#10 Folks, those bad ideas originated here, in the good ol' USA.
It was out of the desperation of the 1970s American economy that globalism arose. US economists, management experts, Harvard B-School professors and policy makers decided that the best way to deal with the apocalyptic threat at the time - Japanese manufacturing - was to keep our markets open and force our manufacturing firms in industry after industry to get "lean and mean" or go bust. Never did they consider closing our markets to the Japanese. No: the solution, US neoliberals argued, was more imports, more openness, more offshoring and outsourcing and - an atrocious neologism of their coining - more "downsizing" of US manufacturing.
Again, these ideas originated in the US in the 1970s and 1980s. They were touted by liberal and conservative economists alike, both the Chicago School and Chamber of Comnerce crowd and - look this up - liberals such as Robert Reich and Paul Krugman. This mentality gave birth to the "neoliberal" i.e. pro-trade middle of the road movement in the Democratic Party out of which Bill Clinton and Al Gore emerged.
Their signature achievement in the 1990s, remember, was the North American Free Trade Agreement. A Democratic president's idea and a Democratic Party policy.
In parallel, these AMERICAN policy-makers and management theorists and economists got the bright idea that not just Japan and Mexico, but also China, could be a "partner" of ours who would destroy US jobs, sure, but "make the toys under the Christmas tree cheaper" for the families oflaud-off American workers.
And so began the mass outsourcing of the US supply chain to a shitty Communist-burdened nation paying its workers $1 a day to make shiny consumer junk that could be marked up to unheard-of levels by companies such as Apple.
Profits galore. Soaring revenues in Asia. And yet more stagnation and ruin and despair across America outside a few coastal boomtowns.
Sorry guys but the truth is that we Americans did this to ourselves.
Chicago Boys. Cambridge MA boys. Washington DC and Wall Street and Silicon Valley boys. 100% Made in the USA.
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...“but only for the United States.” Interesting.