Great Walls

I've looked at the historical record and seen that every nation that successfully industrialized did it behind tariff walls. This includes South Korea and Mexico.

My second take is that because the financial markets are hopelessly corrupt, shortsighted, and technologically illiterate, they are unable to properly value the infrastructure of industrialization. When financialization first started, there were a few protests at the ability of real scoundrels to seize and then cash in on assets they rarely understood, who in the process of their plunder, squandered a system of wealth creation that had taken decades to create. They pissed away USA's industrial crown jewels for a tiny fraction of what they were worth with their get-rich-quick schemes. These protests probably crested with Oliver Stone's movie Wall Street — an effort so excellent, I suspect Stone didn't even know how good it was.

Along with the plunder came the justifications for why this did not matter. Around here, these loony economic expressions for how the world should work, but doesn't, are lumped under the garbage pile we call neoliberalism. And in the world of the neoliberals, there is no greater sin than "protectionism." 

People are confused about what manufacturing is. Even Carter. His moral equivalent of war amounted to nothing like retooling to meet the demands of WWII. USA ought to do this again. The GND should be like a Marshall Plan for ourselves.

I acknowledge that nation-states are pushing up against their limits these days. These changes are associated with the basis on which an appeal for allegiance can be made, especially with the need to find a basis of allegiance that can earn loyalty over larger areas from more numerous groups of people. In the early Middle Ages when there had been no state and no public authority, political organization had been the feudal system which was held together by obligations of personal fealty among a small number of people. With the reappearance of the state and of public authority, new patterns of political behavior were organized in what is called the "feudal monarchy." This allowed the state to reappear for the first time since the collapse of Charlemagne's Empire in the 9th century, but with restricted allegiance to a relatively small number of persons over a relatively small area. The development of weapons and the steady improvement of transportation and communication made it possible to compel obedience over wider areas, and made it necessary to base allegiance on something wider than personal fealty to a feudal monarch. Therefore the feudal monarchy was replaced by the dynastic monarchy. In this system subjects owed allegiance to a royal family, although the real basis of the dynasty rested on the loyalty of a professional army of pikemen and musketeers.

The shift from the professional army of mercenaries to the mass army of citizens, along with other factors acting on other levels of culture, made it necessary to broaden the basis of allegiance once again after 1800. The new basis was nationalism, and gave rise to the nation-state as the typical political unit of the 19th century. This shift was not possible for the larger dynastic states which ruled over many different national and language groups. by the year 1900 three old dynastic monarchies were being threatened with disintegration by the rising tide of nationalistic agitation. The Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Ottoman Empire, and the Russian Empire of the Romanovs, did disintegrate as a consequence of the defeat of WWI. But the smaller territorial units which replaced them, states like Poland, Czechoslovakia, or Lithuania, organized mostly on the basis of language, may have reflected well enough the nationalistic sentiments of the 19th century, but they reflected very insufficiently the development in weapons (especially WMD), communications, transportation, and economics in the 20th century. By the middle of the 20th century these developments were reaching a point where states which could produce the latest instruments of coercion were in a position to compel obedience over areas much larger than those occupied by peoples sharing a language or a sentiment of belonging together. As early as 1940 it began to appear that some new basis more continental in scope must be found for the new superstates being born. This new basis was the 20th century's ideological bloc. At the same time the shift from citizen weapons to professional specialist weapons pushed politics away from democratic to authoritarian forms.

The newest concept, not yet generally recognized and accepted, is that of the "civilizational state". (If JKG the First did not like "stagflation," then I can dislike the word "civilizational".) Not only are Russia, China, and India countries but separate civilizations. The latter two are new in that these possess new instrumentalities of investment that foster an economy of increasing returns. Russia was ready to reboot itself in a manner similar to the way the West has done, but this process has been disrupted. Nonetheless these three have one thing in common, an adversarial relationship with the West. BRICS is the current instrumentality that expresses this emerging cohesion.