Buying on the home front

The cartoon above looks like a problem that we in the USA have been facing for many years. But, look at the cartoon above again. Look at the upper left hand side of the cartoon. The cartoonist is a man named Tom Janssen, and it was published in a newspaper called Trouw in the Netherlands. He was born in the Netherlands as well. Yes, when I looked at it, it fooled me at first also. I thought it was an USA cartoon.

But, this does point to a problem common to many of the Western countries, and it is not a problem that will be easy to solve. On the one hand, all the Western countries are free market economies. And, for the last 30 some years, the push in all our countries has been towards opening world wide markets. Globalization has been ongoing. And, there has been a push to lessen any and all controls on the market and on companies. The theory has been that freeing up the controls will lead to the lowest prices.

And, in one sense, the theory has worked. Of course, the other assumption was that the economic situation would tend to equilibrate between the countries to the benefit of all countries. But, that was a mistaken assumption. Instead, jobs have flowed out of the USA and other Western countries, while cheap goods have flowed in from other countries. You have heard all the jokes about calling tech support and getting a person in Southeast Asia with a hard-for-us to understand dialect of English. On a more serious note, we also know that the People’s Republic of China is accumulating more and more of the world’s wealth, while the economy of Brazil is one of the few economies that is strongly growing.

And so, indeed, an equilibration is happening. Under this type of free market system, we are growing poorer while some of the formerly poor countries are growing richer. This, of course, raises a rather serious problem, and one that is being argued about right now, not only in the USA, but as you can see from the cartoon above, in other Western countries. Should we put controls in imports from other countries to ensure that income and outgo are in equilibrium? Should we put controls on jobs so that companies must have tech support (for instance) for the USA be in the USA? It appears that if some type of controls are not put in that China will be the world’s richest country in another couple of decades, while both India and Brazil stand to do much better.

So, the USA and other Western countries have a choice. Go with a fully globalized and free market and either watch us get poorer and poorer or hope that a fully globalized and free market will eventually reach equilibrium that will not hurt the Western democracies. Or go with some controls and decide that an uncontrolled free market may not be the best economic model at this time and in these places. From Tea Party members through liberals, the divisions are internal. One can read Tea Partiers arguing against Tea Partiers, moderates arguing against moderates, liberals arguing against liberals, and anarchists arguing against anarchists. No political or economic group can find agreement within their own group.

And, I have no good answer to the dilemma. But, I can certainly see it. I would suggest that this is a good time to engage in some prayer for wisdom for leaders in any of several countries.