The Problem in America

Los Angeles, CA. Tents of homeless Californians fill the sidewalk. By Checubus @ Shutterstock.com

America has a problem. As my wife Debbie and I crisscrossed the country on our Harleys in the years after NAFTA was signed, we watched as the rural towns along our favorite routes emptied and crumbled. Thriving Main Streets were deserted, boarded up, and increasingly inhabited by the depressed and drug addicted.

We watched as the tables turned on America. As Chairman of Richard C. Young & Co., Ltd., one of Barron’s top 100 investment advisors in America, I have spent decades researching trade and foreign markets. I have had a front row seat to the abuses and manipulations suffered by America at the hands of its so-called “trading partners.” Americans aren’t alone though; globalism has hurt the entire West. As I recently walked through Paris, the same sad faces worn by the American Middle Class were on display among the city’s Yellow Vest protesters.

The citizens of the developed world are fighting a globalist system created by the elite to generate maximum profit taking, at all costs. Those costs include America’s industrial sector, the loss of the family unit, rampant opioid abuse, and decreasing global competitiveness.

Can the Pain be Stopped?

Recently you may have seen Johnny Burtka, executive director of The American Conservative, appear on Tucker Carlson Tonight. Carlson asked Burtka a simple question, “what would a conservative economic policy look like?” Burtka told the host, with Democrats abandoning their commitment to America’s middle class, it is the perfect time for conservatives “to fight for an economy that puts American citizens first, American families first, and American workers first.” Burtka has detailed a plan for doing just that in The American Conservative. He wrote:

When this magazine was founded in 2002, one of its explicit purposes was to “question the benefits and point to the pitfalls of the global free trade economy.” Why would we do this? Because “we believe conservatism to be the most natural political tendency, rooted in man’s taste for the familiar, for family, for faith in God.” And these deep conservative commitments, with the institutions that make them possible, can and do suffer when the market is allowed to permeate every facet of human life.

The answer to the question of industrial strategy cannot be summarized with a one-size-fits-all answer, as the free-traders would like us to think. Industrial strategy requires prudence and a clear sense of our vital national interests at a particular place in time. Sometimes that will mean that free trade or fair trade is the right strategy. At other times, protection might be the answer, especially in situations where we must maintain the independence of our manufacturing sector from rival powers, particularly for military supplies, as George Washington advised.