The 'Competitiveness' Fraud. The Bush Administration wants Americans to believe that we can compete — no, prosper, magnificently — under free trade with all the world, including the most desperately and dirt-poor. Only a mental defective (or a Republican whose mind has been taken off-line by dogma) could believe such a thing.
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It doesn't matter how many low-paid Mexicans or other Latins from farther south in our Hemisphere we try to draw in, this Hemisphere entire is incapable of competing with the Eastern Hemisphere (a term you rarely hear), because people in the Old World-Third World make almost nothing.
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The Old World is a nitemare, and always has been. That's why WE are HERE. (Sorry, European and other readers: this blog proceeds from and is ordinarily addressed mainly to, Americans, that is, people of the Americas, the land area united by a single cordilleran spine from Point Barrow to Tierra del Fuego.)
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Bush pretends, for the conspiracy of which he is only the human face, that if only we work hard and smart, we can compete with India and China. That's a lie.
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It does not matter one whit whether we are efficient and they are inefficent; whether we work smart and they work stupid; whether we are brilliantly literate and they are only scarcely literate. We cannot compete if they make 1/10th or 1/20th as much as we do. End of discussion.
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All else is moot. We CANNOT compete with people who make 1/10 or 1/20 as much as we do — whether we include medical insurance or exclude it makes no difference, because Chinese and Indian workers don't have medical insurance (China is supposed to cover it by virtue of being a Communist society devoted to the mass, tho one has to wonder, and Indians just have to be healthy or die).
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Americans who make a living wage and have even minimal fringe benefits (health insurance, vacation) cannot possibly compete with China and India. It cannot be done.
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I am not saying, "it will be difficult" to compete with China and India. I am not saying, "The only way we can compete is if we are better-educated and work smarter". I am saying what everyone needs to know with assurety: "Americans cannot make up, in any way, for the difference in wage rates that Asians pull in as against what Americans are paid. It just cannot be done."
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When Bush tells us that we can compete if only this, or that, or the other, you need to know that he is LYING! We CANNOT COMPETE with China, or India, or any country that chooses to compete against China or India. It CANNOT BE DONE. Period.
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We can destroy our own economy, for the sake of trying to compete with countries we cannot possibly compete against, or we can accept that we cannot live as we do unless we insulate ourselves from the worst effects of global poverty.
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There is a slogan among admirers of freedom that everyone must already know: "Freedom is indivisible.' But the human workforce is infinitely divisible, and the poorer paid are always available to take work away from the better-paid.
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At end, society will have to abolish money, but that necessary, futurist cure has little bearing on public policy today. We need, as modern people responding to modern exigencies, to demand immediate fixes for immediate problems.
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Tariffs are an instant fix. They can be passed today and go into effect tomorrow. All the infrastructure is in place to enforce tomorrow's tariffs, as they were able to enforce yesterday's tariffs.
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The super-rich ruling class did not always rule American society, but they always did well. If free trade, with all its horrendous injury to ordinary working people, is abolished, the rich will still do fine, but the rest of us, in the First World, will do much better.
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Working people in the Third World would do best by filling the needs of people in other Third World countries, specializing more or less by design in areas not already taken, so that Chinese companies can supply the needs of poor people in India, Indian companies can supply the needs of poor people in China, and only after all those basic markets' needs are met, other parts of the world can be served.
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The United States cannot be part of that global fix without reducing Americans to Third World living standards (utter penury).
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We can, however, promote far more intensive commercial integration of now-disparate regions of the world. India should be trading intensively with China, and both of those Third World countries should be trading intensively with Africa and Latin America. We of the First World (a term and concept we almost never hear but need to keep in mind) do not have to ruin our own countries in order for the benited parts of the planet to prosper.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,455.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 7:43 PM