Lend-lease law was real free trade, not chopped liver, like in Globalist Flat World
Globalist Free Traders have found an evangelist in Thomas Friedman of the New York Times. In his book The World is Flat, Friedman calls the periods in history that paved the way for globalization and free trade flatteners, but skips over some of the most important ones. The World War II-era Lend-Lease Act is one of them. He changed the course of history and proved that you can’t do business with people who don’t have money. Either you have to find a way to get money to them or you have to give them things to restore their economic values in a balanced geopolitical environment. You can’t move production from one place to another looking for the cheapest labor markets in the world because there is an endless pool of workers who will do almost anything to survive and will never have enough money to buy anything the economic host nation may still have. sell.
In the end, you have a continuous decline process where a poor working class needs ever cheaper prices, while the impoverished poor classes don’t make enough money to grow their own economy, proving that you can’t do business with people. they don’t have money. You can only use them for selfish purposes. This then acts as a boomerang coming back to knock you out as well. It’s like a dog chasing its own tail. Consumers in the US shop to get out of their jobs. Money spent at the retail levels is quickly fanned out to the places where the products are made. The money does not stay in the USA to register its own economy.
Who won World War II? American workers did it. Who lost World War II fifty years later? American workers have. The United States has gone through the most massive dislocation of workers in American history with millions of people losing their jobs. More than 700,000 workers related to the steel industry, more than 400,000 auto workers, and more than one million workers in the computer industry lost their jobs. A third of those over 55 who lost their job never found another. Now, workers as taxpayers pay to bring in foreign car assemblers. After all things considered, the state of Indiana is paying Honda around $150 million to bring an assembly plant to their state. This will provide 4,000 new assembly jobs, but recently, nearly 20,000 auto parts factory workers have lost their jobs in the state. Taxpayers in other states have paid even more for KIA, BMW and other foreign car assemblers to come to their states. Mississippi is paying KIA $400 million to assemble KIA cars in its state. These cars are described as built in the USA and not made in the USA as the parts come from the wage slave workers of the world. The number of assembly workers at all of these foreign plants is only a fraction of the number of existing workers at US auto manufacturing plants. They also work for about half of what auto workers earned in the past. .
Who won World War II in the final analysis?
Let’s go back in time to 1940. The United States was still coming out of the Great Depression. Tariffs were blamed as the main cause of the depression. However, the main cause of the Depression was the stock market crash and the economy took this big hit at a time when tariffs were not even enforceable. Today’s Free Traders like to blame the Smooth-Hawley Tariffs as the cause of the Depression, but this bill was passed after the Stock Market Crash in 1930 and never took hold before Roosevelt took office. can. Soon after, Roosevelt had the authority to lower and raise rates at will in 1934.
The next phase ignited the most powerful industrial power in history. Tariffs had no part in the process. Roosevelt knew that our nation could not mobilize semi-independently: mobilization had to occur as a whole for many vital needs, whether for military or civilian use. President Roosevelt had to sell the war to the American people in a sequence of actions. He started doing it with executive orders and schematics. Roosevelt said, what I’m trying to do is get rid of the dollar sign, we’ve got to get rid of the silly dollar sign. This was good news for England and Russia, who did not have much money left to fight a war.
This is how the first wave of Free Trade began, but it was based on giving away products made in the USA.
Many Americans accepted the premise thinking that they could stay out of the war and at the same time strengthen our economy.
Lack of money was the biggest problem in the world. The world was coming out of a Great Depression. After World War I the allies wanted Germany to be just a big farm with no production capacity at all. Hitler came and filled the void by creating a strong army to invade other countries killing people who got in the way. In the process, Hitler demonstrated how a war machine can create industrial power out of thin air. China and Russia, with elite groups controlling the masses, did not have the same capabilities, but still killed millions for their causes. They killed more than Germany, but the United States chose Germany as its first enemy. At the same time, Japan was claiming the right to the mainland for the sake of its own economic survival. The United States approved their claim at the turn of the century, but revoked its agreements with Japan in the 1930s. Japan felt that the United States betrayed them. This set the stage for Pearl Harbor. After all was said and done, it wasn’t really a surprise attack.
Roosevelt did not want money to get in the way. He caught many by surprise when he said, what I’m trying to do is get rid of the dollar sign, we’ve got to get rid of the silly old dollar sign. This also fit in with the new economic theories that said you don’t owe anyone and money if you owe it to yourself. On September 2, 1940, Roosevelt gave Great Britain 50 Navy Destroyers under his own executive order. This violated international law and the understanding on neutrality. In essence, the United States unofficially declared war on Germany on September 2, 1940.
Around the same time, Roosevelt used an old 1917 law to trade aircraft to private manufacturers for newer models with the understanding that the private companies would then ship the old aircraft models to Britain at no cost. So Roosevelt went one step further. After he was re-elected, he got Congress to pass the Lend-Lease Act that circumvented any money problems the British and communist Russia might have had. Immediately after passing the law, Roosevelt made a list of products that we could loan to the allies. Yet of the billions of dollars of produce shipped to the allies, the US was later reimbursed for only a fraction of the total amounts, including ten percent of total US agricultural production that it went to Great Britain and Russia. The United States also produced and supplied 50% of all munitions used in World War II.
Of course, this brought prosperity to the United States. After the war, building on its impressive industrial power, the US launched the Marshall Plan. This helped restore local value-added economies in Europe and Asia. If we gave Japan this big economic boost before the war, there really would have been no reason for war with Japan. Free traders ignore most of this, singing about non-existent tariffs that ruined our economy during the antebellum era, when undeclared war began years before with Roosevelt’s version of free trade. They sing about how competition rules the game, but as we know, this was not the case during the WWII era. Then as now it is highly questionable whether the US ever had to compete on a global stage. Who, what, when and where concluded that we had to compete on a global stage.
Lend-Lease proved that the only thing that works is local value-added savings that increase values at various levels, from raw product to retail or end-user stage. It also shows that no long-running war can be fought without a strong industrial sector. Today, we have chopped up our local value-added savings and scattered the pieces around the world. In the World War II era, we gave away the ugly golden eggs for our golden goose industrial might. Now we have cut up the goose and shipped the pieces all over the world. Why have research and development if the manufacturing phase goes elsewhere? Now we have a small high-tech army being defeated in a small country with human bombs. Rumsfeld’s war theories are like a child who grew up too fast and needs to get out of any fight fast before his feeble stature is exposed.
Finally, said President Franklin Roosevelt, economic diseases are highly contagious. I wonder what he would say today. Free trade is like sex, you sleep with a lot of partners and then with everyone they’ve slept with. It is an economic epidemic.