by Roger Erickson
This article was originally published in MikeNormanEconomics.blogspot.in
Regulatory policy too.
Does the following say it all? Or what?
“The [imported fruit] that’s coming in from China is not subject to the kind of regulation that American food is,” said Diane Kearns, a fifth-generation farmer and president of Fruit Hill Orchards, one of Virginia’s largest apple growers with nearly 3,000 acres. “People are being priced out of the business. You can’t make money at it anymore.”Free trade? That just means the large-scale merchants are in control of tax, regulatory, tariff and public spending policy.
Worse, merchants may have no country, but their TBTF bankers don’t even have a conscience … just a double-entry accounting ledger with no place to enter either fiat OR return-on-coordination. Plus, their purchased politicians apparently don’t know about evolution, adaptation, recombination or invention either. In fact, they seem incapable of grasping the difference between static and dynamic value. Otherwise, all our merchants, bankers and politicians would actually have a country, and let us consume all that it can produce too.
Adding $500 million in overhead costs ONLY to domestic suppliers of food may be yet another demand leakage, especially if most of the test & monitoring equipment comes via large importers using yet another source free from regulation, taxes or tariffs. One can imagine a future where even blonde American’s can only follow looped instructions to “breathe-in, breathe-out” by using canned air imported from China, along with the imported audio equipment!
If you want to track families, clans or classes over-taxing and under-funding perceived competitors, just look for the phrase “sold out to larger [merchant] operations.”
What about that joke where mother’s milk, if sold in any other container, couldn’t be legally transported across state lines? Yet it is, daily, whenever a large enough merchant wants it imported from China or elsewhere, which is exactly what Nestle was criticized for doing with powdered baby formula. What’s in YOUR powdered milk? Merchantamine?
The darkest joke yet may be a future image of people jailed for pissing untested urine into the wind. You’ll only be allowed to have a certified robot do that for you, using certified urine – both available only from a certain large merchant.
Don’t like it? Then go buy your OWN Congressperson! Either that, or apply some moral persuasion to the ones already bought & sold by our existing merchants. Better act quick, before the Free Trade crusade morphs into Free Politics.
Every simplistic push for “One Size Won’t Fit All” regulation invariably & mistakenly favors the largest merchants. Over time, cultures that survive are those that wake up in time, and revert to distributed, “One Agile Fits Small” resiliency. Better speak up now, and vote with your feet, or acquire a taste for whatever roadkill dregs the large merchants choose to put on your shrinking menu choices.
