Quote:
Originally Posted by
TargetGunFan 
| I am always amazed by so called capitalists that hate NAFTA. |
Perhaps it's possible to be a capitalist
and a patriot. I know that according to the rules of capitalism the capital flows to where labor costs and manufacturing costs are lowest so the capitalists make a higher profit because of lower costs on the front end; but it's also a problem when you realize we have entire sectors of our economy that are absolutely dependent upon product manufactured abroad to function.
And there is still the question of what happens to the lower classes who used to make a decent living out of the factories
that are no longer here that has to be answered. I can't think of an exact analogy from history to fit our current situation. The closest I remember is the migration to America in the early 19th Century of the English and Irish underclasses when there was an economic slowdown in the UK. Hundreds of thousands of them came to America and ended up working in factories in New England and mines in the Central Atlantic states with conditions and wages not too different from what they had left. The biggest difference was they had
hope. Hope that if they saved their money, they could head West and homestead... or set up a small shop... or that their kids would do better as Americans than they would have as Britons or Irishmen, because we had an upward mobility based on ability denied to subjects of the British Crown back then.
But those conditions no longer obtain. We have no lands to homestead as small (my definition: a quarter-section or less in size) farms. Less than 4% of the US population works the land for a living and that number drops every year as more family farms go under and their lands are absorbed into agribiz operations. (Don't get me started.)
As noted, factory jobs have been shipped abroad to places where there are no labor unions and corporations (a concept evil in and of itself) don't pay living wages. At most, some components are made here while assembly of the finished product is performed elsewhere. Even in the auto industry, you won't find a current production car that is "100% American." I checked when Her Imperial Majesty insisted on buying The Big Red Gas Hog that squats in my driveway (a Chrysler minivan; I hate it passionately). Only about 75% of that minivan is American-made parts; it's cheaper to buy things like the tires, batteries, fabrics and some plastic parts abroad and ship them here to be put into the car than it is to make them from scratch in America.
My advice to kids today looking to make good money who can't go to the Ivy League schools would be to look at jobs in fields where the work can't be shipped abroad. Blue collar work like the construction trades (plumbing, electrical, HVAC, etc.) and things like engine mechanics. Work that has to be performed
in situ, that you can't outsource to a call center or laboratory in India or China, in other words.
But what happens when no one is building construction projects and people can't afford to fix their cars? I ask because that's the way we seem to be heading.
One reason America made it through the Great Depression without the kind of mass starvation you saw in China or India under similar circumstances was in the 1930s, something like 90% of America still lived on farms. Provided you own your land and you aren't wrecked by drought (e.g., the Okie Migration to California), at the very least you will be able to feed yourselves and barter farm products (veg, fruit, meat, eggs) for things you can't make yourself like cloth, thread, needles and shoes. In other words, you can farm for subsistence and wait for times to get better; my grandfather did. (He and Grandma also made vodka and traded that to the local drinkers for both cash and goods, including to the sheriff; but that's another story.)
But today, 96% of Americans live in cities or suburbs. All cities depend on the countryside to feed them. What very few people realize is that starvation in the cities is rarely farther than two weeks away for city-dwellers. If transport systems break down and are not promptly restored, you are in a SHTF scenario and no mistake.
Will we get a SHTF scenario when there are no jobs to make the money to buy the food required to live? Probably. The only question is, which scenario do we get? Urban rioting and the breakdown of local government? Revolution in which the current crop of mismanagers from Obama on down decorate every lamp post and tree in town and a new, probably dictatorial system is installed? A massive die-off from starvation that breeds disease and more death to the point the survivors wind up digging mass graves and pushing the bodies into them with bulldozers, like we remember from the movies taken by the Allies after the Nazi death camps were liberated? Cities contracting to their centers while the outlying districts turn into ghost towns? (Note: we are seeing this happen in Chicago, Detroit and Flint, Michigan already.) I do not know, and I would much prefer not to find out.
If we want to avoid this, we have got to get the manufacturing jobs that went overseas back home to America, even if that means the capitalists must pay workers more and products cost more. That's what I meant by the 'patriotic capitalist.' Thing is, I don't know if such really exist or if they are mythical beasts like unicorns, wyverns and dragons.
There is another solution, but it's not viable these days: conquest. We conquer territory, subjugate the native population (or exterminate it, as Hitler had in mind for Russia), and move our own people into it as overlords.
I don't see that one flying.
So we had better get those jobs back home. Just don't ask me how we can compel the people in a position to make that happen to do it.
