It isn't the fact of not being connected to the grid, it's watching as they reap our rewards by turning us into a third world country. Wages are either falling or our buying power is shrinking. If we have to be connected to the grid, then lets see the prices of food, oil and shelter drop also.
It is obvious, that the only ones who want to put the bad idea crowd on an island are those who are profitting off of the rest of us.
Knocking it? Not at all, because I'm not going to stop or change it. Just adding a human side to the figures that have us paying for everything we worked for.
I'm not disagreeing with you or saying that where the US has moved is good for the American people. I am saying that economically the US had no choice but to push for global trade because the world was an economic wreck post WWII while the US had an enormously powerful industrial engine that it had to either quickly convert to peacetime use or dismantle it at the expense of millions of jobs.
IN the decades after WWII, the US industrial and agricultural machine gave the US an economic advantage that no other country could match. Ironically, it was Japan and Germany, who the US most helped recover from WWII that fared the best as the US taught them how to rebuild their economies.
As other economies grew, they wanted a piece of the action as well and it became impossible to exclude them. More recently, it has been American consumer spending and American industrial and agricultural expertise that has fueled the growth of the developing world.
WWII was a pivotal point in the development of the western economic system and it made the US so much more powerful than any other country that it became impossible for it to be sustained without spreading the wealth that the US created to other countries.
The human cost has come in the developed countries esp. in Europe and Japan which made enormous social promises as they rebuilt their societies; it is now apparent that those promises cannot be kept because those countries are not creating enough wealth to support the social systems that were created.
The US is only slightly better off because we didn't make promises that were near as large and because private enterprise took greater responsibility for providing those benefits than did government.
The flip side is that life really is better for many of the poorest of the poor. While the standard of living in many parts of the world is still horrid by western standards, there are many people in the world who are better off today than they or their families were 20 years ago.
Being a part of the global economy has certainly been costly to a lot of Americans but few people consider what would have happened if the US had chosen economic isolationism.
It makes it pretty hard to understand why Twinkies aren't made anymore and why it is so difficult to push up US wages without understanding these dynamics.
