Donald Trump wants to bring back jobs. Frankly, I don’t understand the concept of bringing them back versus creating new ones here. I mean, countries tend to evolve from manufacturing to services to high-tech and so on. We were just trying to stay on the frontier, and that’s good. It’s said there’s a strategic advantage in being first. We were first to the moon, and that’s given us an advantage. We were first to invent cars, which was rather high-tech at the time, I’d say. If we weren’t the first, we would have watched a different economy grow via the car and other advances, and we would have owned those cars if we paid the purchase price rather than the manufacturing cost. Therefore, there are advantages to being first, and we can’t do everything, which means we have to let other countries do some work. I say “let” because, if done correctly, we outsource jobs to countries we can trust, whom we want to help, and whom aren’t really able yet to do so well in the area in which we’re outsourcing without our help. Currently, most of those jobs have been outsourced to China, who isn’t willing to work with us unless that’s a way to get close enough to hurt us. However, done right, outsourcing is a great way to help others grow and free up resources to help your country expand and continue to be first and then outsource what you’ve created, and then the cycle continues.
However, I don’t think Trump is really thinking about all of these issues. He’s more focused on hating everyone that’s not American and, domestically, most Americans. However, a realignment of globalization is necessary. We’ve given most of our jobs to the wrong country. Not really the wrong people, but the government that controls those people. The theory that economic development brings about change that leads to democracy is one that with which I’ve disagreed for my whole life, but many corporations agree with it or claim it when they’re really just looking for lower costs. I think China is proof that either this theory implies a revolt must take place to make the theory valid in areas where a theory of government that directly competes with democracy exists or that this theory isn’t true. It’s just a theory, not a law. Theories need proof to become a law, and I think China is proof that this theory is not valid.
However, when you repatriate jobs, there is one thing that does clearly happen. You get more money. Now, this can be debated, but the United States has a trade deficit, a huge one, with China. Since most jobs have gone there and since it’s clear Trump will try to get jobs back from there, that deficit will narrow. Additionally, he’s said he’ll partner with Jack Ma (Ma Yun or 马云) of Alibaba to sell to Chinese consumers, which would send money from Chinese consumers to the United States. Therefore, China exports fewer goods to sell here and we export more goods to sell there, creating a sealed bilateral tube through which money and products will flow in reverse from the direction it’s been flowing massively since China joined the WTO. Trump thinks this is better than forming a trade pact like the TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership) that would divert money away from China, slowing their GDP growth, though still outsourcing U.S. jobs but to allies. Trump doesn’t want to outsource any more jobs. None. He’s talked about taxing products from China 45%. I don’t know whether this is going to happen, but I do know that Trump has talked about a direct relationship with Alibaba to bring jobs back from China, a direct relationship that tethers U.S. jobs not to China’s ability to assemble U.S. designed goods but to China’s actual labor management. China will be able to tell U.S. workers that they should produce in a certain way and claim that Chinese consumers want it that way in order to control our workforce. If you read Job Growth In America (With Chinese Characteristics), you’ll see that this partnership won’t “Make America Great Again.”
Bringing jobs back, however he does it, will reduce our net trade deficit relative to the world and will increase GDP. This does give America somewhat more control. We’ll have the money, and we’ll be able to tell other countries that, if they want our products, we’ll work with them on our terms. Once Trump is done with his bullshit, we can get a real president who will get us off a Trump-imposed island and back into the global economy. Having a trade surplus or, in our case, a smaller trade deficit, will allow us to have more power globally, and as you know, we like to share that power with our friends because we’re not, except for Trump, assholes.
Bringing back jobs will also cause a problem for the countries that currently have those jobs. Since Trump thinks America should reign supreme while all others perish, I’m sure he’ll be happy to support shrinkage of their economies. China’s economy would definitely shrink if they weren’t exporting so much. Domestic demand for their products is rather low because their people don’t have much money. China’s government has never paid attention to its people because it doesn’t care about its people. It just uses its people as expendable laborers. If China’s economy contracts slowly and steadily for several years, more than it already has, Chinese laborers might — not a large chance — start thinking that the idea of exchanging political freedom for money isn’t going to be enough anymore if they aren’t getting the money. Most likely, the Chinese people will continue to think oppression is normal, as this has been the case for thousands of years, but there’s a chance that people will notice they aren’t getting anything. Moreover, once a country loses the support of its people and responds militarily, the international community knows about it. Since they already did this in 1989, then I can say that, once the U.S. takes away China’s money and China responds with its military, the international community will know about it and won’t want to enter China again. At that point, the only way for China to get its jobs back would be by military force.
A benefit to essentially canceling globalization would be that this would mean withdrawing money from countries, well all countries (Seriously, Trump is an idiot) but countries that would use corporate profits to build their military. Not from taxes on their corporation but the net profit after taxes. See, some countries will take the profit from shoe sales and use it to build rockets that then point at the country whose companies outsourced shoemaking and whose consumer bought the damn shoes. Since one of those countries has a government that doesn’t give a damn about the benefits we’re providing them and isn’t passing any of those benefits to its people, I think it’s okay to take away some of the money we gave them. Any country that is benefiting from our innovation and our economy in any way and using those benefits to destroy us is both stupid and not deserving of our support.
Since Trump wants to bring all the jobs back, including from ally countries that have benefited and who did nothing bad to us and have actually helped us, we’re going to lose their support. Trump says that Obama lost their support, and now Trump wants to cancel any economic relationships we have with them. This will certainly reduce their companies’ incentives to engage economically with us. A reduction in economic ties will also remove one reason for political ties. Given weaker political ties, fewer conversations will take place, and a general sense of disconnection will occur. Perhaps there’d even be a weaker military partnership. After all, Trump wants to take all their money AND make them pay more to NATO. Whether you agree with that or not, it’ll sure be expensive for them. Therefore, we don’t know if they’ll defend us due to this, and they don’t know if we’ll defend them. The bigger concern is who they form an alliance with next, not really a formal military partnership but perhaps something small like letting one of their allies who isn’t a strong ally of ours keep military supplies within their borders or perhaps purchasing some weapons from such countries. This would amount to a shift in control away from the U.S. military to several smaller militaries that may or may not act as a group and may or may not act at all. A divided and/or less intelligent and/or less willing power or group of powers is a great gift to our enemies. In fact, this is what they want. Divide and conquer. The more things change, the more the same goal stays the same.
One really good thing that could happen is that companies that move their jobs back to the United States and find it less profitable to leave might have some patriotism and stop firing everyone by automating everything. They might also give raises because, after all, the race to the bottom in terms of wages around the world would be over because they couldn’t leave the country. This would give the government more control over how much U.S. workers get paid since U.S. companies would actually employ workers in the U.S. This could lift help millions of families. That doesn’t change the fact that we’d be an island unto ourselves, which brings with it all the problems I’ve discussed. However, this one single focus on American workers could provide that one single benefit.
In short, it seems that, whether you agree or disagree with Trump’s plan to bring back jobs or whether you think he should bring that back via any plan, that globalization, an incredibly large endeavor, is hard. You can’t really blame the whole world for getting it wrong the first time. You can’t blame anyone for getting anything so difficult so wrong on the first try. True, it wasn’t truly the first time we globalized or attempted to work with other nations economically, but everyone would agree that the countries of the world are unprecedently interdependent.
What we need is a realignment. That may be possible through free trade agreements like TPP that rebalance trade away from a country that clearly doesn’t care about anyone but itself and isn’t a democracy, but Trump thinks it’s better to be more brash. Shocking. What’s clear, however, is that withdrawing from the global society and realigning for a reboot, like Globalization 2.0 or something, would be helpful. I just think it’d be better to do it without pissing off literally ALL of our friends. I know, I know, fight fire with fire (not a good idea, by the way), but Trump is making it look like we’re the country that clearly doesn’t care about anyone but itself, although at least we are a democracy. If we even have a chance to complete this realignment without losing any semblance of our current place in the world, then it’d take a scientist to figure out precisely how to do it. I don’t think Trump can do it. Maybe he can just pull out and then our next president can fix his mess. The world would look different then and so that president could globalize the United States in a different way. If China tries to use its military to sustain economic power over the world, then they’d certainly be excluded from any reboot next time we outsource.