Comparative Advantage
Around 2003, when I had a lot of time to be on the Internet because I wasn't working, I discovered Yahoo interest groups. One of the groups I was invited to join had as it's topic, the issue of outsourcing of Information Technology (IT) jobs to India primarily and the importation of Indians to take jobs here in the U.S. According to media sources, there was a shortage of IT workers in the United States. The composition of the Yahoo group was that of American IT professionals who could not find work anywhere. We became a group of researchers, writers, lobbyists contacting and interacting with government officials, and activists both soliciting media support and fighting media lies. It was intense but we did manage to get the attention of CNN's Lou Dobbs. His researchers investigated and the rest is history.
One of the biggest propaganda hurdles to overcome during that time was the ideology of "free trade" and the economic theory of an 18th century British economist named David Ricardo. Ricardo had a theory of trade that "suggested that a nation should concentrate solely on those industries in which it is most internationally competitive." His theory was shortened to the term, comparative advantage. According to the trolls, our name for opposition insurgents who also joined the Yahoo interest group on outsourcing, it was to our nation's advantage to export IT systems work to India and to import Indians to take IT jobs here in the United States. The illogic of the argument put me on full tilt.
Obviously, there was competitive advantage to the corporations exporting the IT jobs and importing cheap labor to replace American IT professionals but for our country and our citizens now and into the future, there was no advantage at all - only disadvantage including security issues which were substantial; but even more important than that, was the political and social betrayal by the government in allowing and facilitating foreign economic warfare on our people on our own soil. The exportation of productive work (i.e. jobs) and the importation of foreigners to displace citizens is something only enemies of a country could support and yet it was a majority of the members of Congress with the full support of the majority of the mass media outlets who supported it and facilitated it with propaganda about how great was "free trade" with commoditized labor as easily imported and exported as widgets from a factory.
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"We can hardly expect the nation-state to
make itself superfluous, at least not overnight. Rather what we must aim
for is really nothing more than caretakers of a bankrupt international
machine which will have to be transformed slowly into a new one. The
transition will not be dramatic, but a gradual one. People will still
cling to national symbols." |
Morgenthau was right. I was still clinging to national symbols.
Obama was right. I was and am bitterly clinging to national symbols and I
will do so until my dying breath.
So how do we explain an American government that is anti-American? The simple answers may be found in a book titled, Merchants of Peace by George L. Ridgeway. It is a history of the International Chamber of Commerce. This book explains that the creation of the League of Nations and the United Nations were on the initiative of merchants - of, by and for merchants. The objective is a uniform set of international laws that contravene national laws thereby subverting national sovereignty. The goal is to have global markets (pools) of natural resources and labor from which all territories can draw on. The foreword of the book was written by James T. Shotwell. He wrote:
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The
International Chamber of Commerce is a symbol of the business world in
its broadest aspects...the record set forth in the pages which follow
shows how it has built upon the solid groundwork of day-to-day
experience the foundations of an international community and how, still
further, it has sketched the architectural blueprints of the edifice of
international peace. Because it has been held to the intensely
realistic task of working out the problem of welfare for the common man,
it has been able to make progress in economic statesmanship under the
most adverse circumstances... The present volume is however, more than a
prelude. Its theme is the drama itself, already begun on the stage
of world history by the creative forces of economic peace and freedom.
It tells how the interplay of interests has found expression in the
world organization of the United Nations through such bodies as the
International Chamber of Commerce, devoted to world peace through world
trade. |
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James T.
Shotwell |
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It boggles the mind to think that this man with his perverse and twisted view of the world was revered in both academic and political circles. One can only assume that his real accomplishment was the packaging of repugnant and absurd ideas in a salable marketing concept. And we can see the fruits of the ideas with the issue of exporting jobs and importing foreign labor in furtherance of the goal of a "global marketplace" of human resources. All they've done is to move war from the level of nation-states to hand-to-hand, mind-to-mind combat among "the common man" defeating the very purpose of a nation-state and a government for protecting the rights and freedoms of citizens of nations. No wonder the United States is so hated around the world and increasingly even here at home:
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In thinking about all of this, it does bring me back to the idea of comparative advantage. It seems that the advantage the American capitalist system has produced by the beneficent handiwork of the Merchants of Peace, an oxymoron if ever there was one, is the mass production of ignorance and delusion causing people to blissfully surrender to global Slave Masters in the name of world peace. It doesn't have to be this way. We can change it by first, understanding it and then communicating it to our fellow citizens.
Vicky Davis
December 26, 2013