I Think I'm Turning Japanese . . .

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"Laissez-faire, laissez-passer, le monde va de lui-meme."

DIY since 2001…

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Hello Freedomphiles! I would like to take a second before I start bitching about the world again to ask you to please welcome my son, Connor Thoreau Davis, into the world. He was born on August 16, 2003, after 36 hours of labor, and was 20 inches long, weighing in at six pounds, fifteen ounces. I have to tell you, America, after watching my wife deliver that baby, there is no doubt she is way tougher than I am.

Connor is now officially two months old, and about the cutest thing I've ever seen - screw objectivity, I'm his dad. He already sleeps through the night. By the end of the first week, he could lift his head, and stand on my legs while bracing himself against my chest. Now, he’s already rolling himself over and pulling himself along our bed. So, I see a future shortstop here - he's gonna take care of me. He so strong, if he didn't look like me, I'd think Meg had been sleeping around with a Dominican.

Yes those damn Dominicans, coming over here and stealing American baseball jobs. The Japanese, too. The car thing seems to have run out of steam, so they'll beat us with our own National Pastime. Where are the politicians coming around demanding import/export quotas on athletes? Where's their price protection? How about a Shortstop Hispanic Import Tariff, or for those who like acronyms, a S.H.I.T.?

Many people on both sides of the aisle fall into this protectionist trap. It's the one area that you'll find the likes of Pat Buchanan and Dick Gephardt having a meeting of the minds. Don't go crazy, I use the term "minds" just as a figure of speech. It's quite simple, really. Regardless of their ideological....ahem...principles, politicians are really all interested in the same thing - themselves. Why do you think they all refer to themselves in the third person? It's not really for name recognition - it's because the sound of their own names gives them a hard-on. I'd bet they probably even scream their own names out during sex. Can't you see Gephardt screaming, "I love Dick!!" in bed? I know I can, and it unnerves me.

Since they love themselves so much, they don't really care about you, except enough to make you think they're cool. But still, they are so busy with the masturbatory self-congratulating, they don't really have time for a challenge. So they pick easy targets. And what's an easier target than someone who has just lost their job? These people don't want to hear any solid economic arguments about why their suffering is for the best. Sure, if we forced companies to keep overpaid employees when someone else can do it as well for less money, we'd force the economy to halt like a gas tank full of sugar, but they don't want to hear that. They don't want to hear that the first rule of economics is that resources are limited, even labor resources, and any action that makes better use of those resources - including firing them - will be a net benefit to the economy in the long run. They just don't want to hear it. All they want to know is what they are going to do now.

And these politicians are more than happy to tell them what to do now - namely, sit back and blame someone else. "This is not your fault, poor worker," they tell these downtrodden people, and many times it is not. As Tom Hanks would say, "It's not personal - it's business!" But that is where Dick and Pat break from the truth. Of course, the truth does not make them the beloved paternal figure they see in their own mind, with two extra inches, a stronger jaw, and a better hairline. So, of course, the buck stops over there. "It's the damned Chinese," they will say. Or it's those "damn European steel companies, dumping a cheap product [Heaven forbid!] on our shores." And then they start babbling about trade deficits and predatory pricing and evil, moustache-twirling businesses across our borders plotting the doom of our own home-grown variety.

This, of course, is stupid. First of all, no one in the world would benefit by destroying our economy. And our economy does not benefit from destroying theirs, either. We are all codependent, no matter what our xenophobia tells us. Look at it this way. Would California benefit by destroying New York's economy? No, of course not. California is absolutely dependent on New York's economy. They need the things that New York makes, like bagels and high art, and they need New Yorkers to buy the things they make, like movies and gangsta rap. Without bagels and high art, there is nothing for which to trade the movies and gangsta rap.

Now, the natural next question is: What is it about the imaginary dotted line that defines our national border that changes this principle? Absolutely nothing. Nothing at all. Trade is trade is trade, whether it flows from California to New York, or from Lithuania to Knob Lick. There is a flow, like air currents, circling the globe, and that is capital and consumption. In some places it flows more freely and quickly, and in some places it bottlenecks. In the more protectionist countries, it will bottleneck, because they have squeezed the trade with tariffs and import/export quotas and high taxes. In some places, it flows more freely, which moves the necessary resources to where they are needed more efficiently. It is the latter places that will find more growth and wealth, no matter what the trade policy is of the countries they deal with. The bottleneck isn't in their country, after all. The quick movement of resources in these countries is like crack to investors, both foreign and domestic, which draws them away from the bottleneck and toward the open markets and higher profits. This is why Nobel Prize winning economist Milton Friedman concluded that protectionist measures, like the ones above, lead to decreased wealth and opportunity for the country that enacts them, rather than their intended target - the country they were enacted upon.

So, as a result, Dick and Pat are running around, saying, in essence, "Look at those bastards over there bottlenecking their own economy! We need to bottleneck our own economy, too!" And this is also the same truth hidden when our president negotiates trade deals with other countries, promising to end our barriers, but only if they end theirs, too. Friedman equated this to saying, "I'll stop hitting myself in the head with this hammer, but only if you stop hitting yourself in the head with a hammer first."

"But wait," Pat Buchanan might say, "What of this monstrous trade deficit we have with such and such a country?" To that, I say, what of Santa Claus giving out all those free toys in the busiest shopping season of the year, robbing hard-working toy manufacturers of their due? And don't get me started on the Easter Bunny! My arguments, amazingly, make more sense than Pat Buchanan's. Here is why:

Let's say we buy $10 billion worth of goods from China, and they only buy $5 billion worth of goods from them. Pat Buchanan would say that we were being screwed by China with this massive trade deficit. But would we? Let's examine the little xenophobe's scenario a little more closely. What happens at the end of this cycle? China now has five billion of our dollars just sitting around, drinking tea and watching old Jackie Chan movies, doing nothing. They might as well use them as Presidential-themed wallpaper at this point, because without spending them, they're worthless to the Chinese. And for us - well, that means we just got $5 billion worth of Chinese fingercuffs and clock radios for free. Naturally, Pat Buchanan wants to put a stop to this!

Of course, Chinese businessmen aren't stupid. If they have a bunch of money sitting around, they're not just going to bury it in a mason jar in the back yard. But, then, you might ask, how can we have a trade deficit? That $5 billion has to have gone somewhere, right? Right! Some of those dollars went to Germany, some to Albania, some to Japan, and on and on all over the world. Some went to banks for exchange currency. And as they moved, every dollar made its way back here to America, in the way of bought consumer goods and services, spending money for travelers, or foreign investment capital. So, it may not come from China, but it comes back nonetheless.

To make it simpler, look at it this way. You have two stores on the same block, one a convenience store and the other a hardware store. Now the guys at the hardware store stop in the convenience store every day for slushies, hotdogs, and porn, yet the convenience store guys only go in the hardware store when someone messes up the plumbing in the toilet or a fluorescent light needs replacing. As a result, the hardware store spends about twelve times as much money at the convenience store than the convenience store spends at the hardware store. Do you think the hardware store gives a fuck about this trade imbalance? No, of course not. It all comes back in the end.

But what of our Dominican ballplayer? Making money and sending it home. Well, we now know that any money he sends home has to come back here, or it's worthless. So, that's not an issue. What of the ballplayer whose been displaced by this foreigner who came in and blew the manager away? Well, who would you rather watch play - Joe Schmo with a .197 batting average or Albert Pujols? Would you like it if the American government put a tariff or quota on Albert Pujols that made him too expensive to employ on a team just to protect the job of our underperforming Joe Schmo? Would we like to start a footrace to mediocrity, or would we like to see exciting, competitive games? Joe Schmo may be a nice guy, but he'd be of better service as an insurance salesman or porn star than as a crappy ballplayer. We have to let our resources go to where they can be utilized best, for the health of our economy and the quality of our lives. For the government to stand in the way of this, whether out of stupidity or vanity, is to short change us, disregard our choices, and make us all that much worse off.

Until next time, make every day a good one!

- Rick

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