What Is To Be Done?

(fm the BC thread "The ending year")

On the effects of free trade on industrial capacity, and national security and consumer culture, my position is closer to no mo uro's than to Mongoose's but I do understand both sides. I deplore the low expectations and self destructive behavior of so many that manifests itself in the imports of nondurable goods, poor education, susceptibility to manipulation, empowerment of Left wing media elites and corrupt politicians, destructive tax fiscal and regulatory policies, and the flight of, first manufacturing and then engineering, jobs overseas. The dysfunctional behaviors that start in what can be called proletarian culture have spread through society.

If I spoke any more forcefully on the need to cultivate traditional values and standards in order to both maintain the sinews of our defense establishment and guide the essential proletarian segment of society into a productive pattern of consumption and savings, and politics, then I would get accused again of being a nose in the air naval officer who doesn't appreciate the honest and well educated troops. My point is just that to attain the goals that I think we all want calling in the government and saying that there ought to be a law that stops people from buying "unnecessary" big screen TVs is the wrong way to go. It is not a Libertarian position, I am not one, to say that giving more power to the government and hiring more GS-5, 7 or 9 clerks is not a good idea. The problems are real and we need to work on them in politics, education and in the media. Calling for trade barriers does not help.

For example we have a problem that trillions of dollars flow to Islamist regimes like KSA and Iran. Banning the import of oil from those countries will not improve our position. What will improve our position is drilling in the US and offshore, refining and purifying coal and developing other sources such as shale and building nukes. If we follow that policy while using our technological skills to improve efficiency and at the same time buy up every drop of arab oil we can then in a few years we will be free of the oil yoke and they will be back to being often ignored pests in the desert.

Some may argue that we should have fought a war for oil and paid back KSA by seizing the wells in the Eastern Province while using our control of Iraq to knock the price of oil down to $5/bbl. That would have bankrupted Putin and Chavez on the spot and broken OPEC while putting China and Japan in a better relationship with the US. That question of might have been alternatives will get debated for centuries and to me it is more a technical than a moral issue. The problem we now face is the same one Vladimir Lenin did, "What Is To Be Done?"

Sara (Pal2Pal),
Wonderful blogging memoir.

Whitehall,
Well said, my point is that if we strengthen at home we will have the advantage to open markets in negotiations. Carts and horses.

Langley,
(who lives where Obama is vacationing)

There goes the neighborhood.

You can tell a gentleman who boozes
by the company he chooses.
Then the pig got up
and slowly walked away.