I've written before about how the Town Hall crowd is surprisingly reluctant to discuss economics, possibly because their economic ideas all revolve around ideas without much mass appeal. Today, Town Hall second-stringer Matt Towery wrote a sky-is-falling piece about the state of the world; in it, he made grim predictions about foreign policy, domestic stability, and, surprisingly, the economy. He made the extremely noncontroversial observation that America's destiny is linked economically with China's, and that the Asian goliath stands poised to rival or surpass us as a global superpower due to their monetary policy and massive manufacturing base.
Well, this really brought out the squeakers, man. If you thought these people were dumb about politics and policy, wait until you hear them talk about the economy. Their tiny, mommy-protect-me little minds, which operate on no principle more sophisticated than "America is always right no matter what and it's not what we do, it's that we're Americans when we do it" (hence the defense of stuff like torture and theocracy), were totally blown by the outrageous suggestion that another country might be developing a more powerful economy than ours. So they offered up some brilliant suggestions. Let's watch!
Free Trade: Don't care. In my view, no matter what China does with our debt and currency, there will only be positive long term benefit for us. If they hold our notes and funds, we can import more goods for less (acting as a tax cut), and the price of oil drops for us, acting like a tax cut.
Which is great, because this pseudo-tax cut will more than make up for wage stagnation and the loss of real-dollar value that has been steadily increasing since all of our manufacturing jobs disappeared! Apparently, the reason that no one can save money anymore isn't a lack of job stability, flat wages, or a lack of real-dollar growth, but high taxes.
If they release our notes and funds, we start manufacturing and exporting more goods (acting as an economic stimulant)
Just like that! We'll start manufacturing and exporting more goods! Easy! We'll just somehow rebuild all the factories that have closed over the last 35 years, and retrain the whole workforce, and convince all the CEOs who shipped the jobs overseas to hire American workers at the same price. And we will start exporting more goods, because our stuff will be just as good and cheap as Chinese products! Somehow!
Thank God we aren't an Asian country that must always manufacture or perish.
Yes, thank God! We can run on a service industry, which Asian countries can never do, because, uh, because they don't believe in Jesus, I guess.
We can play any part of this game better than they can.
It may appear that they're beating us in terms of manufacturing and monetary policy, but in reality, we are letting them win. We can never be defeated, because we are Americans.
If it makes you feel better, we could add a term to our notes, "FORFEIT in, from, or to China", at any time, and our embargo of Cuba proves we have the stones for it.*
If things get TOO bad, we can just make special money that says "no good if you're a Chinaman", and it will totally work and won't in any way make us a global laughingstock whose economy will collapse overnight! And if we could successfully embargo a tiny Caribbean nation from whom we got virtually no imports, that proves we could totally do the same thing to a country with a billion people who provides the majority of the world's dry goods manufaturing!
Individuals can protect themselves from currency instability by keeping some fraction of their savings in gold and silver coins.
And gasoline! And, uh, dried noodles and firearms! And then we can live forever in the mountains, and forget that we're part of a global economy!
I'm tired of the endless whining. Straighten up and get back to work.
If we just worked hard enough, that would fix the economy. Shut up, all you economist eggheads who study the incredibly complex interplay of global monetary policy and production trends! All we have to do is work harder! IT'S JUST THAT SIMPLE.
This article can be summed up in one sentence. We need another Ronald Reagan.
Boy, I tell you what! Because all the problems the article mentions -- Islamic terrorism, the loss of our manufacting base, the growing shift in global power to Asia, the energy crisis, and spiralling debt -- Ronald Reagan totally solved all those problems when he was president!
*: Seriously, this is perhaps the dumbest thing ever written. This is substantially dumber than people who say we can fix economic slumps by just printing more money.
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