In this prior substack, it was shown how you can make even great nations collapse by restricting economic freedom. Rome was given as an example. The first 3 ways to make a nation fail were
government regulation of private enterprise
unsound (fiat) money, as issued by a central bank
government (centralized) spending
… but the 4th way is to engage in (crony) protectionism. In the New Deal, the FDR administration engaged in protectionism and even created the Blue Eagle emblem which firms posted at their place of business in order to signify loyalty to FDR and to the economic regulations foisted on the public during the New Deal:
Image Attribution
Page URL: https://loc.gov/pictures/resource/cph.3b50428/
Attribution: Date Created/Published: [Washington, D.C.] : [National Recovery Administration], [1933?]
-The modern version of such a “loyalty gesture” could be a firm forbidding customers who are not jabbed with the COVID jab, or a firm forbidding the use of fossil fuels, or promoting the trans movement, or what have you.
Once such loyalty is signalled to the existing regime, it is assumed that goodies are earmarked for you and that penalties are drawn up for your business rivals. When Conan the Barbarian (1982) came out as a movie starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Mongol general in it asks Conan what is best in life. Here was his response
To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women.
More recently, in what is undoubtedly a loyalty gesture, we have this barbaric quote from the same man who played Conan:
Screw your freedom!
But the zero-sum philosophy of crushing others is barbaric, and protectionism (payments to friends, punishments to foes or to those whom you are indifferent to) is hardly any more civilized than that.
“Stacked decks” only get society so far, and no further. Even recovering from a “stacked deck” economy takes time. Primarily because of the New Deal, it took 25 years for the Dow-Jones Industrial Price Index to return to where it was in 1929 (markings added):
One nation known for engaging in protectionism “to a fault” is China, both internationally and even intra-nationally (between the provinces). In 2008, China was responsible for at least 35% of all of the protectionism in the entire world.
A 2021 study of China’s domestic automobile market estimated that societal welfare dropped by an amount that was 41% of the protectionism money which had been spent locally in provinces.
That’s like destroying $41 of someone else’s money for every $100 you spend on protection of your cronies. That kind of behavior only gets you so far, and China’s growth has been slowing by so much that it is no longer possible to bring in new millions of people from rural areas into cities — as was possible in the past.
Protectionism, like other forms of “barbarianism,” is not good in the long term. Unlike Conan the Barbarian, we cannot succeed with the motto to “crush enemies.” Human economies do not work like that.
If people do not demand a retreat from protectionism, we’ll end up in a Great Reset (like with the attempted WHO and UN power grab) and the world will truly become a zero-sum game, like in other films such as Mad Max or The Hunger Games.
Life as we know it is at risk.
Reference
[Conan Movie] — Internet Movie Database. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0082198/characters/nm0000216
[China made at least 35% of the trade infractions back in 2008] — Trade Protectionism and Economic Growth: The Chinese Example. By Wei Li. https://www.globalasia.org/v4no3/feature/trade-protectionism-and-economic-growth-the-chinese-example_wei-li
[the loss in societal welfare is estimated to be 41% of the subsidies paid to local car makers] — Barwick, Panle Jia, Shengmao Cao, and Shanjun Li. 2021. "Local Protectionism, Market Structure, and Social Welfare: China's Automobile Market." American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, 13 (4): 112-51. https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/pol.20180513