Well, it would be cool, wouldn’t it? How about if we just stayed home from work and did whatever we wanted? Our employers would be totally screwed! Yeah, and what if we bought a car on time and then didn’t make any payments! A Beemer for free? Yeah, I’d take that deal!
That sort of economic “thought” is the order of the day all around the world, not only from Natchez to Mobile and Memphis to St. Joe, but from DC to Beijing. It’s the new freedom!
This “revelation” occurred to me while reading a little Brexit backstory. One of the lines that Brexit proponents like Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage used was “We’ll have all the cards!” The fact that the British were so willing to believe that Europe needed them more than they needed Europe demonstrates the power of wishful thinking. The size of the economy of the EU minus the UK was far larger than that of the UK alone, but the Brits didn’t see it that way. Instead, they thought that, in effect, they could break the law and get away with it. They could defy the EU but the EU couldn’t defy them. Hey, what are they going to do to us, throw us in jail?
Similarly, Donald Trump really believes that if we “buy from our own” instead of, you know, China, we’ll get everything for free. All that money that’s going abroad will go into our own hip pockets! Sweet! Of course, what you get when you create a closed home market is shoddy products for inflated prices. Why give your customers a good deal when you can give them a bad one?
In the old days this “worked” for the U.S.—manufacturers like U.S. Steel and General Motors could enjoy monopoly profits, and pay their workers monopoly wages, while still delivering to their customers the best product in the world. Now, that isn’t the case. Closing off the outside world simply guarantees that we’ll turn ourselves into the sort of neo-socialist backwater that Great Britain slid into in its painful pre-Thatcher years. The shock of the near collapse of the new global economic order that occurred in 2008 has left a very large portion of the world’s population yearning for the socio-economic equivalent of a diet consisting entirely of comfort food—“I’m going to live on mac and cheese and chocolate milk for the rest of my life!”
I have seen the future, and it’s wearing sweat pants.
