Wouldn't A More Isolationist Stance Benefit The People of the US & Why Aren't We Adopting One?

"Free trade and good will towards other nations, entangling alliances with none."

Thats where "isolationism" comes from. Makes it sound negative.

When adhered to in the spirit the Founding Fathers framed it however, prevents meddling and exploitation in other nations affairs. Preserves and sets the best example for their rights and liberties as we espouse them. And protects the American people from repercussions that might arise due to "taking over" abroad.

This would be great, and to bring the U.S. back to the economic power it was in the past 70 years.

1. Close all military bases across the globe, excluding only a handful for strategic resources some rare earth minerals. (I mean very few, and also not meant as a mercenary force for corporations. Maintain carrier battle groups with Marine RDF groups for protection of U.S. embassies and civilians around the planet as well in the event we HAD to intervene somewhere.
2. Close and secure the boarders: Enforce immigration laws on the books, deport anyone caught violating the immigration laws and bar them from re-entry for 30 years. Adopt Mexico's immigration laws and add to our own.
3. Cancel NAFTA GAT and all other free trade agreements, bring back tariffs on all trade, including on U.S. corporations who do not wish to bring back their companies to U.S. soil.
4. End the Income Tax, as well as reform the Tax Code.
5. Work within the revenue of the tariffs
6. Rebuild the infrastructure of the U.S., roads, bridges, rail etc.
7. Withdraw out of the U.N., remove them from U.S. soil or charge them rent in in precious metals for $250 billion a year, and they have to abide by U.S. Law. If they refuse this they can leave our soil.
8.Nullify all treaties, agreements, and accords that do not follow the U.S. Constitution

Fix our country before we go out and try to fix and mettle with other peoples affairs.

Grim

reply to post by TheConspiracyPages

The U.S. wont because we have to keep our status as a world power, no matter what happens to its citizens. The politicians dont give a rats ass about you or me, only about what ever corporation thats paying for their re-election campaign. As long as thats the case America will fail just like all the others that came before it.
On a side note, Ive always thought, since we'll never have anything along the lines of term limits for the senate/congress, that they should at least do something like nascar. A jumpsuit with patches letting us know who owns them and who's interests they are really looking out for.

For some reason, every time someone brings up isolationism, people start complaining about us leaving a power gap. Well if someone else wants to take over as "world police" then I say let 'em. We sure as hell can't afford to do it anymore. So we lose some regional influence we had before, who cares? Why do we need to "buy" influence in the first place? Isn't the shining beacon of democracy enough in it's own right? If not, then all the money in the world won't change anything. We need to protect those resources some say. Why? We have some of the worlds largest untapped reserves. AFAI concerned, we pay these countries for their resources so we don't have to dig up our own. Which is all well and good until they don't want to sell em anymore. If we're there specifically for those resources, then let's quit pussy footing around and take them and get the hell outta there. It doesn't make any sense to me to stick around and try to help them rebuild what we destroyed.

Now obviously we can't just abandon our allies and treaties but there must be a way for us to scale back our imperialism without ignoring our duties. I don't know what the answer is but doing things the way we are now is going to break us. It's unsustainable.

reply to post by TheConspiracyPages


Isolationist? No, that would never work for America.

America has too many fingers in too many pies, globally, for any effective retreat inside its own borders to be financially viable, let alone politically sensible at this point. Perhaps when the US has no exports, and requires no imports, and all the global businesses that run out of the US decide "hey, we do not even LIKE money, lets just go home and sit on the porch, drink some whiskey and be done with the whole thing", then it will be possible for the US to become isolationist.

But with business links between the US and the rest of the world, being what they are, I do not see that time coming at all soon. And that leaves out any US debt that has been, or may have been purchased by other governments and banks from other places on the planet. Realistically speaking, we are all tied together, all the world, by tendrils of companies and organisations, many of whom we never even know the names of. These tendrils are hard to pin down as well, because of the way the markets work. As I was recently made aware, the stock market is only understood by a handful of programmers and techs on the planet. The SEC do not have a damned clue how the organisations they regulate work. This is because the stock markets have been affected by computerised, automated trading, to the point where trying to track who is buying what, and who has it on any one day become utterly idiotic questions, since things change hands so fast now that the moment one discovers who owns some stock, that information is immediately obsolete in the face of another picoseconds worth of trading.

If the US were to pull out of all its interactions on the world stage, it would be politically, and financially, the biggest mess, and not just for the US and its citizens, but also for the rest of the planet. There are better ways than isolation. The US needs accountable political figures, and to install laws which prevent the erosion of the rights of the people. What it does not need, and I would argue, no nation needs, is to set itself apart from its neighbors and allies. That way only leads to an abomination, like a western version of North Korea, a xenophobic and insane dictatorship.

reply to post by TrueBrit


Again, it's not all or nothing. I don't think we have to 100% engaged in the global economy. What's wrong with withdrawing to the point required to maintain the standard of living for the American Worker and until a certain level of unemployment is reached?

I think a lot of nations are benefiting from Americas open trade policies, it's just that the American People as a whole aren't.

reply to post by TheConspiracyPages


Well, good luck getting anyone to vote for that!


You see what you are suggesting, in that case, is an economy not based on growth! But you cannot have capitalism, without a growth based economy, because all the other capitalist nations on the planet rely on growth to feed their economies. You either stay on that bandwagon till the wheels come off, and stay off, or get yourself involved in some sort of partial communism instead, which would be a system under which a flat economy is a good economy, no particular growth, and no concerning downturns.

I might think that is a good thing, but I will garundamntee that the majority of your fellow citizens would rather crap through their eyesockets, than get involved in such a thing .

reply to post by TheConspiracyPages


Yeah, it would be beneficial to the people.

No, it won't happen because we would have to decrease our international influence. We have our thumbs in a lot of pies.
In part if we isolated we would lose quite a bit of ground and influence, BUT we would strengthen as a country.

Another downside is that if we pulled out of a lot of the areas we are in and went into a period of more isolation, it's doubtful the defense budget would decrease despite less active duty personnel. SO that means more home security, more surveillance, more police state.

Can't stand up for fallin' down. Nawmsayin'?

How would preventing the import of a limited subset of goods produce a flat economy in the US? What if we choose a dozen items and announced that in a year from now import of those items would be prohibited? Wouldn't business people tool up to produce those products and in doing so hire employees and invest capital in the US? Wouldn't that result in growth in the American economy?

Another contributor to this thread mentioned protectionism, I'd agree it would be a form of protectionism, suggesting it's communism or even a partial communism is just hyperbole.

reply to post by TheConspiracyPages


Not mere hyperbole.

If you were to say that twelve random items would no longer be imported, then that is hardly isolationist. That is a tiny number of items, so the nett effect would be minimal.

The only way to implement a system such as the one you advocate, without leaving huge supply chain gaps (which would be crippling) is to get the production of these things, en masse, done in the US, and cheaper than outside it too, FIRST, before you cut off outside supplies. You are not going to get that to happen, because until that supply shuts off, it would be financial suicide for any company to invest in such a scheme.

The only way to survive such an implementation, as a nation, would be to make the following things illegal...

1) CEOs getting paid more per hour than their factory floor workers.
2) Business being sold off, or moved off shore to save money.
3) Businesses being closed in protest against the moves being made by implementation of your new way of doing things (which happened when Obama installed his healthcare initiatives, and would be worse in face of what you propose).
4) CEOs leaving the country, taking their vast fortunes with them.

Business globally would not allow what you suggest, to go down without using every legal means to avoid the controls placed upon them, and it would cause more focused chaos than a nation as large and resource dependent as the US could hope to survive.

Countries that have such policies tend to be very poor and have some of the lowest standards of living. That is what isolation brings you on an economic level. Their is reason China went from being a third world nation to a global power. On a politcal/military level it leads to little things called World Wars. This is why we are not isolationalist as we once were, because it leads to direct dangers and threats to the US.

Well, we could just buy the oil instead of stealing it. "if we don't then someone else will" kind of thing.

List of excuses thieves use:

It was just laying around.
No one was using it.
Everyone else does it.
If I don't someone else will.
I need it more than the people that owned it.
I have a better use for it.
They didn't take proper care of it.
They have more than enough.
I didn't take all of it.
Who's complainin?

America has been assigned the role of "world cop"...until that contract is up, we will remain.

Hey Brit,

My comment about hyperbole was directed, I think rather clearly, at your characterization of limiting imports to communism.

If you were to say that twelve random items would no longer be imported, then that is hardly isolationist. That is a tiny number of items, so the net effect would be minimal.

It would depend on the products and the effect probably wouldn't appear minimal to those people employed in those industries. The number 12 was just thrown out there as a point of departure. It could have been 7 or it could have been 25. Research would have to be done to determine the best products and numbers.

The only way to implement a system such as the one you advocate, without leaving huge supply chain gaps (which would be crippling) is to get the production of these things, en masse, done in the US, and cheaper than outside it too, FIRST, before you cut off outside supplies. You are not going to get that to happen, because until that supply shuts off, it would be financial suicide for any company to invest in such a scheme.

It's hard for me to imagine a supply chain gap of toasters as ever being crippling. No, they wouldn't have to be produced cheaper than they are outside the US and it wouldn't be suicide to tool up for production if the government was really going to cut off imports of a given item. Again what I'm suggesting is an incremental step in the direction of self sufficiency over time that leads to a preservation of the average Americans standard of living and lower unemployment.

CEOs getting paid more per hour than their factory floor workers.

I generally agree that CEO's are over compensated for their roles, but I wouldn't agree that their wages should necessarily be the same as a guy putting lug nuts on a wheel nor do I understand why this would be necessary to make the original idea work.

2) Business being sold off, or moved off shore to save money.

They're doing that right now, in large part because they can produce the goods over seas and then import them back into the US and sell them.

3) Businesses being closed in protest against the moves being made by implementation of your new way of doing things (which happened when Obama installed his healthcare initiatives, and would be worse in face of what you propose).

This has nothing to do with Obama Care. Why would businesses close? They would know that they could produce the product in the US and that they wouldn't be subject to competition from outside the US when they went to sell it. They'd also know that if they produced them outside the US they wouldn't be able to sell them here. I think what you'd see is the opening of new businesses within the US.

4) CEOs leaving the country, taking their vast fortunes with them.

Why would they do that? Even if they disagreed with the policy, which I'm not at all sure they would, they move businesses and money off shore all the time as it is. I don't see them moving their families overseas en masse. But frankly if they're not going to invest their money here then bon voyage.

Business globally would not allow what you suggest, to go down without using every legal means to avoid the controls placed upon them, and it would cause more focused chaos than a nation as large and resource dependent as the US could hope to survive.

I think we could survive a limited banning of imports and a move to produce those goods in the States quire nicely. And maybe businesses shouldn't be allowed to dictate national policy.


I can see the validity in some of your points of what I was purposing was a re-enactment of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act that Babybull24 brought up, but not in the limited context I'm speaking about. I also think you're under estimating the support that businesses owners and the American public in general would provide for a policy like I'm advocating.

reply to post by TheConspiracyPages


30 years ago, we could have gone isolationist and had a prayer of making it work. It may have seen other nations beating down our door for re-establishing trade, in fact. We had things others not only wanted, but needed.

Now? The Steel Belt is the Rust Belt. Indiana, Michigan, Ohio and PA....the heavy industrial manufacturing states..are "green" and in the balance, without work or ability to manufacture much, compared to decades past. Others still DO manufacture all that we've decided we're above doing ..and if we go isolationist, we'll be needing to learn how to do without things like building steel and other finished products we currently import for lack of domestic capability.

Once, we led the world in industry ...now we lead the world in benefit programs and a service based economy. The last stage of the affluent before a crash, it seems. Going isolationist will just accelerate the process and bring most of the world down before we go. Not necessarily the nicest thing to do, when the outcome is the likely outcome, either way.

reply to post by TheConspiracyPages


To clarify, I think the idea that you are proposing would be healthy for the US economy, if it was totally unopposed by global business concerns, and an easily misdirected citizenry. But I believe that between the businesses that would be affected by it, and the people who would be lead to believe that this effort was indeed tantamount to communism, by media and by propaganda put forward by business persons who disagree with the idea, you would have a hell of a job convincing enough Americans that this was a good idea, to get into control of these matters in the first place, let alone actually implement them.

I think the idea is noble, I think it could work, but between the logistical issues, and the counter moves that would surely come from interested parties, I think it would end up being a mess, no matter how much of a masterpiece it started out as.

reply to post by TrueBrit


Hey Brit,

I see your point, the policy would almost certainly come under attack by certain narrow interests. However, isn't it the role of elected officials to research out and advocate for those policies that are best for the majority of Americans?

I know that the American public isn't innocent in this, not everything can be broken down into a 60 second sound bite, or at least not accurately and sometimes it seems like if it can't be, if the American public actually has to stop and think, then ideas can't get any traction.

But do you see 100 percent engagement in a global economy in the current climate leading to anything but a lower and lower standard of living for the average working American? And if so, what's the solution?

amazing
So hypothetically what would happen if we required USA companies to pay USA/identical wages to their workers in foreign call centers and manufacturing? I don't think there would be a way to do it but...imagine a world where Microsoft call centers in India paid as much as they would here. You'd have an instant middle class there with money to burn, jumpstarting the economy there, then imagine Apple factories in China paying as much as they would have to here and on and on and on. What would be the fall out? Just a thought.

While I agree that something definitely needs to be done, I'm afraid what you're proposing will never happen. Primarily due to the fact that it's the polar opposite of their ultimate goal, which is to lower our wages here in the USA to equal those in the third world arena. Then and only then, they'll think about bringing jobs back to America.

IMO, there are really only a couple of ways to address this problem. One way would be to tax imports at a level high enough to offset the difference between the two economies and standards of living. I don't really favor this method because, (assuming those tax dollars are utilized to pay for things like unemployment insurance, social assistance and workforce re-training for those who lost their jobs.) it only addresses half the problem and it doesn't do anything to address the ongoing lack of jobs here at home. (in other words, re-train them for what?) With profit margins as high as they currently are, I'm afraid that most companies would just pay the tax, increase the price of the product yet again to cover the cost and go about their daily lives as usual.

The other way would be to pass new legislation mandating something to the effect that; "If you want to sell it here, build it here." Now in order to be fair, just the opposite would have to apply for american companies in that, if they way to sell their products in a foreign country, they should also be required to build those products there. In other words, it would have to be a "Build it where you sell it policy."

I think this is a much better answer because it helps to improve the lives of people everywhere. Under a "build it where you sell it" policy, job creation is commensurate to the demand of each country and the price of the product is dictated by what the local standard of living will allow.

Just my opinion.

reply to post by Wrabbit2000

Now? The Steel Belt is the Rust Belt. Indiana, Michigan, Ohio and PA....the heavy industrial manufacturing states..are "green" and in the balance, without work or ability to manufacture much, compared to decades past. Others still DO manufacture all that we've decided we're above doing ..and if we go isolationist, we'll be needing to learn how to do without things like building steel and other finished products we currently import for lack of domestic capability.

I agree with your assessment of the current situation. However isn't it a weakness and shouldn't we be trying to remedy it? I don't think it's impossible to re-build our manufacturing capacity, its a matter of giving businesses a reason to do so. I think some sort of limited protection introduced incrementally could do that.

The multi headed beast rising up out of the sea of mankind, causing craft to prosper. Who can make war with it? It will come speaking peace and prosperity for all of mankind but end in brutal dictatorship.