Home Globalists Were Wrong. The World Isn't Flat.
Home Globalists Were Wrong. The World Isn't Flat.

Globalists Were Wrong. The World Isn't Flat.

First it was baby formula, now there’s a tampon shortage. Tampons are affected by the rising price of oil affecting the cost of plastic and higher cotton prices due to mask manufacturing and the war in Ukraine. A whole lot of fertilizer comes out of Ukraine and Russia. So does neon which is used to make semiconductor chips. The chip shortage is shutting down car plants. It's also keeping the Biden administration from issuing gas refund cards.

This is the thoroughly interconnected world celebrated in prose by journalists like Thomas Friedman who marveled at how Big Data and globalization brought everything together.

"No two countries that both have a McDonald's have ever fought a war against each other," Friedman once claimed. In his greatest paean to globalization, The World Is Flat, he argued that, "No two countries that are both part of a major global supply chain, like Dell's, will ever fight a war against each other as long as they are both part of the same global supply chain."

McDonald's in Russia has closed and the ones in Ukraine might be blown up any time. Russia restricted its neon exports while Ukraine's neon exports have fallen sharply. Dell's CEO Michael Dell has warned that the global chip shortage could last for years.

So much for the Golden Arches and Dell theory of globalist conflict prevention.

The world isn’t flat, it’s all too round. Much like history isn’t an ascending trend line to the right side, it’s also a circle. That’s why Islam is once again at war with Europe, Russia is invading Ukraine, China is relaunching its empire, and the ‘flatland’ is experiencing a dimensional shift.

The American economy increasingly looks like the Soviet Union with rigid central planning that is incapable of adjusting to the dynamism of the market and whose institutions are so uncompetitive that they lack the incentive to do more than pretend to try. And like the Russians, Americans are being forced to learn to live with unexpected expected shortages.

Globalization advocates had just recreated Marxist central planning with a somewhat more flexible global model in which massive corporations bridged global barriers to create the most efficient possible means of moving goods and services around the planet. Borders would come down and cultural exchanges would make us all one ushering in the great union of humanity.

What an interdependent world really means is Algerian Jihadists shooting up Paris, gang members from El Salvador beheading Americans within sight of Washington D.C. tampon and car shortages caused by a war in Ukraine, and more radicalism and extremism than ever.

Trying to “flatten” the world just makes it pop up again.

The technocratic new world order of megacorporations consolidating markets and then doling out products with just-in-time inventory systems now flows through a broken supply chain. Rising inflation and international disruptions makes it all but impossible for even the big companies to plan ahead, and so they produce less and shrug at the shortages.

We’re in a wartime economy because our system has become too vast and too inflexible to adjust to chaos. Biden keeps trotting out the Defense Production Act for everything until given time the entire economy has been Sovietized. The more that the government tries to impose stability on the chaos, the less responsive and productive the dominant players become.

Market consolidation due to government regulations has left a handful of companies sitting atop the market. When one of them, like Abbott for baby formula, has a hiccup, the results are catastrophic, others like Procter & Gamble, which controls about half the menstrual products market, don’t have to worry about losing market share to competition. Similar consolidation in food, paper products, and supermarkets have replaced a dynamic economy with cartels.

Behind all the brands on the product shelves is a creaky Soviet system in which a handful of massive enterprises interconnected with the state lazily crank out low-quality products from vast supply chains that they no longer control and feel little competitive pressure to perform better. The only thing that is still American about the supermarket experience is the advertising.

The problems with the system were less noticeable when its predictive mechanisms worked and its foreign suppliers were eager for American dollars. Under stress, the failure points are all too obvious and what is less obvious is that the system has no intention of repairing any of them.

It doesn’t need to.

An out-of-touch elite responds to problems with meaningless reassurances, glib jokes and wokeness. Like Soviet propaganda, the only thing corporate statements communicate is the vast distance between the lives of those running the system and those caught inside its gears.

But despite their complicity, the massive monopolistic enterprises didn’t make this world.

Biden and the Democrats have been eager to blame companies for “profiteering” from the inflation created by federal spending. Few companies prefer the current crisis to 2019. Hardly anyone except bottom feeders enjoys not being unable to rationally plan for the future. Major corporations and their investors care more about a growth plan than quarterly profits.

The Democrats were the biggest champions of globalization. Their regulations led to record market consolidation and domestic job cuts. Corporations were pressured to export dirty Republican jobs to China and keep the ‘clean’ Democrat office jobs at home. The devastation wreaked havoc on the working class and the middle class, and rebuilt our entire economy to be dependent on China and a worldwide supply chain only globalists could believe was bulletproof.

OPEC’s impact on fuel prices under Carter became the model for the entire economy. A war anywhere impacts Americans. Dozens of countries have the power to wreck our economy, intentionally or even unintentionally. Even the environmental promises of energy independence have become a farce in which our government pleads with China for more solar panels.

Interdependence hasn’t even led to the world government that globalists wanted, but global chaos in which impotent western powers try to talk the rest of the world out of fighting to avoid being swamped by refugees, high energy bills, and empty shelves in supermarkets.

After selling off American economic sovereignty, globalists proved unable to maintain global stability. Lacking the will to actually stand up to China, Iran, or Russia, all they can do is hold more international conferences and build up a useless multinational bureaucracy.

Say what you will about the League of Nations, but it only had 700 employees in Geneva. The UN's 44,000 employees are just the tip of the iceberg in the huge ranks of multinational organizations who all claim to be upholding the international order while running up the tab.

Globalization globalizes the ineptitude of the global order. Its grand plans, like those of the Soviet Union, are never a match for the chaos of human nature and its ambitions. Politicians, philanthropists, and philosophers had labored to replace American dynamism with a clockwork machine. The old Baggage clockworks became servers upholding a cloud that proved to be very handy for instant communications, but ran up against the same ‘flattening’ limitations.

America was never meant to be flat. It was a land discovered by those who understood that the world was round. Flattening America has depressed its economy and its spirit. A flat world with no room for American exceptionalism is instead becoming a playground for Chinese and Russian exceptionalism. And America’s economy is becoming one big permanent shortage.





Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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Thank you for reading.

Comments

  1. Anonymous20/6/22

    “ A whole lot of fertilizer comes out of Ukraine and Russia.” I dare say more fertilizer comes out of Washington D.C.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. true, sadly not usable for agriculture

      Delete
  2. Anonymous20/6/22

    Time to Shrug?

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anonymous20/6/22

    Such a clear explanation. Brilliant, as always.

    ReplyDelete
  4. AislaPS20/6/22

    A brilliant and all embracing critique of seemingly disconnected events that turn out to be related to each other via malice, incompetence, insouciance and no consequence for sabotaging previously known and knowable events .
    Friedman's worldview has failed catastrophically on its first contact with reality, but it actually served his purpose and those who fund his piecrust musings that might once have been confined to the student rag paper. And had no effect on real.life because airheads and dreaming fools simply stayed on campus. And weren't allowed near real people, real things and consequential plans.
    And you have yet to factor in the deliberate crash control plots that ESG represents to Fink, Bezos and Carney etc. Wait until the supply chains are only allowed to exist if their trans policies and carbon footprint( as deemed to be so by themselves) suit those of UNESCO, CCP and IFIs etc.
    Godless evil, we folk of faith need to hurt them with extreme prejudice whilst we still can.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Anonymous20/6/22


    "An out-of-touch elite responds to problems with meaningless reassurances, glib jokes and wokeness. Like Soviet propaganda, the only thing corporate statements communicate is the vast distance between the lives of those running the system and those caught inside its gears."

    Thanks for saying what I wanted to but couldn't. This is the wokeness alliance, between our dear "leaders" and their technocrat overlords. If you dare object, you are not thrown into a gulag, but shunned as a "racist,' and cancelled. The Cyber blanket stretches far...

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. the blanket pervades all our lives now

      Delete
  6. Anonymous20/6/22

    So glad that your issues have been resolved some so that you are able to give us your excellent analysis as before.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. the emails have been going out, but it seems like they weren't reaching some people so I switched to a new service, glad you're seeing them now

      Delete
  7. Anonymous20/6/22

    Hello Mr. Greenfield. Great article. I was curious about your comment: "Market consolidation due to government regulations has left a handful of companies sitting atop the market.." I've long sensed that government regulations have creates the monopolies and market consolidation that we have today, but am not clear on how that works; i.e.., what regulations have created these conditions. If you've written about this issue before, will you please provide a link? If you haven't written about it before, would you please address it in a column in the near future?

    Thanks!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. briefly, regulations raise cost for market participation,

      big corps often court regs because it keeps any upstarts from being a threat

      the more regulations, the more it makes sense for companies to consolidate to have the scale to lobby the government and to deal with regulatory requirements

      we saw this on a massive scale in the medical field after ObamaCare

      Delete
  8. Anonymous20/6/22

    In addition to all of this, the entire Biden family is totally corrupt and Joe is so compromised he cannot or will not do anything to rock the boat with Ukraine, China, Russia, Iran or any other country that is American unfriendly. He will make us a third world country before he is through his first term. His motto is "Love me at any price!!!"

    ReplyDelete
  9. Anonymous20/6/22

    I live in Fairfax County, Virginia. It seems that every 10th car is a Tesla. Builders are only building homes that "start at" $2.5 M. Large population of lobbyists enjoying the fruits of our tax money. So I wonder if this is the future ~ we as onlookers at the feast. Or is it possible as the whole thing comes crashing down they'll be buried alongside us. This line I heard on a TV program still resonates. We have been experiencing "the controlled demolition of America."

    ReplyDelete
  10. Anonymous20/6/22

    Complexity and Simplicity; contradictory models
    we misunderstand to our detriment.

    For governments, academia, finance it seems
    we need complex ways of making and using them.
    Requires "Intellectuals", more capable than
    most of us to do a good jobs. Like FDR's brain
    trusts and the Soviet expert for all toothpicks
    in the USSR. This results in intractable problems,
    low accountability, inability to experiment and
    change. (See Thomas Sowell: "Intellectuals and
    Society")

    In a free-market economy, bird, fish, drone swarm,
    actions and decisions happen at a local level,
    quickly changing and optimizing. A single entity
    may fail, but causes little damage. Another case
    is the human brain. Each cell behaves from few
    inputs and outputs, simply. Combined, the brain's
    power is prodigious. (See Neural Nets, Emergent
    Phenomena.)

    Thomas

    ReplyDelete

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