America has become addicted to cheap foreign baubles and easy money ( i. e., fake fiat currency ) at the expense of its long-term economic health. We allowed ourselves to be transformed from a cast iron business that made items into a largely document business that depends on the good graces of foreign countries for its success. This is a formula for postcolonial death.
We don’t make our own arms, foods, equipment, vehicles, plastics, drugs, or laptops. The total Covid lunacy, with its shutdowns and shortages and supply-chain panic, was a screaming concern warning us that the market we thought was so powerful was astonishingly fragile.
Visualize a successful producer, then surrounded by enemies and opponents, who, over time, outsourced most farming actions to his relatives because they could perform the job and provide the materials more cheaply than he could. He sold off his products and laid off his laborers because it was just easier and less expensive for others to accomplish the work and keep the machine.
But one evening, his companions said,” No more”, and now he finds himself unable to feed his property, push his fields, or yield his plants. Even if he had kept his old tractors and implements, he sold off all his welding equipment and spare parts and raw materials, so repairing anything would be impossible. On top of that, he doesn’t remember all that much about repairing the equipment anyway because he hasn’t done it for years.
So now he finds himself in control of once-fertile and productive land that he can’t utilize, and the people he used to rely on for help now refuse to lift a finger because they see an opportunity to bankrupt their old neighbor and business partner, allowing them to buy up all that land for themselves at fire sale prices.
That’s where America is now as a country. We stripped our economy down and sold it for parts, happy to have the cash in our pockets and ignorant of the possibility the good times could ever end.
President Donald Trump has understood these dynamics for decades and is trying to reset our priorities to give us an economy that isn’t built on a foundation of paper. That requires resetting all of our trade relationships and recreating the conditions that built an economy and civilization that together were the envy of the world.
There will, of course, be some short-term pain as part of that process. Muscles must ache before they grow stronger. Addicts have to go through withdrawal before they can come out clean on the other side. In fact, the angry reactions from self-styled “free traders” who have gotten rich off of our leaders mortgaging our country’s long-term economic health for short-term cash resemble the drug dealer enraged that one of his best customers is about to go clean. ” You’ll never survive the withdrawal symptoms”, he says. ” You want what I’m selling. You need it. You can’t live without it”.
The reality is we cannot survive if we continue to remain addicted to cheap foreign crap. We cannot survive if we are unable to make our own food and medicine and vehicles and weapons and computers. A farmer who is wholly dependent upon his enemies to plow and seed and fertilize and harvest his land is a farmer who will starve. Likewise, a nation that depends entirely on its enemies to power its economy is a nation destined to become history rather than shape it.
