By
The
English who settled America brought English culture with them. The
colonies were nothing but little Englands. When the colonists revolted,
they were merely trying to get free of the tyrannical English monarchy,
not trying to change the culture. They were perfectly happy with the
English way of life. They carried on its practices and adopted the
English system of common law.
That
sixteenth century culture is alive and well in America today and is why
America is in many respects a backward nation. Americans are living 500
years behind the times.
One would like to believe that human institutions
exist to enhance the lives of people, but there is very little evidence
to support that view. If enhancing the lives of people is not the
purpose of human institutions, what is? The American Constitution lists
six goals the founders expected the nation to accomplish:
We
the People of the United States, in Order to (1) form a more perfect
Union, (2) establish Justice, (3) insure domestic Tranquility, (4)
provide for the common defence, (5) promote the general Welfare, and (6)
secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do
ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
Unfortunately,
no American government has ever tried to govern in a way that seeks to
attain these goals. So the American government is either an
unconstitutional, failed state or else the framers of the Constitution
must be thought of as having engaged in unrealistic political
propaganda. At any rate, the American government is not what the
Constitution makes it out to be. The question is why? The answer is the
stupid political economy!
The
English who settled America brought English culture with them. The
colonies were nothing but little Englands. When the colonists revolted,
they were merely trying to get free of the tyrannical English monarchy,
not trying to change the culture. They were perfectly happy with the
English way of strife. They carried on its practices and adopted the
English system of common law.
That
sixteenth century culture is alive and well in America today and is why
America is in many respects a backward nation. Americans are living 500
years behind the times.
The English were engaged in economic activities for hundreds of years before Adam Smith published his An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nation; all he did was provide English merchants with a rationalization for what they had always done and wanted to do more of. Laissez-faire
(let [them] do), to them, meant the ability to engage in economic
practices without being subjected to governmental restrictions and
tariffs. Then, like today, merchants wanted the freedom to profiteer by
buying cheap and selling dear. Merchants, then or now, have had little
interest in abstruse economic theory unless its models promise greater
profit.
But
buying cheap and selling dear applies to labor as well as materials,
and the classical economists provide a rationalization for that maxim
too. The subsistence theory of wages, advanced by classical economists,
holds that the market price of labour always tends toward the minimum
required for subsistence (that is, for basic needs such as food and
shelter). Even Alfred Marshall, America’s first modern economist, was of
the opinion that wages in the long run would tend to equal maintenance
and reproduction costs. So when the Republican party seeks to eliminate
regulations and keep the minimum wage low, they are acting just like
sixteenth century English merchants and their boot-licking economists.
Merchants become sheep dogs that herd human sheep, and our economists
think nothing of it. They have adopted the British way of strife
totally.
Although
this impoverishment of labor is bad enough, in a globalized economy it
is devastating. The classical economists held that a subsistence wage
had to be high enough to enable the workforce to reproduce itself in
order to maintain a labor supply; in a globalized economy, the workforce
needed exists in underdeveloped countries. A domestic workforce is
entirely unnecessary, so there is no need to even grant it subsistence
wages or any other humane benefit. From a merchants’/economists’ point
of view, domestic labor becomes expendable. Why pay it anything at all?
What a lovely world our economists advocate! Economics is not merely a dismal science, it is a murderous one.
Merchants
and economists constitute a class of totally inhumane human beings.
(Isn’t inhumane human a contradiction?) It seems as though two entirely
different races have intermingled—the human race and an inhumane one. In
the words of Pope Francis,
“A savage capitalism has taught the logic of profit at any cost . . . of exploitation without thinking of people.”
What
kind of person would support this economy? Although they may revel in
their fortunes and often act and speak like the rest of us, they are not
like us. They are evil to the marrow of their bones. Logically, the
inhumane are either not human or deranged.
One
such person is Arnaud Costinot, an MIT economist, who uses the doctrine
of comparative advantage to justify globalization. He is said to hold
this:
“Ricardo
thought that instead of trying to produce a wide range of goods,
countries could grow by specializing in the goods they could produce
most cheaply, and then trading those goods with other countries. This
made sense, Ricardo claimed, even when a country could make multiple
products more cheaply, in absolute terms, than other countries.
How? Suppose, Ricardo
posited, that England produces cloth more cheaply than wine, while
Portugal produces wine more cheaply than cloth. And suppose Portugal
produces both products more cheaply than England does. Both countries
could still benefit from trading in equal terms: England could
specialize in making cloth, and trade that for wine. But Portugal could
specialize in making wine, and trade that for England’s cloth — which
would be the cheapest way to acquire cloth, even if Portugal’s own cloth
was cheaper to make than England’s.”
Only
thing is, Ricardo never wrote any such thing, and to describe what he
wrote in this way is intellectual dishonesty at its worst. Ricardo never
uses the word “cheaply.” He uses “the number of man hours needed to
produce one unit of cloth or wine,” ‘Man hours worked’ is not a wage or a
value of currency. The production may not be cheap. By deliberately
misstating what Ricardo writes, economists advocate the exploitation and
impoverishment of workers and ultimately their destruction—a truly evil
and inhumane goal.
This
is the only explanation for the right wing’s war on the poor. Beasts of
burden are disposed of when they have lost their usefulness, so
destroying the middle class is not to be lamented. When the labor of
underdeveloped countries became available to manufacturers, the American
middle class became expendable. That is the American Republican party’s
goal. It seeks to shrink the size of government by eliminating the
people who need to be taken care of.
Economists want us to believe that free trade makes everyone richer, but experience teaches us otherwise.
The
Internet is replete with articles both pro and con, but the attitudes
of people to offshoring is quite consistent. The peoples in
underdeveloped nations involved in making products for the West chafe at
the extent of the exploitation. Whether in Latin America, Bangladesh,
Malaysia, the Philippines, the Czech Republic, or Poland exploited labor
is never described as prosperous. Neither has prosperity blessed
America’s laborers. Exploitation and prosperity are alien concepts. The
exploited are never prosperous and the prosperous are never exploited.
No nation can boast of its prosperity gotten by offshoring. The
empirical evidence gotten anecdotally is better than the dubious
statistical evidence cited by economists (see The Real Cost of Offshoring.)
India’s laborers are not getting rich working for American companies.
NAFTA has not brought prosperity to Mexican or American workers. A
low-wage job is not a gainful (prosperous) one. Marx asked workers of
the world to unite; Western corporate leaders tell them to be damned.
Any economist who does not see what is happening is intellectually
blind. Or perhaps, just plain evil.
In The Story so Far, the Economist put it this way:
ONCE
UPON A time the rich world’s manufacturing firms largely produced in
the rich world for the rich world, and most services were produced close
to where they were consumed. Then Western firms started sending
manufacturing work abroad on a large scale. By the 1980s this was well
established. The movement was overwhelmingly in one direction: away from
rich countries to places where workers with adequate skills were much
cheaper.
Whether openly stated or not, lower labour costs were almost always the chief rationale.
To
corporations, workers are likened to beasts of burden and the economic
elite who advocate this economic practice are then likened to vicious
dogs. What a wonderful world! It will not change until the welfare of
mankind, rather than profit, becomes the goal of political-economy. If
the human race is to survive, the welfare of human beings must be the
goal of human institutions.
John Kozy
is a retired professor of philosophy and logic who writes on social,
political, and economic issues. After serving in the U.S. Army during
the Korean War, he spent 20 years as a university professor and another
20 years working as a writer. He has published a textbook in formal
logic commercially, in academic journals and a small number of
commercial magazines, and has written a number of guest editorials for
newspapers.http://www.globalresearch.ca/expendable-people-economics-a-murderous-science/5355985
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