by John Young
While globalism has granted a handful of people unbelievable wealth, it has come at the expense of creating an America where most cannot even feed themselves if they miss a paycheck. With the Covid-19 illness, the fact America has been turned into a skeleton has been laid bare.
Over 300,000 Chinese nationals were enrolled in U.S. colleges in the Fall of this school year. Last year, the number of newly added H-1B workers was 199,000, of whom half were from India and approximately 20,000 were from China. During the month preceding the administration’s half-hearted “travel ban,” over 100,000 people entered the United States from the environs of Wuhan.
Now, we have churches closing to avoid spreading the Sars-2 virus. We have people being laid off left and right. Malls are shutting down. We have extended family who can’t see each other, businesses folding, untold thousands in quarantine and hospitals expecting to run out of critical supplies in mere days. The price of oil, which is what actually supports the American dollar, is plunging through the floor because demand for gas is low among people “sheltering in place.”
Today out of curiosity, I looked at a box of masks I had purchased at a brick-and-mortar retailer about a year ago. Like 90% of our antibiotics, they were made in China. We have businesses, including biotechs whose work might be critical, shutting down entire sections due to a lack of raw materials because they aren’t made in this country. We have the national guard deployed near major cities in preparation for expected disorder.
The price of globalism has, of course, been with us all along, it just hasn’t been as obvious to the average city dweller who works in a high rise office shuffling papers. But the reality is our manufacturing capacity for all manner of things ranging from nitrile gloves and masks to antibiotics and even the resistors required in nearly every electronic circuit have been outsourced to countries who, right now, aren’t shipping.
But long before it reached this point, globalism was the logical extension of the Ponzi scheme of our centralized banking system – a Federal Reserve that is neither Federal (as in part of our government) nor a Reserve. Our Federal Reserve system has two features that made globalism inevitable. The first is that it is predicated on constant growth, which means once growth opportunity was exhausted within the United States it required growth without limits throughout the world. The second is that it induces price inflation both through injection of money and through the use of leverage.
As a result, wages even for professionals outside the “financial sector” have been flat for 30 years, and wages for everyone else have literally fallen to such a degree that the lifestyle that could once be afforded by one person now requires two people working non-stop. Well-qualified college graduates who should be starting families are living at home with their parents because their wages can’t match the cost of living.
But it is worse than even that. With globalism and constant offshoring and competition from foreign labor even within our borders, people have been increasingly economically insecure, with most just two paychecks from bankruptcy or eviction.
And this is why, with many governors declaring states of emergency, they have issued orders prohibiting evictions or turning off the electricity for non-payment. People are so close to the edge that they are in danger of homelessness within two weeks of being laid off. That, also, is a product of globalism.
While globalism has granted a handful of people unbelievable wealth, it has come at the expense of creating an America where most cannot even feed themselves if they miss a paycheck.
With the Covid-19 illness, the fact America has been turned into a skeleton has been laid bare. In order for hospitals to have key supplies, they are coming from stockpiles on military bases, and even then it will not be enough. Because we have no domestic manufacturing capacity for these items. Domestic manufacture is limited to only the most expensive and specialized of items. Anything that doesn’t net windfall profits is made on the other side of an ocean.
If you weren’t fortunate enough to buy bleach or toilet paper just before the panic hit, good luck finding it. If you ordered some masks online so you can avoid infecting loved ones if you get sick, good luck because if you find them at all, they are coming from China. Slowly.
So what is the alternative to globalism? Nationalism.
The problem with nationalism is not, as its detractors claim, that it has any number of moral deficiencies. Rather, the problem with nationalism is that it prioritizes the well-being of the people of the country rather than a tiny minority who parasitically suck the nation dry.
The time when America gained its greatest strength and influence throughout the world, as Pat Buchanan has thoroughly and repeatedly documented, was also the time when we vigorously protected our domestic industries and our workers through tariffs and sometimes outright import prohibitions.
Once we stopped doing that, we increasingly replaced the real wealth of this country with a pyramid of increasingly Byzantine paperwork derivatives and a fake consumer-driven service and throwaway economy based on imports. This can chug along for a long time, but if something goes just a wee bit awry, the results we are now seeing become unavoidable.
Nationalism does not mean that foreign nationals can never come to America. It simply means that they come as tourists or collaborators in limited numbers, and return home when they are done. It means that foreign nationals don’t crowd out our native population for top educational opportunities. It means they don’t get brought in to depress our wages. And they don’t come here by the hundreds of thousands … potentially spreading a virus.
Nationalism does not mean that you could never buy an imported product. But it means that we would retain the ability to do our own manufacturing of anything of importance, and that the people employed here doing that would be paid enough to raise a family.
We are living in an extraordinary time, a time we will remember as a turning point. And I will address the opportunities this gives us later.
But for now, let me just leave you with this: Covid-19 is merely a symptom. Globalism is the true disease, and Nationalism is the cure.