Tag Archive for: globalization

America and the Future of Globalism

If globalization is the economic integration of nations in a world where technology has all but erased once formidable barriers to long-distance communication and transportation, globalism is its cultural and ideological counterpart. In theory, the same dynamics might apply. As economies merge, cultures merge as well. As we move deeper into the 21st century, a global melting pot blends everything and everyone together. A planetary civilization marches united into a future of peaceful coexistence, ecological restoration, human life extension, and galactic exploration.

If people were saints and reality utopia, this idealized version of globalism could be embraced without reservation. Globalism, like communism or neoliberalism, is beautiful when described in these abstract terms and not rooted in the real world. And there is a legitimate moral imperative for us to try to come to terms with what civilization will look like as technology continues to shrink the world. Technology makes globalization, in some ways, inevitable. But what ideology regulates globalization is a choice.

This is the lens through which to view the identity struggle that currently grips the United States and other Western nations. It clarifies what is at stake and points to the consequences of getting it wrong. Unfortunately, for reasons that are not hard to explain, people are not saints and reality is not utopian. Thus, the institutions currently defining policy in America are doing almost everything wrong. Their malpractice is pushing America into decline at the same time as it is alienating allies and empowering malevolent regimes. It must be corrected.

In two fundamental areas, the consensus of America’s elites, relentlessly escalated in policies imposed both by unelected administrators and elected officials, is horrifically wrong. The first of these concerns energy in particular, and more generally, environmentalism. These policies, which nations elsewhere on earth will not accept—to the point of being willing to go to war to stop them, if necessary—are going to strip Americans of freedom and prosperity if we continue to pursue them. That process is well underway.

In the name of saving the planet, Americans are being denied access to affordable energy, despite the fact that “renewables” are not only incapable of replacing oil, gas, coal, hydro, and nuclear power, but are even more destructive to the environment. In an attempt to reduce “greenhouse gas” emissions, Americans are being driven out of rural areas and into cities. In turn, America’s cities are prevented from expanding outward in order to prevent “sprawl.” Instead, people evicted from rural areas, along with millions of migrants from foreign nations, are packed via “infill” into multifamily, high-density apartments.

To express the scope of this transformation would require volumes. It is designed to eliminate America’s middle class and destroy small businesses. It extends into every economic sector—energy, water, food, transportation, housing, media, medicine. It is regulatory tyranny that only billionaire individuals and multibillion-dollar corporations can navigate. It centralizes power and cannot be administered without monitoring and micromanaging individual behavior. It is a dystopian nightmare, and it is quietly and systematically smothering what remains of free and economically independent Americans.

The other fundamental mistake America’s elites are promoting is the destruction of the meritocracy that, perhaps more than anything else, made America great. In the name of eliminating racism, sexism, and disproportionate outcomes for people with other identifiable group characteristics, merit and qualifications are being replaced by identity quotas. This, too, is rolling its way through America’s institutions.

Meritocracy, in the broadest sense of the word, is closely related to normality. It is normal to want the best-qualified people to fill positions. It is normal for social organizations, including businesses and government agencies, to best cohere when everyone is not only chosen for their competence, but for their acceptance of shared values and behaviors. Replacing normality with a celebration of abnormality, and replacing competence with quotas, as America’s institutions are doing, undermines the efficiency and the happiness of everyone involved. What’s left are implacable bureaucracies, vast and empty organizations without souls.

These mistakes are going to kill America. Energy poverty, environmentalist tyranny, “equity” over competence; these choices are fatal. But these are merely surface phenomena. The bigger problem is that there is a collective soul that has defined western civilization, developed over millennia, and now warped and abandoned by America’s elites. It is dismissed as an anachronism and an impediment. But it is the source of America’s greatness and restoring it is the only solution to America’s current misdirection.

A recent essay by Cauf Skiviersa provocative writer who was recently banned by Medium (you’ve been warned)—includes a paragraph that describes the foundations of Western civilization. For brevity, it’s as good as any. He writes:

The foundations of the West are anchored in the triad of Christianity, Greek philosophy, and Roman law. These pillars were not erected by a single, all-directing force, but rather were forged out of disagreement, wars, jealousy, and love. None of the elements necessitating any particular racial impetus. Much to the contrary. Christianity dispelled the notion of a ‘chosen people,’ extending salvation indiscriminately through faith. Rome, too, was built upon the bedrock of the Rule of Law, applicable to all. Greek philosophy was not concerned with the ‘lived experience’ of Athenians or the ‘spoken truth’ of Milesians, but rather with universal values.

The relevance of this paragraph is in its appeal to everyone, everywhere in the world. Salvation indiscriminately through faith. The rule of law applicable to all. Universal values. What this heritage gave rise to was a nation that even now remains an inspiration. A nation where individuals enjoy personal and economic freedom. A nation where the government does not intrude on where people live or how they develop their property. A nation where private enterprise and private ownership are respected and protected.

But our values—our piety, our idealism, our respect for individuality—have brought us to the present struggle to define our identity. We no longer agree on what’s normal. We no longer agree on what’s fair. Every right and every traditional value we cherish is threatened.

Fixing the surface phenomena—the orchestrated abolition of affordable energy and meritocracy—is conceptually easy. The most powerful coalition of special interests in American history must be opposed with equal resolve by an American people united against the tyranny that must govern a society that’s economically broken and indifferent to competence.

Fixing the foundations of the West, however, is a harder job. The goal, and the opposition, is harder to define. Will we settle on values that restore a healthy society? Can we overcome woke hysteria without overreacting our way into a version of repression that is just as dark as the tyranny it displaces? Can we recognize enough of the enlightened and evolving values of this century without succumbing to decadence and decay? If we can do this, we offer the foundations of a world civilization.

How America resolves its own identity struggle will largely determine what kind of culture we live in centuries from now. To say, probably accurately, that no nation on earth is trying with more integrity than America to figure out how we should live in a way that is sustainable and equitable while preserving individual freedom and economic independence is discouraging but also must be an inspiration. We have to get this right.

Whether nations eventually merge together or remain separate members of a community of sovereign states depends on how globalism is ultimately defined. America’s elites offer a future of green poverty and woke decadence. In doing so, they are squandering the greatness that other nations once admired and emulated. Instead of setting an attractive example, inviting other nations to join a global civilization, America’s elites are imposing a repugnant vision on the world. They must be stopped. There are alternatives. It is not too late.

This article originally appeared in American Greatness.

Towards A Nationalist Economic Policy

Suggesting that managed inflation and currency devaluation are pathways to greater national prosperity is bound to invite howls of derision. But critics may be ignoring factors, which, if acknowledged, might point towards consensus. At the least, it might provoke a more useful discussion.

With that in mind, here are four economic realities in America today:

1 – Despite that the word “fiat” is often used as a term of derision, all currencies are fiat unless backed by redeemable commodities. China is stockpiling gold amidst rumors they may try to tie the Renminbi to gold. Good luck with that.

2 – Throughout history, nations with the ability to sustain capital formation through financial innovation are the ones that succeeded. Prudently managed fractional reserve lending, a financial innovation, enables far more liquidity in the economy.

3 – The biggest engine of liquidity is not printing currency – there’s only about five trillion in actual printed US dollars extant in the world – it is debt formation, backed by collateral, that finances massive projects and asset acquisitions.

4 – American has been on a borrowing binge since the 1980s and total market debt – consumer, commercial and government – now stands at nearly 3.5 times GDP. This level of debt is unsustainable.

On this final axiom there should be agreement. As for the others, concerned observers might agree to disagree. Suffice to say that the economic disruption, and unintended consequences, that would accompany transition to a commodity backed currency would dwarf what we may expect in most other scenarios for the American dollar. So how do Americans unwind nearly $80 trillion in hard debt?

If one accepts the premise that this debt is unsustainable, and that further debt accumulation is no longer possible, than broadly speaking, to facilitate the inevitable rebalancing there are only two possible outcomes – inflation or deflation. The problem with deflation is there is no model of deflation that doesn’t include a complete collapse of liquidity and a near cessation of economic activity. A deflationary collapse would not simply wipe out a few big banks. It would wipe out all banking, big and small, multinational and local, because the value of the collateral that backed all their loans, no matter how healthy their reserve ratios had previously been, would have collapsed.

There is a model of inflation, however, that permits America to continue to prosper economically. It is vital to make the distinction between inflation caused by wages increasing faster than asset values vs inflation caused by asset values increasing faster than wages. Understanding this distinction, and recognizing what is at state in the choice between them, cuts to the heart of what constitutes nationalist economic policy vs globalist economic policy.

Globalist Economic Policy

For at least the last 20 years, American wages have not kept pace with inflation. Examining the core elements of this inflation offers clues to why most Americans are worse off economically than they were 20-30 years ago. And the primary driver of inflation outpacing wage growth is the financialization of the American economy. This is the reliance on creating overvalued assets (asset bubbles) to serve as expanded collateral to enable increased consumer borrowing.

Allowing consumers more capacity to borrow took momentary pressure off of consumers to earn higher wages. This served the interests of multinational corporations and international banks whose profits were optimized when they exported jobs and imported workers. By importing cheap products from overseas and stimulating borrowing on inflated home equity values, for a time, most Americans weren’t suffering the consequences of an economy running on debt instead of productivity.

It’s worth considering all the ways that financial inflation was imposed on ordinary Americans, forcing them into debt. Already reeling from the globalist tactic of exporting jobs out of their country, and importing workers (and welfare recipients) into their country, Americans also had to contend with higher prices for everything that couldn’t be imported – which are those items that use up most disposable consumer income – rent or mortgages, and utility bills. Why?

The answer to this exposes the other primary strategy of globalism, synergistic with the tactic of exporting jobs and importing low wage workers, which is climate change mitigation in all of its almost endless permutations. In the name of protecting the planet, artificial scarcity has been imposed on Americans from coast to coast, and in those regions where state and local governments are overran the most with globalists, that scarcity is most acute.

In the name of fighting climate change, globalists – oops, environmentalists – challenge the ability of entrepreneurs to do anything. To the extent new housing developments are permitted, after years, not months, and millions, not thousands, in fees, they must be confined within the boundaries of existing cities.

It is impossible to overstate how misanthropic this policy is in terms of its effect on ordinary Americans. At the same time as millions of immigrants, legal and illegal, continue to pour into the country, draconian environmental laws are cramming all new housing within the footprints of existing cities. Tranquil neighborhoods are being demolished to make room for millions of newcomers. People are being literally piled on top of each other. But the investor class sees their real estate portfolios soar. Collateral grows, enabling more borrowing, enabling more spending.

Renewable energy, also mandated by law in the interests of supposedly cooling the planet which is supposedly warming catastrophically, also creates artificial scarcity. The cost of renewable energy far exceeds that of conventional energy, which itself costs far more than it should because of permitting delays, lawsuits, and excessive regulations.

Renewable energy requires costly upgrades to the power grid. It requires storage assets to make up for the daily intermittent nature of wind and solar power. The lifecycle costs to manufacture, operate, decommission, and periodically replace wind and solar power arrays are grossly underestimated, especially when considering how these systems have to be oversized to account for seasonal fluctuations in renewable energy output. Power management systems at the grid level and within the home, extending to every “wired” appliance, also add stupendous costs. But public utilities earn far higher revenues when they deploy renewables, which, since their profit percentages are regulated, is the only way they can increase their profits. And everyone up and down the supply chain, from green entrepreneurs to high tech companies, exploit mandated market opportunities that would not otherwise exist.

Climate change panic has turned our schoolchildren into manipulated puppets and morphed a generation of environmentalists from sincere activism to militant hysteria. These minions support every piece of legislation and every lawsuit, despite the impact: higher prices for everything, artificial scarcity, and inflated collateral to keep the borrowing party going. Other significant sources of inflation, college tuition and health care in particular, have other primary causes – in particular, unionization and the inefficiencies and higher costs that come with unionization – but the pretext for demanding higher wages and benefits in the first place, or even the drive to unionize itself, stem from the reality of unaffordable homes and unaffordable energy.

Nationalist Economic Policy

It is important to emphasize that nationalist economic policy is not “conservative,” nor is it Republican. The only reason nationalists, or conservatives, for that matter, vote for Republicans is because Republicans are not Democrats. While far too many Republican politicians are still just members of the establishment uniparty, at least they haven’t had their vanguard completely taken over by international socialists and climate change zealots. But to suggest that a nationalist economic policy is further evidence of yet another betrayal of alleged Republican, “fiscal conservative” principles is to miss the point entirely.

A nationalist economic policy should have one goal: unwind American debt in a manner that will avoid a deflationary collapse while at the same time shifting the weight of ongoing inflation from financial asset inflation to wage inflation. To do this, both of the key premises of globalism have to be broken. Immigration must be limited to reduced quantities of highly skilled immigrants, and climate change alarmist legislation must be replaced with practical policies designed to promote private sector development of cheap and clean fossil fuel throughout the United States and around the world.

Reducing the supply of labor via more restrictive immigration policies will cause wages to inflate. Increasing the supply of housing and energy by reforming absurdly restrictive environmentalist laws will cause prices for these commodities to level off or at least not rise as quickly as wages. And this might be enough to slowly allow the real value of debt in the economy to erode via inflation. But why stop there?

Fiat currencies maintain their value based on the underlying economic strength of the nations that issue them. The US Dollar is the reserve and transaction currency of the world because no other large national economy has anywhere near America’s industrial diversity, demographic vitality, wealth of natural resources, top universities, broad and deep leadership in high technology, political stability, and military strength. What if devaluing the dollar would actually increase America’s underlying economic strength, and what if the only way to devalue the dollar were to continue to engage in federal deficit spending, and incrementally lower the federal reserve lending rate?

Cue the howls.

About a year ago, it was leaked to the press that President Trump was asking his economic advisers “what’s better, a strong dollar or a weak dollar?” Literally everyone, from the entire media establishment to every anti-Trump pundit, took this opportunity to ridicule Trump, as if he should have already known the answer to this question. But there is huge disagreement among experts on this question, and Trump, as usual, was displaying common sense by asking to hear both sides of the issue.

Trump’s gut instincts appear to favor devaluing the dollar. A devalued dollar means it costs relatively more to import raw materials than to extract them domestically (note to environmentalists – it’s also less hypocritical). It also means it costs relatively more to import manufactured goods than to manufacture them domestically. This not only creates jobs, it further bids up the cost of wages. These policies will also help mitigate potential negative impacts on Americans of yet another rising mega-trend, automation.

Everything Trump’s doing, restricting immigration, developing oil and gas wells and pipelines, trying to repatriate money, and negotiating better trade deals, is designed to shift the model of inflation that we’re dealing with from a bad inflation model to a good inflation model.

As for deficit spending, it’s very principled to talk about deficit spending as if it’s an evil, and it’s certainly something that’s created a problem, but at least in the short run, it is not possible to eliminate deficit spending. If wages are increasing faster than the cost-of-living, than spending on entitlements including Social Security can be indexed to stay at or below the rate of inflation, slowly reducing its share of the federal budget. Immigration reform can reduce that burden on federal and state/local budgets. Maybe military spending can settle in at somewhat a somewhat lower percentage of GDP than it did during the last cold war. We can certainly use federal money more efficiently, and probably save a few hundred billion there. But precipitously eliminating the federal budget deficit is impossible, and continuing deficit spending might actually help devalue the dollar, stimulate “good” inflation, and diminish the real value of government and consumer debt.

International Globalism vs. Nationalist Globalization

Ultimately the choice of economic policies for the U.S. comes down to only one; inflation where wages grow at a faster rate than assets appreciate. The reverse of that is the financialized economy we’ve lived with, which has enriched the globalist political donor class but impoverished everyone else in America. The catastrophic third option is deflation, which carries a high risk of cascading implosions of collateral, putting the economy into a depression era tailspin.

There is no policy without risk and without downside. Inflation, for example, will victimize holders of fixed income investments no matter what. It might as well be wage inflation rather than asset inflation, particularly since asset inflation can lead to property tax increases that are particularly harmful to people on fixed incomes. And it’s a bit disingenuous for budget hawks to attack economic solutions involving inflation, when these are typically the same folks who want to throw America’s seniors onto 401K plans. Such a strategy would imply a supreme confidence in every American individual’s ability to manage their own personal retirement portfolios, including, presumably, inflation hedged investments.

Americans, along with citizens in every nation, have a choice. They can become commodities in a global marketplace, where the assets they’ve earned and accomplishments they’ve logged have no meaning and no merit. Or they can assert their sovereignty, preserving their culture, their wealth, their independence, and the privileges they’ve earned as citizens. They can compete with other nations, they can coexist with other nations, they can cooperate with other nations, but they can survive with their identity and traditions intact.

In America’s case, the challenge is particularly complex, because of America’s leadership role in the world. The American military doesn’t have to engage in nation building. It can be more judicial in deciding when to engage in police actions. But no matter how much those activities are attenuated, America’s military still has to pursue international terror networks, wherever they are, and America’s military still has to deter Chinese expansionism. Like it or not, America is in an undeclared cold war with China, and has been for decades. This is a war that can only be kept cold through deterrence, and deterrence, while fabulously expensive, is cheaper than a hot, horrific war.

Globalization, to clarify, is not the same thing as globalism. Technological advances make globalization inevitable. Intercontinental travel is now available and affordable for literally billions of people. The internet has made mass communication available from anyone, anywhere on Earth, to anyone, anywhere else on earth. Electronic transfers of funds occur instantaneously from anywhere to anywhere. Trade between nations has never been easier. And multinational corporations and banks have lost their national identities and operate as global entities.

Globalism, by contrast, is an ideology. In the crudest, most accurate terms possible, globalism can be described as the naive belief that turning global governance over to an unelected cadre of corporate and financial elites is the best possible future for humanity. But it’s not, because globalists want to cram humans into congested cities like cattle, erasing cultural and national identities and traditions. They want to ration availability of energy, water, land and raw materials, justifying it in the name of saving the planet. And they’re willing to relentlessly demonize, marginalize, ostracize and silence anyone who questions their agenda, stigmatizing them as racists and climate “deniers.”

Perhaps some globalists are truly naive, while others are cold and cynical. If so, naive globalists apparently think that rampant population growth among the impoverished nations constitutes less of a burden on the planet and its peoples than empowering these nations with cheap fossil fuel which would induce them to voluntarily check their population growth. And perhaps cynical globalists simply don’t care. They just want the power that globalism offers them, and if renewable energy fails to deliver a sustainable civilization and chaos ensues, so what? The great cull would be a violent but very effective shortcut for the elites to establish their breakaway civilization, their privileged Elysium.

The reality of accumulating debt and persistent federal spending deficits will eventually push Americans to a crossroads. Most everyone agrees about that. Hyping the tropes that keep donor dollars flowing into libertarian think tanks is not the same as offering constructive alternatives. Those critics who wish to offer up a solution more realistic that what is proposed herein are emphatically invited to do so.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

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How the Left Embraced Globalization

On November 30, 1999, the largely theoretical question of globalism exploded into reality with the spectacle of 50,000 demonstrators shutting down a major meeting of the World Trade Organization in Seattle. News coverage of this unexpected sensation, with expertly rendered video montages of police phalanxes, black-clad anarchists, smashed glass, snarled traffic, accompanied by animated commentary, provided American television media with a daily potboiler for a few days. Then globalism was again forgotten.

In 1999, America’s progressive Left viewed globalism as the root cause of poverty, environmental destruction, and the disintegration of ancient cultures. They perceived globalism as the movement by multinational corporations, and their client organizations, the supranational World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, to control the development and growth of supposedly sovereign nations.

Instead of allowing developing countries the opportunity to grow diverse, self-sufficient economies, in the hallowed name of “free trade,” they were force-fed loans that required them to spend on mega-projects, cash crops, mines, dams, low-wage manufacturing plants—all built by multinationals that destroy the economic independence of the countries they enter.

In 1999, Americans who bought running shoes produced by slave labor overseas, ate hamburgers made from cattle that grazed on the lands of a former rainforest, or drank coffee grown in pesticide drenched monocrops where cloud forest once stood, could only with effort conceive of such remote despoliation. What was obvious was the cheap footwear, fast food, and excellent coffee.

Globalization, to the extent Americans thought about it at all, was perceived only as providing material benefit. The catastrophes wreaked elsewhere in the world were abstractions. At the time, one of the core missions of the populist progressive Left was to expose globalization, and stop it in its tracks by changing American public opinion.

That was then. Today the progressive Left has become the champion of globalization, joining, perhaps unwittingly, America’s establishment uniparty in supporting its updated agenda: open borders, free trade, and “climate action.”

While the progressives may disagree with the establishment on questions of degree—how much redistribution of wealth, how many migrants, how aggressively to implement climate action—they’re in remarkable agreement on the premises.

Today the foes of globalization are on the Right. The same black-clad anarchists who used to smash glass to disrupt the meetings of the WTO, IMF, and World Bank, now take to the streets to silence the anti-globalist Right.

What happened?

Probably the most significant change was the growing realization that economic globalization was not simply a matter of developed nations exploiting developing nations. The reality is far more complex.

In general, free trade is supposed to optimize the rate of global economic growth, but the primary beneficiaries are the less developed nations. Exporting jobs to less developed nations with cheaper labor may have been characterized as exploitation of those workers, but the big surprise was that most of them didn’t see it that way. Just compare the rates of economic growth in developing nations between 2000 and today—ChinaIndiaVietnamMalaysiaIndonesia—to the growth rates over the same period in developed nations including the United StatesJapan, and members of the European Union. But for a while, the topic of globalization faded from the public mind.

The events of September 11, 2001 and the War on Terror that followed took center stage, pushing globalization to the sidelines. Then, right about the time the public had begun to get used to the new era of endless wars, came the great recession.

Until the great recession, the downside of globalization hadn’t really struck Americans. Sure, at the same time as jobs were being exported to low wage nations, citizens of the high wage nations were losing those jobs. If you don’t have a job, it doesn’t matter if the giant flat screen television made in China is available at Walmart for $600 or $1,200. But for years, millions of Americans compensated for lower income by borrowing money on their bubblized home equity. That came to a screeching halt in 2009.

Where was the progressive Left during the great recession?

Yes, there was Occupy Wall Street and a succession of encampments around the country to protest the injustice of a financial industry that escaped almost any consequence for derailing the economy. But to a large degree, the Obama presidency obscured the transition of the Left from foes of globalization to proponents of globalization.

Barack Obama’s charisma, his status as the first African American president, and his ability to pacify his leftist critics with big legislative initiatives such as Obamacare, somehow either overshadowed, justified, legitimized, or overcame objections to his other policies, which were to be just as globalist as those of his predecessor. It wasn’t until Trump came along in 2016 that the debate over globalization returned to center stage. But this time it was a very different debate.

Donald Trump disrupted the debate over globalization by focusing on the impact it was having on Americans. He challenged what had become truisms for the establishment—trade deficits don’t matter or can actually be beneficial, free trade is always good, mass immigration helps more than it harms.

What the establishment had ignored was that the benefits of trade deficits are financial bubbles (as American asset prices are bid up by foreign investors) that only enrich wealthy speculators. Free trade isn’t free when other nations cheat. Mass immigration only benefits businesses who want cheaper labor. Meanwhile, homes became unaffordable debt traps, good manufacturing jobs migrated overseas, and immigrants took away jobs from America’s most vulnerable workers.

Trump also clarified the debate over globalization by forcing the progressive Left to reveal its true colors. It became clear that the Left’s only concern was how globalization affected the developing world, and exposed their indifference, even hostility, toward the workers in their own nations.

You can make a moral case that globalization should harm the workers of the developed nations more than it harms the workers of developing nations. You can turn that unavoidable truth into an altruistic virtue, although one that is rather hard to defend in the nations that are being harmed.

You can also embrace globalization on those terms because it does the bidding of the wealthy elites and multinational corporations who are most enriched by “free” trade and open borders.

America’s progressive left did both. They’ve disguised their desire to see the traditional American worker disenfranchised in their own nation with attacks on “white nationalism.” They’ve come to accept the premises of free trade economists that they’d once despised, with the caveat that climate activism and all that it entails—namely, the mass redistribution of wealth—will mitigate the impacts of globalism on developing nations which had once bothered them so much.

The fatal flaw in the Left’s new embrace of globalization, however, is that socialist redistribution has never made societies better off, and achieving 100 percent renewable energy would be environmentally disastrous to say nothing of economically impossible.

These unresolvable conflicts doom the undeclared alliance between progressive leftists and economic globalists. The result? A steady stream of defections by progressive leftists into alternative platforms, many of them likely to embrace the various forms of nationalism they now claim to deplore. Just watch.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

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