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IF America were to halt all trade with foriegn governments. . .?
Nightshade
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Registered User regular
What's your idea of America if it was a completely secluded entity? It's not likely in the slightest. But how many of you think it would crash and burn and how many of you think it could sustain itself and grow stronger. I think it's an interesting idea and I want to know what the community thinks a nation without outside help would look like after a few years.
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Certain consumer goods would simply cost more because we have minimum wage laws and coal would shoot to the #1 fossil fuel used. Alaska would get tapped dry for cars, etc. while we figure out a petroleum replacement and... that's it?
The country's enormous, it's self sustainable.
Yeah, people tend to think "keeping up current consumption" when they think "sustainable". That's not really what it means at all.
Exactly. We can grow more than enough food for ourselves, but we'd barely be able to get it to people, let alone all our other products. I can't even predict exactly how the chaos would unfold but I'd expect lots of fire and shooting.
Let 'em eat fucking pineapples!
US exports to foreign countries as a percentage of US GDP has risen over time; presently it hovers around 12%. And people can't buy your stuff unless you buy their stuff. Manufacturing employment will certainly plunge.
One thing the US certainly lacks is the ability to supply all of its own oil in a hurry. Maybe some foresee relatively non-costly substitution to some other technology or resource but this will certainly take longer than a few years.
Yeah, standard of living would have to go down in many places. But it could be done. And eventually standard of living would improve and surpass current norm. (It would just take a while. 3-4 decades maybe).
I'm not certain the USA could grow enough food to sustain itself in the first place, in the absence of a mechanised farming infrastructure.
How dependable is the manufacturing sector on China and the like?
I think U.S. COULD sustain itself, by the way, it would just probably have to let go of concepts like "democracy" and become something radically different then it is now. And obviously, it could not be as powerful as it is now.
really though, "export" is what defines U.S. for me. I've been probably influenced more by American culture then any other one, and I haven't even stepped a foot on it's soil.
Well, we would really have to invest in public transit. And I don't think the current rail system runs on oil. I think its doable. But like has been said standard of living goes down. And we mean down. Like 1920's down. Not pretty and it would be that way for a while.
You may be mistaking "centrally planned" for "autarkic"; Cuba exports 16% of its GDP. Principal trade partners are the Netherlands and Canada.
Yeah, and it was pretty dependable on Soviet Union at one point.
I don't think there is any truly isolationist country in the world anymore. Even North Korea is depeding on world for say, food aid.
Yeah, but I think we can run an economy better than North "Wabbits is the cwaziest people" Korea.
Inside NK this is explained with the failing imperialist pigdogs paying tribute to NK out of fear, when food bags with English text on them are handed out. It's pretty sickening. But that's for another thread.
Politically isolationist, but not economically isolationist. There are some numbers here:
The low point is, of course, associated primarily with the Great Depression. Bretton Woods drove the rapid recovery and surge in postwar trade. But the pre-Depression world of the 1920s was very globalized in trade.
(and, of course, by "politically isolationist" we mean the Monroe Doctrine; it's only isolationist if you consider all of Latin America and the Philippines to be under the American sphere of influence by default.)
Cuba is hardly shut off from the world.
Better example would be North Korea.
I mean, we would probably hit self-sustainability eventually, after massive die-offs, but at that point we'd just be invaded anyway.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
For example, mid-Michigan's largest employer, Nexteer (formerly Delphi, formerly GM Steering Gear) would be closed if this happens. Thousands out of work in a county that averages some of the highest unemployment in a state that's half again the national unemployment levels.
At one point more Japanese cars than GM were being built inside US borders because most of GM's were coming from Mexico and Canada. Dunno where that stands now, but a lot of "foreign" cars are being built right here by the good old United Auto Workers. All those factories? Closed. Tens of thousands of workers right out of a job.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
Sure the U.S. can grow enough oranges and wheat to not-starve (maybe), but it would be better to trade that for delicious things that other people make.
DC, if we were to go the no trading with foreigners thing, the demands of all the stuff we would have to do to support basic living on a pretty taxed and poorly kept up infrastructure (as of right now), means that Microsoft would pretty shortly be out of business. Nobody needs a new OS or game system when the biggest concern is trying to get food to market, electricity to homes, or to keep the power grid (part of which runs through and off Canada, dang foreigners) from failing.
Apropos, from one of the world's most cited development economists:
I took the liberty of liming an important bit. But the broad thrust of it is that it gets complicated very fast.
The key to Yetter's analytical mistake is that countries are not price-taking entities embedded in a pure exchange economy, so mutually beneficial trade between vast numbers of people in two countries will have a sizable impact on other people uninvolved in the trade (plus other political and externality issues). These other issues don't have to be all negative, but it tends to be the case that some of them are.
The best argument against trade protection is IMO not that trade is always beneficial - it isn't - but that trade protection tends to be shoddily carried out; for every South Korea you have dozens of failed policies. Would the US Congress back policies that promote US wealth as a national entity, or to protect industries that should have collapsed a decade ago, in the states of powerful Senators or crucial for electoral victory?
I'm pretty sure we all acknowledge the lime of that line.
Population wise, what do you think the effects would be like? Would the change be so drastic that America's population would plummet due to an inability to support its behemoth size on the nation's resources alone?
And you notice that once we became a mechanized nation early in the 20th century, our population definitely went boom because everyone likes to celebrate an industrial age. . . .
Societies gravitating toward each other for support tends to be traumatic transition. For one thing, that means that people start becoming dependent on the whims of geographically local power players instead of a vast, and largely anonymous, market and welfare system... stuff like this is why tribal societies tend to remain stuck as a tribal society. It's fine and all when your communal co-ops are all liberal all-are-welcome societies, but this would hardly be the case for the vast majority of areas.
The alternative to an oil-driven industry is, of course, a coal-driven industry: so trains and rivers become the principal long-distance networks. The US lacks native oil but it doesn't lack native coal, so that's where it'll go. Solar and nuclear would have to wait until the country recovers from the oil shock.
I don't know how much oil there is total domestically (and I'd include untapped areas, offshore drilling and the strategic reserve for this hypothetical scenario) but considering that petroleum alternatives are already developed it's just a matter of using up those reserves until they get implemented. The problem with all the green petroleum alternatives is that they cost more than petroleum, if we had no choice then electric cars and bio-diesel trucks and farm machinery is exactly what'd we'd switch to.
There would be no government collapse, people wouldn't starve and I'd hazard a guess that the manufacturing jobs lost to no exports would simply transfer to manufacturing jobs making things we currently make in a sweatshop in Vietnam. Obviously all that crap will cost more now but people should still have jobs.
I am curious how biodiesel won't compound the food problem. The US is already a net food importer.
You don't think that the drastic increase in prices would push things people to a significantly increased amount of violence?
And how would we generate enough food for everyone? Im not poking holes for the hell of it, i want to know what motivates your comparitively optomistic few.
We export a lot, but if we stopped entirely and ate it ourselves, we'd still be importing food. Not to mention we have a much more diverse diet than we have production, which is the case in most countries, really. You can eat anything anywhere, but you can't grow it all there. To oversimplify: We produce way more corn than we eat, but we eat way more rice than we produce.
Too much of the politically-powerful sectors, pretty much. The US is almost certainly producing too much corn and wheat (corn is the largest agricultural product by net worth; wheat perhaps 7th; corn and wheat are both heavily subsidized).
But people consume more than corn and wheat. US consumers want a wide variety of products that come from all over the place, especially the tropics. Location-based classification contributes to this, somewhat - if you want Scottish cookies, it has to come from Scotland.
Most fish in the US is imported, as is most shellfish (although I'm not sure whether this is an artefact of classifying every other ship under the flag of a landlocked country). And, of course, consumers in the northern hemisphere are now used to getting seasonal produce all year round.
Australia itself has plenty of protectionist measures - agriculture and car manufacturing would be two broad examples. I bet that these measures are pretty popular with Australian voters too, or they wouldn't have managed to gather such long term government support.
When OPEC did the whole embargo thing a few decades back was there a significantly increased amount of violence? My knowledge of that event is that it simply was a huge hassle, but I don't think people started murdering each other in those huge lines at gas stations, the pictures I've seen all looked pretty orderly.
I just don't see people rioting because prices of bullshit they don't need go up. Historically people would riot over food shortages, when they were starving, sure. But the US can produce vastly more food than we need and as a bonus we'd be able to finally stop paying those ridiculous farm subsidies (since the prices would rise naturally).
Think about US corn subsidies, for instance... there's always a lot of rage in the food threads about corn syrup as a sugar substitute. Or using corn as filler in pet food. Or corn in livestock feed, which is its largest use.
Nonetheless corn subsidies are popular.
Definitely true? Because I was referring to drastic price increase in food. But then again, Americans do like crap they don't need. Maybe a lack of Ipods would cause riots too