It is funny (by funny I mean so scary that you either laugh or scream.) how the citizens and the politicians take our economic security so much less seriously then out military security. For those taking notes, here is a profound statement that I don’t want slipping by. You can never fully destroy a culture with tanks and bombs. However, you can completely and utterly destroy a culture with economic invasion. When the dust settles the people will just start breeding and rebuilding. Their food, their music, their livelihood will return eventually. Most often even the culture’s form of government and wealth distribution will return. Most defiantly they will not take on the appearance and characteristics of their oppressors. However, invade a society economically, and their children will all be trying to emulate their aggressors. It wasn’t the bombs in Japan that did the most damage to the traditions that defined them. It was the businesses.
You wouldn’t let a foreign army come and use your equipment, weapons, and bases to wage a war against you would you? Then why would you let workers from another country come in and use your facilities to increase their own countries economic viability. Certainly the intelligence agencies have empowered groups with ideologies completely different then those of the US to fight military battles. So far, not once has that not come back to bite them in the ass. Iraq and Afghanistan are the most recent examples. It certainly doesn’t make sense to send monetary value to your enemies so they can buy weapons to use against you. Yet we do it, mostly through oil revenue.
While it makes no sense to do any of the military faux pas expressed above, we think nothing of A) letting foreigners drive the cost of our labor resource down and B) economically empowering cultures that we find morally wrong. These we willingly do at the expense and even detriment of our own family, friends, and countrymen. Ultimately we do it at the expense of our own wellbeing.
The way economics all works out, is that if you want people to employ you or your company, they are going to need resources to do it. If you do not employ them they will not be able to employ you. The simplest way to think about it is like this. Imagine a meat farmer and a vegetable farmer existed for years making weekly trades. The vegetable farmer would show up each week with a weeks rations of vegetables and traded it for a weeks ration of meat. Then one day the vegetable farmer shows up and the meat farmer informs him that he will have to have cash. He got twice the amount of vegetables from the farm that uses illegal immigrants for the same ration of meat. A week later the meat farmer noticed a decline in orders. 3 weeks later he runs into a man who had been a regular customer, but had not seen weeks. The man explained that he had been working for the original vegetable farmer. Since so many people were buying their vegetables from the illegal immigrant employing farmer, the honest farmer had to lay him off. Wait there is another kick in the teeth. On his families reduced income, the only place they can afford to buy vegetables from is the illegal employer. Eventually the meat farmer had to close his doors.
Now imagine an entire economy buying from the cheap outside labor. All of the sudden the government doesn’t have employed tax payers. They need those taxes to pay for military expenses. How long do you think we would have our large volunteer military if the paychecks and benefits stopped coming/ not long I assure you. Most of its workforce is made up of recent high school grads that had not other economically sound options.
This is why it is as important that our policy makers be as aggressive with the economic aggression as they are with their “(war) s on whatever”. Our morality is not one that is designed to be advantaged in an economic struggle with people who have no problem using slave labor and unsafe environmentally unfriendly production techniques.
You wouldn’t let a foreign army come and use your equipment, weapons, and bases to wage a war against you would you? Then why would you let workers from another country come in and use your facilities to increase their own countries economic viability. Certainly the intelligence agencies have empowered groups with ideologies completely different then those of the US to fight military battles. So far, not once has that not come back to bite them in the ass. Iraq and Afghanistan are the most recent examples. It certainly doesn’t make sense to send monetary value to your enemies so they can buy weapons to use against you. Yet we do it, mostly through oil revenue.
While it makes no sense to do any of the military faux pas expressed above, we think nothing of A) letting foreigners drive the cost of our labor resource down and B) economically empowering cultures that we find morally wrong. These we willingly do at the expense and even detriment of our own family, friends, and countrymen. Ultimately we do it at the expense of our own wellbeing.
The way economics all works out, is that if you want people to employ you or your company, they are going to need resources to do it. If you do not employ them they will not be able to employ you. The simplest way to think about it is like this. Imagine a meat farmer and a vegetable farmer existed for years making weekly trades. The vegetable farmer would show up each week with a weeks rations of vegetables and traded it for a weeks ration of meat. Then one day the vegetable farmer shows up and the meat farmer informs him that he will have to have cash. He got twice the amount of vegetables from the farm that uses illegal immigrants for the same ration of meat. A week later the meat farmer noticed a decline in orders. 3 weeks later he runs into a man who had been a regular customer, but had not seen weeks. The man explained that he had been working for the original vegetable farmer. Since so many people were buying their vegetables from the illegal immigrant employing farmer, the honest farmer had to lay him off. Wait there is another kick in the teeth. On his families reduced income, the only place they can afford to buy vegetables from is the illegal employer. Eventually the meat farmer had to close his doors.
Now imagine an entire economy buying from the cheap outside labor. All of the sudden the government doesn’t have employed tax payers. They need those taxes to pay for military expenses. How long do you think we would have our large volunteer military if the paychecks and benefits stopped coming/ not long I assure you. Most of its workforce is made up of recent high school grads that had not other economically sound options.
This is why it is as important that our policy makers be as aggressive with the economic aggression as they are with their “(war) s on whatever”. Our morality is not one that is designed to be advantaged in an economic struggle with people who have no problem using slave labor and unsafe environmentally unfriendly production techniques.
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