[Politics] The Heritage Foundation

[Psychic Robot]

The Heritage Foundation is probably the most dangerous terrorist organization that America has ever faced. They are not terrorists in the sense that they are a physical threat to the American people, but they pose a mounting threat to the spirit and virtue of our people. Their political identity is one of perpetual selfishness and unabashed ingratitude, gutting from within the nation that has allowed them to achieve such heights of political influence and affluence. And the victims of their policies are you and I.

Who loses in their free trade policies? The factory worker and the small business owners, of course. The factor workers lose their jobs as the large corporations outsource their labor. The small business owners are forced to fight against unfair competitive standards in underdeveloped countries. What choice to they have? They either go out of business or lay off their workers or cut the wages and benefits. Who loses in all of this? The common man loses his job and his investments. He loses his well-being and restful nights. He loses his economic security so that the greed of the outsourcers can be satisfied with cheap labor. A blow to the American spine.

This alone could not damn them. Not entirely. Given their free market policies, a fellow conservative should find them in a positive light. Unfortunately, this radical anti-American organization fights tooth and nail against unions and minimum wage and labor laws and welfare. This wretched, greedy organization would no doubt delight in returning the poor to the nightmarish conditions of the Industrial Revolution, with men, women, and children working 12-hour days for little pay. Any man with sense can see how the large corporations--not the small businesses, which, again, are the steel rod of America's vertebral column, but the big, massive businesses ever-hungry for more money--would use economic hardships to pay a pittance to starving persons desperate for work. It has happened in the past. Sweatshops exist in the present. These things are real, and only a man with both eyes blind could not see them.

The labor laws preventing these conditions are bad, the Heritage Foundation says, and I agree. Government coercion is not the answer--the people must do what is right. But the unions, where workers demand better working conditions and wages? Those are wicked things, the Heritage Foundation says. And so is the welfare system. And so is any protection afforded to workers by any organization whatsoever. Then what happens to the poor? They die. They die a slow, agonizing death as they cannot afford their housing or heating or electricity or medical care. They die a nasty, painful, gruesome death in debt or in lack of necessities. The extremist corporatist Heritage Foundation wants to cut the strings of the social safety nets and grind the underclass into a fine paste to lubricate their corporate machinery. Yet another blow to the American spine.

And finally, their foreign policy. They divert funds away from the needy to fuel the vast American war machine, the military-industrial complex, that awful creature made of steel and oil and bombs. And then they have the audacity to put our troops into harm's way. They send our men and women to die overseas for the sake of their stocks, and they celebrate over glasses of champagne fermented in the blood of our sons and daughters. They demand ever-greater sacrifices from us and play their clumsy hands at chess, and when the pieces topple to the floor and America faces the consequences of their actions, who suffers? Who bleeds when this fanatical subversive thinktank's actions come back to haunt them? We do. A third blow to the American spine.

The Heritage Foundation is a terrorist organization in everything but outright deed: their words and works seek to undermine and destroy America, killing the common man so the uncommon men at the top will benefit. In the end, their goals result in a small minority of people controlling the nation with their economic might. That sounds fundamentally un-American to me.

[Maxus]

I love those groups. Americans for Prosperity? Only mean theirs and anyone who would buy into their takes-what-you can ideology.

Which goes back to the need for a free market to have a -few- controls on it. Because if you have a system where vicious cheating greedy bastards win, you end up creating or breeding REALLY vicious cheating greedy bastards.

[Psychic Robot]

Agreed. Though the one area I'm incredibly anti-freedom is the financial sector with banks and Wall Street. You know, what with the economic collapse of the United States and all.

[Juton]

I wish more conservatives would talk like this.

[Severian]

What about the poor workers in developing countries who need these jobs to put food on the table?

Oh, they aren't American, I guess their suffering doesn't matter.

[mean_liar]

The Fifth International is still in its embryonic stage.

[CatharzGodfoot]

The Fifth International is still in its embryonic stage.

That's a loooooooong gestation.

[Username17]

The existence of Trotskyism pretty much means that the Fifth or Sixth International is a joke term, even among communists. Leon Trotsky had some good ideas, he had some bad ideas, but mostly he had a basic tenet of not negotiating, which precluded the development of any real internationalism. That would have required coalition building, and Trotsky was a splitter, not a grouper.

Latin America is putting together a Leninist coalition with Venezuela at the head. That's a real thing. Chavez has made noises of calling the Bolivarian Revolution a "New International", so that could be a Fifth International starting this year. But you might also want to call it the sixth, depending on whether you want to count the various crap like the Communist Labor Party or the Larouchists who did in fact call their stuff the Fifth International already. But mostly it would end up being called the "New" International, because then you wouldn't have to have bullshit discussions about what pot smoking Trotskyites did in the 60s.

---

Anyway, on to the original discussion. Free Trade is ultimately something of a distraction. One country gains manufacturing jobs when another country can buy more of their goods, and the other country loses manufacturing jobs when the other country can sell more goods there. Ultimately, it's really something of a wash. There is some gains in overall efficiency as nations with more competitive advantage in one area specialize more in that area and of course more jobs in shipping, but the effects are ultimately pretty small.

If the United States went super protectionist it would sell a lot less goods overseas (costing jobs) and make a lot more of its own goods in-house (creating jobs), but the workforce is educated and adaptable enough that the changes would be minimal.

That being said, the Heritage Foundation is a terrorist threat to the United States. Not because of their support of deregulation of international trade (as that is largely neutral), but because of their support of deregulation of finance. When bankers take large santa sacks full of cash out of the economy there is no compensatory benefit. It's not like free trade in manufactured goods where jobs get shipped over seas but overseas jobs also get shipped here. No, this time it's just bankers taking large piles of real money out of circulation and the American taxpayer being asked to foot the bill at the end.

-Username17

[Juton]

What about the poor workers in developing countries who need these jobs to put food on the table?

Oh, they aren't American, I guess their suffering doesn't matter.

You must be trolling. If developing countries weren't interfered with by colonial powers they would generate wealth. All those people stuck at subsistence wages in sweatshops aren't creating any wealth in their country.

When a union job gets outsourced, its wages and benefits don't leave with it. You better believe that the CEO's don't take a pay cut though. It robs from the middle class, gives a few crumbs to the poor and the rest to the rich. This is what you'd fucking defend Severian? Fuck you.

[mean_liar]

You must be trolling. If developing countries weren't interfered with by colonial powers they would generate wealth.

Your assumptions about kleptocracy are very different from mine.

[Psychic Robot]

What about the poor workers in developing countries who need these jobs to put food on the table?

Oh, they aren't American, I guess their suffering doesn't matter.

Prime Directive.

[Severian]

What about the poor workers in developing countries who need these jobs to put food on the table?

Oh, they aren't American, I guess their suffering doesn't matter.

Prime Directive.

This is both incredibly callous and foolish. World Politics isn't an episode of fucking Star Trek. We're separated from people in developing countries by miles, not light years. We can't afford to ignore the most of the world.

[Psychic Robot]

This is both incredibly callous and foolish.

No, it's not. Send aid to them via private humanitarian organizations if you will, but don't muddle in their affairs. Ever heard of the term "banana republic"?

[K]

Basically everything the Heritage Foundation does is bad.

For example, they are paying one Supreme Court Justice 700K a year. This is the same Justice who has not spoken in court for the last five years.

I'm not saying that they are a bribing him. It just looks a lot like they are bribing him.

[Count Arioch the 28th]

What about the poor workers in developing countries who need these jobs to put food on the table?

Oh, they aren't American, I guess their suffering doesn't matter.

Prime Directive.

This is both incredibly callous and foolish. World Politics isn't an episode of fucking Star Trek. We're separated from people in developing countries by miles, not light years. We can't afford to ignore the most of the world.

To be honest with you, I've been keeping track of all the times America interfered with other nations. It doesn't appear we have a good track record, I think most of these nations might have been better off if we hadn't interefered. I'm just sayin'.

[Username17]

To be honest with you, I've been keeping track of all the times America interfered with other nations. It doesn't appear we have a good track record, I think most of these nations might have been better off if we hadn't interefered. I'm just sayin'.

Depends on what you mean by "interference". If you mean that we should stop having the CIA support the overthrow of democratically elected governments by brutal and incompetent dictators, then yes. That was a shitty idea in Iran, it was a shitty idea in Chile, it was a shitty idea in Ghana, and it was always a shitty idea every other time we did it. If you mean that we should stop invading countries on behalf of corporate or even criminal interests, yeah. That really hasn't worked out for us since the Korean fucking war.

But we "interfere" in countries all the time. And sometimes it's even positive. I'm fairly glad we have a military presence in Poland, since we managed to talk them down from invading Belarus. We don't always sell enough medicine to developing countries, but we do fucking sell them medicine. The alternative is often not getting any medicine at all. Isolating ourselves from the rest of the world wouldn't help our economy nor would it help anything else.

The CIA system of interference has been an unmitigated disaster for our own national interests and basic human rights around the world. But we also ship corn and urge restraint and blah blah blah. Fuck, our interference in the Egyptian uprising was extremely nice. We called up the head of the Egyptian military and made them promise that they weren't going to shoot anyone. That was awesome.

-Username17

[Count Arioch the 28th]

To be honest with you, I've been keeping track of all the times America interfered with other nations. It doesn't appear we have a good track record, I think most of these nations might have been better off if we hadn't interefered. I'm just sayin'.

Depends on what you mean by "interference". If you mean that we should stop having the CIA support the overthrow of democratically elected governments by brutal and incompetent dictators, then yes. That was a shitty idea in Iran, it was a shitty idea in Chile, it was a shitty idea in Ghana, and it was always a shitty idea every other time we did it. If you mean that we should stop invading countries on behalf of corporate or even criminal interests, yeah. That really hasn't worked out for us since the Korean fucking war.

Yeah, that's what I meant by "interference".

[mean_liar]

Basically everything the Heritage Foundation does is bad.

For example, they are paying one Supreme Court Justice 700K a year. This is the same Justice who has not spoken in court for the last five years.

I'm not saying that they are a bribing him. It just looks a lot like they are bribing him.

I believe that's $700k total from 2003 to 2007, paid to his wife.

I wouldn't NOT call it bribery until I actually saw her output. Being paid big bucks and not doing anything while your income isn't being disclosed is a sign of shenanigans.

[tzor]

This is both incredibly callous and foolish.

No it's not. The whole premise is based on the laws of unintended consequences. This is really the great wooden sabot that causes many well intentioned plans of aid to go horribly wrong.

One good example: The influx of food aid to a country can often cause the local price of foodstuff to go down; this in turn causes critical pressures against already struggling farmers; resulting in an ever greater dependence on donated foodstuffs in the future.

That said, the "prime directive" assumes in its raw form pure isolationism, which doesn't happen in the real world. However "non interference" in terms of nation building (whether from the CIA or from Google) is wrought with unintended consequences, in part because of the law of alernative motives. As President Reagan once said the scariest words in the English language are "I'm from the government and I'm here to help." Every time someone claims they are trying to help some other country they are really trying to help themselves.

[sabs]

I was in a PVP guild in WoW that used that as their battle cry when they rolled and ganked people. "We're from the Government, and we're here to help."

Course, if a CORPORATION, said "We're here to help" I'd be looking for the toxic chemicals and daggers in my back.

Government screws you while trying to help.
Corporations screw you while saying they want to help.

[Severian]

This is both incredibly callous and foolish.

No it's not. The whole premise is based on the laws of unintended consequences. This is really the great wooden sabot that causes many well intentioned plans of aid to go horribly wrong.

I never said anything about foreign aid and charity(giving direct charity to these countries should be reserved for disaster-relief type scenarios, in my opinion), or American governmental engineering. I'm talking about trade.

With some unfortunate exceptions, globalization and increased international trade has been overwhelmingly beneficial to developing countries. The world is doing quite well compared to how things were even forty years ago.

[Psychic Robot]

Here's the thing, dog. I'm ultra-nationalistic, which means that any policy that I support must help my countrymen. If ends up harming them, then it gets thrown into the wastebasket. When I see manufacturing plants close up shop to move down to Mexico and a poverty-perpetuating service economy slowly emerging from the death throes of the greatest country that God or man has ever seen, I see a problem.

Free trade with fully-developed countries is good. Free trade with underdeveloped countries that allows the ultra-wealthy to exploit cheap labor at the expense of paying a living wage to my hard-working countrymen is bad policy and morally unconscionable.

[Maj]

Service economy: why is it poverty perpetuating?

[Psychic Robot]

Because it usually pays poorly and is difficult to unionize. McDonald's, Walmart, Buger King, Jimmy John's--guess what would happen if workers at a store decided to unionize? They're all fired or the business is closed without a significant loss to the company.

[Count Arioch the 28th]

Because it usually pays poorly and is difficult to unionize. McDonald's, Walmart, Buger King, Jimmy John's--guess what would happen if workers at a store decided to unionize? They're all fired or the business is closed without a significant loss to the company.

Before anyone accuses of him of making stuff up, a Wal-Mart in Quebec went union. Wal-Mart literally chained the doors shut and abandoned the property.

Also, I've mentioned how Coors (Now Miller-Coors) shut down the Golden, CO plant and expanded the Elkton, VA plant because Golden went Union and Elkton voted it down. (At which point they fired nearly all the full-time workers at Elkton and replaced them with temps.)