"Saturday, June 9, 2018
MAJOR PUNDITS WHO FLIPPED ON GLOBALIZATION THE LIBERAL PUNDITS' ZERO SUM GAME
MAJOR PUNDITS WHO FLIPPED ON GLOBALIZATION
It would be great for pundits like Friedman, Krugman, or Brooks, now to explain, in detail, to all, how these other now flipped pundits have blundered!"
He says you want to think of the post war political and economic institutions, GATT, Marshall Plan, NATO, as the brainchildren not of economists or of business interests.
He actually goes farther back, trying to exonerate the whole economics profession as well as business interests to whom they are beholden, going back a hundred or two hundred years (unless you read Wallerstein, even farther back):
The modern world trading system itself was largely the brainchild (when they say brainchild they usually mean that of a brain damaged child...) of Cordell Hull. This is an astounding and stupendous lie.
No more false, cynical, and self effacing account can possibly be imagined. I would have expected nothing whatever less than such a confection from Krugman, in this almost the last ditch.
What is one key error he avoided? Blaming globalization and the LIEO on one group or faction of economists. He senses the terrible danger in such a flawed approach. No. He needed to frame responsibility for the LIEO out of whole non economist cloth. The big lie.
"The first thing we do....let's kill all the economists...." Shakespeare paraphrase. This is of course just a compliment. See NYT below, 1990.
'''The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers,'' was stated by Dick the Butcher in ''Henry VI,'' Part II, act IV, Scene II, Line 73. Dick the Butcher was a follower of the rebel Jack Cade, who thought that if he disturbed law and order, he could become king. Shakespeare meant it as a compliment to attorneys and judges who instill justice in society.' NYT 1990
Back then, the NYT interpreted Shakespeare as complimenting lawyers. Was he? Think about it. The Florida Bar contends that it was a lawyer joke. I side with the Bar, not with the NYT.
But let's move on, we and our British allies had conquered a large part of the world.... This was never on the American constitutional agenda. Quite the contrary.
He says the Pax Americana was an empire of sorts, when in fact we forced a final end to our allies' colonial empires, especially including Britain's, which Krugman does not mention, at the same time that we allowed Soviet Russia to take over Eastern Europe, which he does.
He sees some parallels to ancient Rome, Pax Romana.
He is just one step from one of my favorite economists' assertions, the virtues of the greatest trading empire in history supposedly, the Pax Mongolica! (Terms search this blog: Pax Mongolica.)
Creating allies out of enemies has not at all turned out as America intended. Most democratic regimes thus created have not worked, and will not work going forward.
Most of what one really should call The World of Color fails to share our core values, (but wants all our material and intellectual stuff,) in fact the opposite, and has little interest in protecting them, because they rightly see them as a part of Krugman's hypocritical globalist White Christian and Jewish dominated LIEO.
It has been our founding ideals which were intended, and which have turned out, to keep us weak.
That we came to be so called leaders of a so called free world was strictly a result of factors like luck, geography, natural resources wealth, indecision, helter skelter market capitalist industrialization, and political confusion, not the result of effects flowing from our universalist constitutional principles, which called for us to be, and to remain, a weak but highly democratic, proselytizing anti imperialist, post colonial, big dumb diverse large country, in the Western Hemisphere.
The Krugmanesque globalist economist wants all tariffs and all other restraints on trade discarded, and let the global market chips, the Davos Party chips, the LIEO chips, fall where they may, baby!
That is fundamentally what has really got him and his constituency ticked, but they can't say that. They have to play the human rights card even here at home re illegal migration, like Samantha Power did abroad, ramming human rights up the ass of anyone who stands in her global market capitalist kind of Democrat's way.
But let's move on...He says America isn't nearly as dominant, his words not mine, a power as it was 70 years. 70 years is most of the duration of Krugman's, all economists', and the West's LIEO.
If the LIEO, as he admits, even though he also falsely asserts it wasn't the economists' doing, has resulted in America being not nearly as dominant as it was a mere 70 years ago, and during a time when he also admits we fought no major war and when we had what he calls a Pax Americana, why would he now support such a gross loser order, going forward, unless he is bent on committing national and civilizational suicide?
Krugman's LIEO has raised up a multitude of countries, both erstwhile allies, former and current enemies, and so called new but fallen away allies.
He says Trump is delusional if he thinks they will back down from US repudiation of its own LIEO. Of course Trump is delusional if he thinks that.
But Krugman is delusional if he thinks that the picture he has painted of relentless decline, under his own economic regime, should continue along the same course.
Krugman raises the bogey of millions of workers being displaced. Notably, he does not mention where these workers work. Most of our workers here have already been displaced by Krugman's LIEO. That is the dirty little secret he wants to keep from you. He wants global convergence, and global consolidation as much as Leonhardt does, but he can't frame the issue that way for cashiered and increasingly impoverished American middle and lower income workers and readers. Leonhardt can make the faux nationalist economics argument about ATT consolidation; Krugman probably will stay out of that pundit fight. Good Leonhardt nationalist economic cop, bad Krugman globalist economic cop.
What does self interest mean, when you are a globalist economist? Increasing relative national decline?
What do being good by being great by promoting free trade amount to?
If relative decline is his answer, and it is, why have bothered in the first place? Why continue along that path?
Answer: There is no longer any alternative. Bingo!
Krugman says Trump is turning us into an ineffectual bully.
We bullied our own Western Great Power allies out of their own Empires, at the very outset of the 70 year period Krugman refers to....
Bully for us, and for the West now, and going forward, baby!
Why not say a few words about trade deals. I suggest you all read Prestowitz' old book Trading Places, for example, (Termss search thiss blog: trading places) to get a real flavor for what Krugman may be talking about when he says our smart trade deals were also about more than dollars and cents. They were, as he says admiringly, about a whole helluva lot more than dollars and cents, baby! But hey, doesn't that idea itself violate the most sacrosanct principle of global market economics? Forget I mentioned it.
But if they did make America richer, over a long period of time, say 70 years, then why are we, as he says, not nearly as dominant a power as we were 70 years ago? Granted the Marshall Plan enabled former allies and enemies to catch up, but the theory was predicated also on the idea that this very freer trade process would further enrich America in relative terms over time. The opposite has happened.
It would be more accurate, and far more important, to point out that Trump represents not merely the Fall of the so called American Empire, really a species of misnomer, but rather more or less the next to last ditch in the long fall of the West, to which America itself has contributed so much:
"Only one thing could have prolonged the existence of the European Empires---the continuing approval and support of the United States. It was the denial of that support that spelled the end of the old European Empires. The citizens of the United States had not joined in the Second World War to prop up a system of imperial domination against which they had been the first people to revolt. And it has been with genuine bewilderment that they find themselves today so generally reviled as its inheritor....." Sir Michael Howard
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