The Globalist Free Traders have found an evangelist in Thomas Friedman of the New York Times. In his book The World is Flat, Friedman calls the periods of history that paved the way for globalization and free trade flatteners, but skips over some of the most important ones. The Lend-Lease Act in the era of World War II is one of them. He changed the course of history and showed that you can’t do business with people who don’t have money. Either you have to find a way to get them money or you have to give them things to restore their economic values in a balanced geopolitical environment. You can’t move production from one place to another looking for the cheapest labor markets in the world because there is an endless pool of workers who will do almost anything to survive and will never have enough money to buy anything the economic host nation might still have. to sell.
In the end, you have a continuous declining process where a poor working class needs cheaper and cheaper prices, while the impoverished poor classes don’t make enough money to grow their own economy, proving that you can’t do business with people they don’t have money. You can only use them for selfish purposes. This then acts like a boomerang that comes back to knock you out as well. It’s like a dog chasing its own tail. Consumers in the US shop to get out of their jobs. Money spent at the retail levels is quickly fanned out to the places where the products are made. The money does not stay in the USA to register its own economy.
Who won World War II? American workers did. Who lost World War II fifty years later? American workers have. America has gone through the most massive dislocation of workers in American history with millions of people losing their jobs. More than 700,000 steel-related workers, more than 400,000 auto workers, and more than a million computer industry workers lost their jobs. A third of those over 55 who lost their jobs never found another. Now, workers like taxpayers pay to bring in foreign car assemblers. All things considered, the state of Indiana is paying Honda around $150 million to bring an assembly plant to their state. This will provide 4,000 new assembly jobs, but recently about 20,000 auto parts factory workers have lost their jobs in the state. Taxpayers in other states have paid even more to have KIA, BMW and other foreign car assemblers come to their states. Mississippi is paying KIA $400 million to assemble KIA cars in their state. These cars are described as being built in the US and not made in the US as the parts come from the world’s wage slave workers. The number of assembly workers at all of these foreign plants is only a fraction of the workforce of existing workers at U.S. auto manufacturing plants. They also work for about half of what auto workers earned in the past. .
Who won World War II in the final analysis?
Let’s go back in time to 1940. The United States was still coming out of the Great Depression. Tariffs were blamed as the main cause of the depression. However, the main cause of the Depression was the stock market crash, and the economy took this huge hit at a time when tariffs weren’t even applicable. Free traders today like to blame Smooth-Hawley tariffs as the cause of the Depression, but this bill was passed after the Stock Market Crash in 1930 and never took hold before Roosevelt took office. can. Soon after, Roosevelt had the authority to lower and raise rates at will in 1934.
The next phase ignited the most powerful industrial power in history. Tariffs played no part in the process. Roosevelt knew that our nation could not mobilize semi-independently: mobilization had to come as a whole for many vital needs, whether for military or civilian use. President Roosevelt had to sell the war to the American people in a sequence of actions. He started doing it with executive orders and schemes. Roosevelt said, what I’m trying to do is get rid of the dollar sign, we’ve got to get rid of the silly dollar sign. This was good news for England and Russia, who did not have much money left to fight a war.
Thus began the first wave of Free Trade, but it was based on giving away products made in the USA.
Many Americans bought into the premise thinking they could stay out of war while strengthening our economy.
Lack of money was the biggest problem in the world. The world was coming out of a Great Depression. After World War I, the Allies wanted Germany to be just a big farm without any production capacity. Hitler came and filled the void by creating a strong army to invade other countries killing people who got in the way. In the process, Hitler demonstrated how a war machine can create industrial power out of nothing. China and Russia, with elite groups that controlled the masses, did not have the same capabilities, but they still killed millions for their causes. They killed more than Germany, but the United States chose Germany as its first enemy. At the same time, Japan claimed the right to the mainland for the sake of its own economic survival. The United States approved their claim at the turn of the century, but revoked their agreements with Japan in the 1930s. Japan felt that the United States betrayed them. This set the stage for Pearl Harbor. After all was said and done, it wasn’t really a surprise attack.
Roosevelt didn’t want money to get in the way. He took many by surprise when he said, what I’m trying to do is get rid of the dollar sign, we’ve got to get rid of the silly old dollar sign. This also fitted in with the new economic theories that stated that you owe no one and money if you owe it to yourself. On September 2, 1940, Roosevelt gave Great Britain 50 Navy Destroyers under his own executive order. This violated international law and the understanding of neutrality. In essence, the United States unofficially declared war on Germany on September 2, 1940.
At about the same time, Roosevelt used an old 1917 law to switch airplanes to private manufacturers for newer models with the understanding that the private companies would ship the older model airplanes to Britain free of charge. Then Roosevelt went a step further. After being re-elected, he got Congress to pass the Lend-Lease Act which sidestepped any money problems the British and communist Russia might have had. Immediately after passing the law, Roosevelt made a list of products that we could lend to allies. However, of the billions of dollars worth of goods shipped to the allies, the US was later reimbursed for only a fraction of the total amounts, including the ten percent of total US agricultural output that went to Great Britain and Russia. The United States also produced and supplied 50% of all ammunition used in World War II.
Of course, this brought prosperity to the United States. After the war, based on the impressive industrial power, the US launched the Marshall Plan. This helped restore local value-added economies in Europe and Asia. If we gave Japan this big economic boost before the war, there really would have been no reason for war with Japan. Free traders ignore most of this and sing about nonexistent tariffs that ruined our economy during the pre-war era, when undeclared war began years earlier with Roosevelt’s version of free trade. They sing how competition rules the game, but as we know, this was not the case during the WWII era. Then and now it is highly questionable whether the US ever had to compete on a global stage. Who, what, when and where concluded that we had to compete on a global stage.
Lend-Lease demonstrated that the only thing that works is local value-added savings that increase values at various levels, from the raw product to the retail or end-user stage. It also shows that no long-term war can be waged without a strong industrial sector. Today, we’ve cut up our local value-added savings and scattered the pieces around the world. In the World War II era, we gave away the ugly golden eggs for our goose-laying-golden-egg industrial might. Now we have cut the goose down and shipped the pieces all over the world. Why have research and development if the manufacturing phase goes elsewhere? Now we have a small high-tech army being defeated in a small country with human bombs. Rumsfeld’s war theories are like a child who grew up too quickly and needs to get out of any fight quickly before his frail stature is exposed.
Finally, President Franklin Roosevelt said, economic diseases are highly contagious. I wonder what he would say today. Free trade is like sex, you sleep with many partners and subsequently with all the people they have slept with. It is an economic epidemic.