Timothy Birdnow

Here is exactly what is wrong with globalism; a few key international pieces in the massive Rube Goldberg machine can wreck the whole market.

There have been droughts in Brazil, where most of teh world's coffee comes from at present,so prices have skyrocketed to record highs. But also "supply chain problems" and farmers sitting on their crop to drive up prices have hurt everyone worldwide.

The point is, we have overspecialized the economy. The globalization/"free trade" crowd determined long ago certain places would provide certain things and nobody else - and so when the designated producer has problems you wind up with inflationary pressure or shortages.

Coffee can be grown in many places (and is) and there is no reason why it should come mostly from Brazil. Shoot; it can be grown in Florida. Florida coffee may not be that good relative to stuff out of the Carribean (I favor Jamaican Blue Mountain myself,but it's very pricey) but it certainly would be o.k. for growing robusto - the cheap stuff. Robusto mainly comes from Vietnam.

I would think coffee could be grown in Texas, too, although it may require more water than is available in the Lone Star state.

Up until now nobody bothered with it becausethere were many reliable providers from overseas. But now we seem to be having a problem.

I've long said that the globalists want to specialize nations. Anyone who has ever seen the '70's movie Rollerball may remember then having this - corporations ruled certain cities across the globe. Houston, for instance, was an energy city, while Indianapolis was a food production city. Everything specialized, compartmentalized. I do believe that movie captured a fundamental goal of the modern internationalists.

But overspecialization is what ended the Bronze Age. Nations all had their one or two particular trading skills,and trade was easy and enriching. But then some new folks showed up - the Sea People, for example - and the supply chains broke down. The end result was a huge civilizational cololapse that took centuries to dig out from under. The overspecialization meant nobody could produce what they needed to maintain their civilzation on their own; when the trade stopped so too did the civilzations. Many completely disappeared from history. Others survived but in a different form. But everyone lost the culture, the prosperity, that they had enjoyed. All because everyone quit doing for themselves and simply bought the stuff from someone else.

That's what we've taken to doing in our modern rush towards globalism. And we have seen how badly that turned out during the pandemic.

Today it's high coffee prices, tomorrow what will it be? The engine of the world's economy can easily grind to a halt if something very bad ever happens. These supply chains are gossamer, and can quite easily be broken at any time. One big war, or a worldwide natural disaster (like an asteroid strike) could throw us back into savagery. This wasn't a problem when we made stuff for ourselves.

Part of adulthood is learning to rely on yourself. The modern man has gone full in reverse, seeking to reassert dependency. The result will be chaos and suffering - or at least coffee that is too expensive to buy.

What will all those hippie liberal coffee shop dwellers say then? They will no doubt blame Donald Trump and the free market.

Oh, one final thought; European nations believed that a country could not be strong if it did not produce everything it needed. This was the concept of Mercantilism, a much-despised idea now. It largely failed the European nations because it was far too strict. Governments used heavy regulations and taxation to force consumers to buy from within their empires. And they needed huge colonial empires to produce everything they needed, and those empires were very expensive to holed and maintain. I am not advocating that; we should allow foreign trade, no question. But there is nothing wrong with encouraging American commerce, American manufacturing. We need to make what we need in addition to buying it from elsewhere. What we have now is NOT free trade,but rather we simply closed up shop and buy from foreign entities that employ slave labor or otherwise circumvent the regulations we imposed that made our industries uncompetitive in the first place. While I think buying steel from Japan is o.k. I think selling U.S. Steel to Japan is an abomination. See the difference?  You can't just sell your country and chalk it up to free trade.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 10:16 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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