We Vote For Presidents, Not Popes
Part 4 of Culture Armageddon
Trump is a sleazy, ruthless businessman. Finding out that he is amoral should be an election breaker, right? Wrong. We aren’t voting for the Pope, we are voting for the President. The President’s primary job is to protect the country. A lot of people think this responsibility ends with the military, but in fact most wars are economic, and we have been losing most of them.
“War never changes.” -Ulysses S Grant (allegedly)
War has always been about using force to obtain land and resources. In my lifetime, the territory owned by the US hasn’t grown in a meaningful way, yet there is the perception that the US completely dominates other countries in war. This is only if we look at wars of violence, but violent conflicts are reserved for people that base their culture around 2000-year-old books, and as a result are centuries behind the rest of civilization.
Trade wars don’t leave a trail of dead soldiers behind, but they cause more Americans to suffer than wars of violence. Whether the US “wins” military conflicts in Iraq, Syria, and other countries seems to not matter. Once these wars are over, it becomes abundantly clear that there never was a threat to the US. By contrast, the economic war has been both visceral and devastating to Americans right here on our front doors.
“The U.S., over time, began to stop having as many vocational kind of skills. I mean, you can take every tool and die maker in the United States and probably put them in a room that we’re currently sitting in. In China, you would have to have multiple football fields.” — Tim Cook
Given that many of these processes described by Tim Cook were developed during the industrial revolution that started in the Western world, what happened to all of the American tool and die makers? They are probably strung out on opioids in West Virginia.
My dad is a genius. No one in my family went to college, but my dad is one of the smartest people I’ve ever met. He can fix anything from cars and boats to HVAC and pool heaters. He built a boat from scratch. It always boggles my mind. My dad went to a trade school and worked as a Honda mechanic for 30 years before retiring. Over the years, he experienced first-hand how globalization swings a hammer with enormous leverage to crush the middle class. As the minimum wage and the tax rate grew larger in the US and Canada, companies found more ways to move automotive work to Mexico. First, the assembly plants moved, then the labor became so cheap that mechanics were instructed to replace parts instead of fix them. Finally, we reach the present time where any serious automotive work requires that the engine block be replaced and the old one shipped away to be repaired off-site. This means that cars are cheaper to buy/maintain, but also that skilled mechanics in the US are wiped out. It’s an American middle-class Tragedy of the Commons.
The most egregious part of this tragedy is where we place the blame. Companies use people in Bangladesh who make $68 USD/month (which is more than enough to pay for basic needs thanks to currency differentials) and we blame ourselves. We call ourselves greedy, and somehow the government that enables free trade gets a free pass. How is the corporate world suppose to apply global free trade respectfully in the context of a national minimum wage? We need a global minimum wage enforced by tariffs. Trump’s tariffs on companies like GM and Apple are a small step towards this but a necessary one.
I have no doubt that Hillary would have run a more effective military: she dropped bombs all over the world during her tenure as Secretary of State. She somehow got the world’s League of Extraordinary Assholes to open their hearts and give her foundation millions of dollars. She is an elder stateswoman, however, she was not putting us on a path to win the economic wars that cause visible suffering in our communities. No amount of pussy grabbing jokes are going to change that.
