The Virginia Society for the Preservation and Appreciation of High-Quality Posts

[Epaminondas]

Yankee on a roll this week.

Why doesn’t their “alternative” be coming here to employ in America?

In some cases, lack of natural resources or excessive government regulations can result in offshoring of jobs. It isn't always possible to actually bring the jobs to the US, but ideally that's exactly what they'll do. The US offshores far too many jobs to China that could be American jobs.

In most cases though, it is profit margins. Free trade encourages slave labor, because it enables production to flow to the lowest labor cost area and thus boost profit margins. Though it isn't emphasized when teaching about the Civil War period, but Republicans often made the connection between the two back then. Rome also harvested wealth via slave labor and sent it east to buy silks and other luxury goods, enriching China and Persia and leaving Europe in grinding poverty for centuries of the dark ages.  

Look I am for capitalism and a competitive market, but I am not in favor of completely unrestrained business or Laissez Faire. As a conservative, the way I see it is, unrestrained profit motive and creative destruction will destroy your community, depress religious affiliation, spread families across the county and disrupt family support networks. Removing industry leads to depressed wages, lower tax revenues for schools in those communites, rising crime, drug use, divorce and suicide rates. The dominant source of income becomes government jobs and government programs and the family is more broken. For years this has been happening and Conservative's would answer back that people should rely on their family/church for assistance instead of the government. The problem is those institutions have been decimated by outsourcing and creative destruction.

You cannot successfully merge Lassiez Faire with Conservatism because conservatism is about preservation of societal institutions (marriage, family, tradition, and yes in our case Freedom). Unrestrained profit motive wrecks those and leaves people dependent on government, the exact opposite of what conservatism would want. The reason why the GOP is always at war with itself is because you have vast amounts of money supporting lassiez faire economics, meanwhile that same force has wrecked the American heartland and ironically created more American Socialists out of despair than the Soviet Union could in 75 years of subversion and influence.

It doesn't require socialism, it requires moderating the excesses of creative destruction and at least some level of economic nationalism to redirect the benefit of capitalism towards that of the nation and its people. Sort of a combination of a civil and economic nationalism in that sense.

The end result of free trade is ultimately either New Dealer redistribution, taxing the profits of the trade to redistribute or invest. This can be pushed to the socialist extreme as well.

The other alternative is to restrict the trade through some kind of protectionism and try to rebuild economic stability so the family and communities can recover their cohesiveness.

Republicans are going to have to decide which one is more acceptable and compatible with Conservatism generally. Is the opposition to gov't dependence and pro-family/religion more important, or is unrestrained profit more important.

(from Trump orders U.S. companies to "start looking for alternatives" to China)

[Epaminondas]

Guns did not become a cultural talisman for white grievances until the early 1990s.

The National Rifle Association was once, as its name suggested, a very boring, obscure organization for hunting and sport shooters. Its primary purpose was teaching gun safety and marksmanship. It never opposed gun control, particularly of handguns which were regarded as outside its purview and associated with urban crime.

Wayne LaPierre is the one who really transformed the group into a Republican mouthpiece and haven for black helicopter conspiracy theorists.