End the Globalization Gravy Train

From J.D. Vance at The American Mind:

The Chinese state has unleashed a plague that, if we’re lucky, will merely be the worst in a decade rather than the worst in a generation. The CCP has lied and manipulated international institutions in a way that ensures the deaths of thousands of additional Americans. 

The virus has revealed an American economy built on consumption, reliant for production on regimes either indifferent or actively hostile to our national interest. Production, where it still exists in our country, clusters in megacities, where “knowledge economy” workers live uptown from the low-wage servants (disproportionately immigrants) who clean their laundry, care for their children, and serve their food. 

Perhaps we shouldn’t build our cities like that. Perhaps we should make things in America. And if not all things, then at least enough so that the next time China unleashes a plague, it can’t threaten us with a loss of medicines and protective equipment. These are more important debates than whether we should end our lockdowns. Our economy is based on consumption, debt, financialization, and sloth. There is no end to the lockdown that returns our country to health or prosperity if it ignores these facts. The minute before COVID-19 hit, our stock market was at an all-time high, yet our middle class had only seen its net assets grow by 4 percent in over a decade. We have shut down health care facilities—even those far from overwhelmed by COVID-19—to preserve face masks and rubber gloves, because we don’t make enough in our own country for a time of crisis. Can we honestly say the most important question in our public life is whether we should be allowed to eat at restaurants that many would avoid anyways? 

But debate the lockdowns we will, because they are more pressing to the people who fund our political distractions. And what’s more important to them than ending the lockdowns is not ending the globalization gravy train. 

Peter Thiel recently observed that one of the best barometers of globalization is the share of corporate sector profits going to the financial sector. When you have an economy built on borrowing money from China and then buying the stuff it makes, you need a robust financial sector. Getting all that money from the U.S. to China, and then there and back again, takes, well, money. And for two decades, while America has consumed much and made little, there has been no better industry than moving fake currency from one location to another. Even if you zoom out from the finance industry, it is hard to find an American tycoon who hasn’t benefitted, directly or indirectly, from the rise of Beijing. 

And if you look at the boards of most of our big conservative institutions, you’ll find many of those people. Increasingly, they talk a big game about China. They’ll express concern for the Uighurs, who are undoubtedly an oppressed people. They may even encourage a satellite military conflict in the years to come, because it won’t be their children loading the magazines or firing the rifles. 

But there will be precious few resources for those designing the policies to shift a substantial share of our manufacturing capacity back to the United States. There will be limited campaign dollars for politicians who advocate those policies. It is one thing to offer platitudes for the Uighurs, and I suspect we’ll hear many of them in the years to come. It is another thing entirely to tell Apple’s leadership that they can’t flog them half to death for failing to meet production deadlines, or to tell the shareholders that they will no longer benefit from the labor arbitrage of China’s slave camps. It is one thing to whine at NBA owners and superstars for bending the knee to the Chinese Communist Party and another to make them pay for doing so. 

Yet to make the real change would require that we come to grips with the fact that so much of Conservatism, Inc. depends on the status quo. (Read more.)

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