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The Glory of Globalism
If there’s anything the globalist “free traders” loved more than importing cheap foreign labor to undercut American workers’ wages, it was offshoring those jobs entirely by relocating American manufacturing to communist China. According to the GFTs, there was absolutely no downside to this. True, American manufacturing workers would lose their livelihoods by the millions, but all the cheap Chinese-made crap they could buy at Walmart (once they learned to code and got new high-tech jobs {unless East Indian coders imported by the millions on H-visas undercut those jobs, too}) would raise their overall consumer satisfaction. Also, the GFTs told us… try not to laugh… increasing trade with the Chinese would make them more liberal and democratic.
The former thing is working out about as well as the latter thing; which is why you may have noticed a lot of empty shelves (or, more likely “ITEM OUT OF STOCK” labels on Amazon.) This is reported at multiple sources, but we’ll use the Daily Mail:
Dozens of cargo ships anchored off the coasts of Los Angeles and New York face shocking wait times of up to four weeks and railyards and trucking routes are hopelessly clogged due to the lack of manpower to unload goods – with an expert warning that the government needs to intervene or face spiraling inflation and unemployment.
The backlog of billions of dollars of toys, clothing, electronics, vehicles, and furniture comes as the demand for consumer goods hit its highest point in history as consumers stay home instead of spending money on travel and entertainment.
Supply chains have lagged far behind consumer demand due to a lack of manpower at American ports and the restrictions that came with the COVID-19 outbreak early last year. These constraints, which include social distancing and mandatory quarantines, have severely limited the number and ability of port workers to do their jobs.
I can’t help thinking a lot of this could have been avoided if, you know, we still manufactured stuff in America. Also, if we hadn’t treated an upper respiratory infection with a 99.8% survival rate like it was the second coming of the Black Plague. I vaguely remember a guy who warned us that depending on communist China for our manufacturing was a bad idea. I think he got impeached or something.
Published in Economics
The whole thing sounds insane. People are voluntarily paying money to governments or brokers or whoever else, in order to purge their guilt of putting CO2 emissions into the atmosphere!?! This is even more backwards if you consider, like me, that we should be putting more CO2 into the atmosphere. If you believe the paleoclimatologists, the earth is at an all-time low of CO2 levels in our atmosphere. Even with the increase in CO2 over the last 100 years, it is still just slightly above the minimum level needed to sustain plant life on the planet. The levels used to be in the neighborhood of 20 -30 times higher and the planet did just fine.