Let’s say you wanted to take over the world. Let’s say your military technology is not up to snuff compared to the major parts of the world you want to take over. What are your other options?
Well, if you’re not strong enough to defeat an opponent in direct combat you can always resort to poison. How do you poison a country? How do you poison an entire culture.
We (The West) did poison a culture at one point. And when I say “we” I really mean the East India Company. The culture I’m referring to is China in the late 1800’s. They were consuming silver, trading it for tea and ceramics, at an alarming rate, and the East India Company (the world’s first corporation) wanted a way to get that silver back out of China and into the world market (ie: their pockets).
So they poisoned them. They used opium. The poppies were grown in India (then controlled by Britain) and funnelled in through Canton. Opium was to late 19th century China was cheese burgers are to modern America. Readily available and subversively damaging.
Opium is illegal in America, and most other western nations. So what’s the next best thing? Maybe cheap crap?
Maybe you can manufacture everything America manufactures, but you can do it for cheaper because you enslave your citizens and have virtually no safety regulation. Then the Americans will buy your cheap crap because it looks the same as the stuff they make, but it’s 1/3 the price (and contains lead and mercury, but who cares? It’s 1/3 the price.)
And here’s the rub. We keep giving them money for this crap that we’re only addicted to because it’s cheap. They don’t give us money for anything. They loan us money that we have to pay back with interest. We keep giving them money. They don’t give us money. Do you know math? Have you been to a school? Eventually we aren’t going to have the money, but we’re still going to want the crap. What does a drug dealer do when you want his crap but don’t have the money? He finds some “other” way for you to pay for your fix.
Then he’s no longer your drug dealer. He’s your pimp. What’s going to happen when our Chinese drug dealer becomes our Chinese pimp? I don’t know, readers, but it’s going to take a lot of cheeseburgers to wash away that shame. Which is fortunate, because the only jobs left in America by that time will involve cheeseburgers.
How can we stop this madness? We can buy American. That’s a cliché by this point, as America doesn’t really produce anything anymore. And if we did the Chinese crap would still be 1/3 the price so you’d just buy that.
We could try to compete with their pricing, but that involves you working in a factory 16 hours a day for $60 a month. Fun times.
The best option is probably to impose tariffs on imports from countries that have an uneven trade ratio with us. But that hurts the bottom line of the companies who import those goods. And rich people own those companies. And the only thing America hates more than giving health care to poor people is not whoring itself out to rich people.