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Friday, June 22, 2012

The failed ‘globalization’ experiment

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Entire generations have been indoctrinated in the concepts of hooking up to the bigger global market rather than maintaining local self-sufficiency. Even the United States with its decades-long wanton “outsourcing” binge ultimately shot itself in the foot. It created manufacturing powerhouses like China that are now racking up surplus upon surplus while globo-”sourcer”, the US, sinks further into deficit oblivion. This ironic economic school of thought is allowing big US corporate to grow even more profitable on the back of cheap Third World labour without generating any further domestic employment for Americans (tough luck for the unskilled and blue collar workers that constitute its “heartland”).

It’s a false “efficiency” or “productivity” gain that makes goods and services cheaper by externalising costs (kind of like keeping a clean house by throwing your rubbish over the fence into your neighbour’s backyard).

Meanwhile, Filipinos keep adding more people to its already enormous population. Unfortunately most of the new entrants into the Philippine labour force lack the skills to both literally and figuratively “grow money from trees” …

So does it mean that it would be better if we “grow money from trees” ? Figuratively, yes.

Let’s plant more trees & crops. Let’s improve our agricultural sector.
A strong agricultural sector will yield cheaper sources of food & raw materials.

Once we have strengthened our agricultural sector, let’s strengthen our manufacturing sector.

Let’s use our cheaper raw materials (brought about by our strong agricultural sector) to help reduce the cost of manufacturing goods.
Let’s set-up more business which will manufacture goods locally, using raw materials grown locally and employing local labor.

Then once our local agricultural & manufacturing sector has been established, then that would be the time to look for foreign investments to learn new technologies and apply them locally.

…(or at least their own food from the ground) and as such, the country isgrowing more and more dependent on increasingly scarce foreign capital

Open up the market to foreign capital and foreign goods in a society that already lacks a track record of innovation and suffers a deficit of entrepreneurial inclination to begin with, and you get an addiction to all things foreign (foreign capital, foreign incomes, foreign substance) and a vision for developing an indigenous capability to create these things atrophied beyond all hope of recovery forever. Not all societies are created equal just as not all people are destined to be wealthy.

How long can the little boy keep living in his parents’ house and driving his daddy’s car? He needs to learn how to save up to buy his own house and car.

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