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America walked away from WW2 as the economic superpower of the world. No other nation was even close. We had the bomb and we ran the show.
Nations devastated by their proximity to the conflict basically started from scratch.
When I was a kid in the 50s the only thing that came out of Japan was junk. Few here might remember a "Put Put Boat" A small toy that had a tiny boiler. You put a sliver of Sterno called Canned Heat (remember the band by that name) under the boiler and it sucked water into two small tubes and heated it to a boil and shot it out the same tubes. The force of the steam drove the boat forward.
Japanese products were all considered throw away toys until Honda brought his tiny motorcycles into the US in the late 50s. Attention to quality and a remarkably effective marketing policy, changed the perception of Japanese products.
The Arab oil embargo and the electronics industry, as well as the Japanese work ethic and smart management that worked hand in hand with labor, reversed the positions of only two decades earlier and our lack of pride in our workforce and dedication to products that understood the old adage "the customer is always right" became lost in the myriad levels of US corporate conflict.
Lawyers and accountants became the controlling forces in corporate hierarchies, while the simple worker was replaced by more and more of the smart machine that replaced manual labor. Make money, dont get sued, or thrown in jail.
Japanese workforces matured and their virtually non existent older generation (the ones killed in WW2) was replaced by a newer older generation. They shipped them overseas for retirement as the wages became more on par with US wages. Property values skyrocketed.
Now Japan and Germany face situations similar to the US. They lost the war, rose from the ashes, produced and economic miracle only to become affluent and economically lethargic.
Here comes China, Korea, Taiwan, and India, plus many other poor countries. Life expectancies are short so retirement security is a non issue. Labor is cheap because people are poor as dirt, and will work for wages no one in the affluent countries would tolerate.
It's happened before. Go back 2000 years and read about the decline of the Roman empire. China threw out the English right after the 20th century began, and massacred the heroin addicts to the tune of 20 million. They had plenty of people and could not afford to attempt rehabilitation.
Stalin and the Russians ground Hitler to dust with the blood of tens of millions of Russian lives. people who only a generation before had be peasants, little more than property like the serfs of feudal times in Europe.
We like to hate the big guns in the US, we make them out to be the pariahs of society.
If you were running a major corporation and you saw your product demand drop off due to foreign competition, what would you do?
Fall on your sword of nationalism, and loose your millions of shareholders retirement funds in an example of sheer stupidity, or do what you have to do to survive.
International economics is a fairly new phenomenon. We used to have no competition, now we can't compete. Like the old picture of the fat British merchant sitting next to the starving Chinese peasant before the Boxer rebellion, we have become irrelevant due to our disregard for the plight of others.
What do we do to fix the problem?
First, as Christ as explained we have to really look inside ourselves.
Personally I think it will be a miracle if we succeed. I can't think of a single example of a great civilization that imploded and recovered. Maybe I haven't thought about it enough.
Great civilizations of the past have inevitably suffered from their own success. The US is presently on a course to spend all of the accumulated wealth we have spent 400 years carefully building. It will either bankrupt us or make our money worthless, two roads to the same consequence.
The Arabs are depleting a finite reserve of oil. What do they do when it is gone?
What does the world do when cheap energy is gone, although we have learned that it's not as cheap as we once thought, if the potential environmental consequences actually are as serious as many think.
Our only chance is through innovation and focusing our economic energies on investments that provide us with real long term benefits. I fear the Democratic system of government is ill equipped to compete with other forms of govt that do not have to think short term until the next election, but can plan forward in a generational timeline and plan appropriately. These same governements have the distinct advantage of carefully examining our example and cherry pciking the good parts and eliminating the bad parts.
I understood this when I was 18, 40 years ago.
At age 50 I discovered a potential solution to a significant portion of the present problem, a device that offers significant improvement in many different forms of energy storage and application.
Like Casandra the priestess of Troy, no one will listen, the Great Wooden Horse is within the gates, I am screaming, "Beware of the Greeks bearing Gifts". My words are ignored in the drinking and celebration. The next day our world is gone.
The Aztec calendar predicts the end of the world as we know it on December 21, 2012.
Thats the day my first Social Security check is due.
I am actually glad to think I dont have too much longer to live on this planet. Watching a country that I truly love, and that my family has spent blood to build and protect, decline into the all too familiar abyss of a historical footnote is something I would rather not experience.
What will happen to oil prices if $%^&* starts a war with $%^&*.
It could be the best thing that ever happend to us, waking us up to the fact that we are the problem, and only we can effect a solution.
reagrds
Mech
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