by Barry King, 4 Sept. 2016

The sad thing about the high cost of the appetite of American lawyers for their made-in-the-USA multi-million dollar "liability" lawsuit settlements, is that the true cost of that addiction, to Americans and to the world, lasts for decades after the fact.

The short list of "made in the USA" products that can be found now in Africa includes most of the airplanes that I fly, which were built by Cessna in Wichita, Kansas. But most of those, like most airplanes worldwide, are more than 30 years old.

This year we reach the 30th anniversary of the year (1986) when greedy lawyers and unions, and their political allies in the USA, accomplished what the Germans and Japanese could not do in WW2, and the Russians could not do in the cold war. The American left's raid against Americans managed to shut down light aircraft production in the USA, and to keep it shut down for the 12-year period 1986-1998. That's how long it took to get the barely-adequate reforms into place.

So we now enter a 12-year period in which, in the market segment for 30-year-old light aircraft, there will be essentially no American options available. And Cessna's discovery that its airplanes can be built under license in China for half the cost, will not be reversed.

The story highlights the schizophrenic delusions of those who do not realize that by opposing the "export of American jobs" on the one hand, while with the other hand promoting hatred, lawsuits, and regulation against corporations and banks, they are at cross-purposes against themselves. Protecting American jobs can't be done without protecting to some extent the corporations and banks that create those jobs - as Democrats realized when (circa 2008) they needed to bail out banks and car companies which were unionized and "too big to fail", at taxpayer expense, in order to save their own skins, at taxpayer expense, via saving their corporate, union and law-firm sponsors.

Then, as soon as those companies proved able to remain afloat for a while, rank-and-file Democrats returned to their efforts to sink them and other American companies with international interests, by slander, lawsuits, taxation, and regulation.

You might call the strategy "protectionism plus" meaning something like national-socialist protectionism, plus national-socialist suicide.

Future historians will marvel at this: that in 2016, so late in the era of globalization, there appeared three finalists in the race for POTUS, who were ALL PROTECTIONISTS! The last two men standing were both national socialist protectionists (although one of them was a bit reluctant to admit it) as opposed to international socialist protectionists, which means that, ideologically, in the struggle between Germany and Russia during WW2, they would have aligned more with the German point of view.

One of them imagined building a wall between the US and Mexico with Mexican support, much as, post WW2, the Russians and East Germans agreed on the building of a wall between east and west Berlin. That's what protectionists of both the left and the right do: they build walls, using both bricks and lawyers.

I have a tactical recommendation for American protectionists of both the left and the right: if you are really unwilling to abandon protectionism as a broad strategy, try this as a tactic: take your whole country and relocate it to the planet Mars. By using interplanetary space as your "wall" you may be able to manage a century of "protecting Martian jobs". After that, of course, cheaper communications, interplanetary travel, and popular demand will make that wall crumble like all the others, but hey, you might be able to get a hundred miserable Luddite years out of it.

Or, check out the Christian version of the crumbling of walls in the second chapter of Acts, as a possible model for continued life on planet earth.