Not brilliant, I'm afraid. Eventually Walmart would move its headquarters and incorporate in Asia. Their monoploy would flourish and we'd just be exporting our greed to every part of the world. The world economy would be in the hands of the corporate triad: Sony, Toyota, and Walmart. Together they'd corner the markets in intellectual property, manufacturing, and retail, and after that what's left but agriculture and mining? The only way the US economy would survive in that situation would be to rescind all environmental protection laws and harvest North America's natural resources for all they're worth just to resolve the widening trade deficit.
We'd be better off printing billions of $100 bills and giving them to our foreign debtors, because despite what that would do to the value of our currency at least those countries would have the money to buy stuff that we could export. The wealth of the United States doesn't lie in its legal tender or its natural resources, but in its human resources. We give the world free money, they use that money to buy our services and products, and everyone is richer for it. That's not a perfect solution either, but it's better than selling our jobs and corporations to the highest bidders overseas.
In short, the best way to close the trade gap isn't to import less but to export more.
|