraud you. An alliance is a two-way street.
Globalists don’t understand this principle, however.
In the aftermath of WWII, the Allied nations, giddy with victory and smug in their liberal values, believed that the whole world could live as one, that the population of the earth could enter into one giant alliance. It is from this idea that we get the “United Nations,” quite literally the nations of the earth were to be united into one global community rooted in shared democratic values. After the fall of the Soviet Union, it appeared that this liberal project had been realized.
Every nation on earth had entered into a new era free from tyranny and the petty jealousies of the old geopolitical order.
Liberals used this rationale to justify massive outsourcing in the American economy.
Shipping jobs abroad lowered labor costs, brought cheaper prices, and raised the value of American companies. With fewer liabilities on their balance books, stocks rose to soaring heights. Returns blossomed. Investments boomed.
True enough, the United States had outsourced innumerable key industries abroad. Today, 99 percent of our medications, shoes, and fish are acquired from abroad, primarily from China. But for liberals, this was a small price to pay.
Free trade makes a nation wealthy. Global free trade should make it even wealthier. And where wealth goes, democracy is sure to follow. Democracy means peace. Peace means happiness. All would be well.
This promise was a lie. The nations of the earth do not share a fundamental interest. Democracy does not guarantee peace. Free trade does not make for endless prosperity. The delusions of a global order of freedom are hollow to the core. Indeed, they are evil.
COVID lockdowns made this clear. If liberalism and free trade lead to ever more freedom, how does one explain the global panic over a respiratory virus, a panic so intense it led to the American government unilaterally suspending the rights of free association, worship, and speech for years at a time?
It wasn’t just America, either. Western nations transformed themselves into open-air prison camps. After the initial wave of hysteria passed, relentless vaccine mandates came. The freedom of bodily autonomy was suspended on an almost global scale.
COVID threw back the curtain on the liberal world order and revealed its rotten, tyrannical, and insane heart, but it was not the only warning sign. Far from it.
The nations of the earth do not share a common interest. The explosion in BLM violence, anti-White DEI policies, and the relentless condemnations of American history for its bigotry and White supremacy make clear that no such reconciliation has yet occurred or is even possible.
The more migrants pour into America, the more our social cohesion frays, and the more our once-shared history is condemned and destroyed.
China and America, for instance, obviously pursue different interests. If they were the same, then we should simply unite and form one nation with a common citizenship. This would not work, of course. No one today would even dream of proposing such a thing.
The idea of uniting with Russia is even more absurd. Liberals foam at the mouth over Putin’s actions in Ukraine, viciously condemning the foreign policy of our one-time ally in WWII. The Russians, moreover, have no interest in being adversaries or even junior partners in the neoliberal world order. They want respect and a seat at the table, and they are willing to fight for them.
At home, America’s rural communities are in shambles. Once high-paying middle-class factory jobs have been wiped out. Empty factories dot the plain. Large swaths of America look like they lost a war: the buildings are falling apart, and the population is filled with foreigners.
The “interdependent” global economy has made Americans worse off in virtually every possible way. The only pathway to success today is through the “new economy.”
Every single one of my non-STEM college-educated millennial peers is working in law, finance, real estate, marketing, the non-profit sector, or for the government. They do not own businesses making real goods or employing real people. They are in industries that depend on government largesse, donations from the wealthy (derived primarily from equities), or working for the same stock-rich individuals.
Wealth increasingly concentrates in fewer and fewer hands. A few major cities—San Francisco, New York City, and Washington, DC—wield immense political and economic power. The scramble to get access to this wealth has given enormous influence to those in power.
It is much easier to cancel someone who works in a coveted laptop class job than it is to cancel a small-business owner who makes key components for a critical national industry.
Centralization makes censorship and gatekeeping much easier.
It is obvious to those with eyes to see and ears to hear that our contemporary economic situation is not sustainable. We cannot keep going on like this. COVID was a blaring warning of the grave dangers of globalism.
America must choose a new path. We must choose the path of self-reliance, frugality, moderation, and prudence. We must choose to embrace national sovereignty and rejuvenation.
For 80 years, the American ruling class has been selling America off for parts. Our privileged geopolitical situation, isolated from Asia and Europe by vast oceans, our intelligent and industrious population, our ethnic homogeneity, our vast natural resources, and our open space are an immense source of wealth. For decades, the grifters and parasites were able to sell and sell and sell. They defrauded their countrymen of jobs, opportunities, and possibilities. We have indebted our children and sold off their inheritance to enjoy pleasures in the present.
All of this is disgusting and contemptible. We need a reckoning.
Tariffs and borders will deliver the national economy we deserve.
In the short run, asset valuations and wages are inversely correlated.
The more a company must pay its workers, the less profit it can offer investors. For a corporation, high wages are a liability. Yet, this logic is stupid.
In the long run, the greatest asset a company has is the workers who make it up. Without their labor and insight, the company would not exist. High wages make our civil society stronger. Workers who feel like they have skin in the game are more patriotic, more motivated, and more eager to sacrifice for the greater good.
If forced to choose between corporate profits or higher wages, we should choose higher wages. Exporting jobs abroad to cheap Chinese laborers is a form of fraud. It is a betrayal. Good jobs should exist right here in America.
High wages mean better working conditions and better worker safety. America wouldn’t need minimum wage laws if the labor market were tight enough. True, corporations sacrifice profits in this arrangement, but those profits weren’t ever theirs to sacrifice. Workers and owners need each other.
We cannot sell out either one (through outsourcing or socialist revolution, respectively) without incurring deep economic and political wounds.
Capitalism and private property work best when capital and property are distributed broadly and freely.
In the 1970s, CEO compensation to average worker salary was about 20:1. This is a fair deal. It is right for those in charge, who ensure the business exists at all, to be better compensated than those who merely clock in and out. But today, this ratio has grown out of all proportion: it is now 400:1. The average CEO makes 400 times what his worker makes.
American workers deserve more respect. Without them, none of our national wealth would be possible! Competition with cheap foreign labor is a race to the bottom. It is suicide. We need the American worker to have purchasing power and excess capital. We need him to be confident and strong.
This means protecting him from foreign competition that sacrifices living standards for money. Americans deserve their dignity.
We need strong borders, too. There is no point in re-shoring factories only to fill them with immigrants. Third-world immigrants, especially, are a blight. They are often clannish, resentful, and grasping. They do not care about the nation or its history. They want money. They think the older White majority is racist and bad. They vote overwhelmingly Democrat. They need to go.
Immigration drives up housing prices, too. God isn’t making any more land. Artificially inflating the price of homes and space by an endless flow of migrants is a government subsidy towards those who already own homes at the expense of those who wish to acquire them. This is not fair.
Due to America’s vast resources and our (still) high-quality native population, we should have become less dependent on foreign trade as we became wealthier, not more. Trade is a product of excess wealth beyond the needs of life.
Early in the life of the American republic, our native industries were small and inefficient compared to those of Europe. American farmers, therefore, would trade commodities for relatively cheap manufactured goods abroad. But this dynamic created dependency. Americans became wealthier due to trade, but they also became needy. They had to have these manufactured goods to keep growing.
Tariffs incentivized Americans to pour their excess labor into making manufactured goods instead of more commodities made abroad. That policy made America into an industrial powerhouse in its own right instead of a satellite of Europe.
We need a similar policy now in order to recover high middle-class wages and a stable internal economy that isn’t dependent on foreign trade to maintain prosperity.
From an individual or global perspective, foreign trade creates prosperity. From the standpoint of the nation-state, it is a sign of misallocated capital. If America can only eat 50 million bushels of wheat, but we grow 100 million bushels, then this is a sign we have too many people making wheat. In the short run, it is better to ship that excess abroad in order to trade for luxuries.
In the long run, it is better to turn the excess labor of making wheat for export into making the foreign luxuries right here at home.
In a nation with as many resources and as much space as the United States, autarky is much more feasible than for nations like Japan or North Korea. While true autarky is not achievable or desirable—foreign trade and travel are part of individual freedom—it is good to encourage internal manufacturing as much as is reasonable.
Tariffs strike the right balance: they impose costs on foreign goods while channeling revenue back into the nation. The individual maintains access to foreign goods, even though this can harm domestic manufacturers, while paying into the commonwealth of the nation.
Tariffs are good. They protect the high American standard of living, make us more independent of foreign countries, and encourage innovation right here at home. Tariffs benefit us all. They are a necessary hedge to protecting American wealth.
https://www.zerohedge.com/economics/protectionism-good
