Web Letters: Britain's Winter of Discontent

Like America, Great Britain is destroying its internal market by outsourcing its industries and the jobs that support it. As this article notes, they are also in-sourcing foreign labor that takes the jobs of British workers. No jobs and no disposable income to support an internal market. Great Britain used to be the industrial country. Alexander Hamilton was accused of being pro-British, but his tariffs were designed to protect infant American industries from British products. Great Britain had a twenty-year lead in the Industrial Revolution, and it was a powerhouse. A free trade relationship with the Brits meant they controlled your economy.

China has replaced Great Britain and the US as the industrial state. Western business interests have outsourced industries and jobs to China, because labor is cheap, but intelligent. China is supposed to make the products, and the formerly developed Western countries are supposed to buy them. However, since Western industries have been outsourced along with their jobs, there is no market, because the disposable income from those jobs has also disappeared. Since China has cheap labor, Western disposable income was not in-sourced. China is dependent on an export economy that has lost its customers because the customers do not have the disposable income to buy China's products. China itself would be an excellent market, but cheap labor has no disposable income to develop the China market.

We can all hold hands as the ship of globalization sinks, or return to national economics that limit the economic risks of globalized "free trade"!

(I was looking at BBC this morning and, apparently, foreign companies can bid on contracts in the US, under the stimulus legislation. I would not be surprised if they also imported guest workers, under the twenty-some guest-worker programs authorized by Congress. These idiots don't get it--two-thirds of the American economy is supported by the disposable income of the American worker. If American workers are not employed, there will be no economic recovery.)

Pervis James Casey

Riverside, CA