Why Nations Can’t Resist Austerity

Free trade, as practiced, is designed to destroy local autonomy by making nations dependent on foreign goods, and by removing decision making from democratically elected bodies and pushing them to transnational tribunals, secret courts and laws which cannot be changed without opting out from treaties, something most countries are reluctant to do, because they need the trade once they are enmeshed.

Keynes believed that most production of basics should be local: you should manufacture most of what your country needs, in your country. You should also, ideally, be able to feed your own population.

If you can’t make what you need or what your people (and more importantly, elites) really want, then you’re screwed. In the modern world you need hydrocarbons, you need food, and you need the machinery which turns hydrocarbons into the industrialized lifestyle.

Your prosperous citizens probably want food your country doesn’t produce: summer vegetables in winter, possibly meat you can’t provide in large enough quantities, and so on. They want electronic goods like smartphones that due to patents are quite expensive, and which you probably can’t make domestically.

Your elites want a vacation in Paris, a home in London, a German car, a French mistress, a New York Apartment, and a variety of luxuries that their own country doesn’t make.

If you want or need these things; if you do not have a taste for what your country can produce, in terms of basics and luxuries; if you do not ensure your country can feed itself, generate electricity and make cars or other forms of transit, you MUST do what those who control the trade regime want you to, or you will find yourself cut off from all these things.

Distributed production of necessities (which includes basic lifestyle goods and luxuries and machine goods) is anti-democratic and anti-national control in a world where the primary decision making units which are amenable to pressure from the commons, whether democratic or not, is exerted almost entirely on national and local units.

If you want to not do austerity when the Troika demands it, you must be in a position to tell the Troika to go stuff itself. If you have made yourself vulnerable, by losing your ability to feed yourself; by not developing local industry or exporting it; by your citizens acquiring a a perceived or real need for foreign goods; or by your local elites wanting to be “transnational elites” who want foreign luxuries and who feel as at home in Paris, New York and London as in their own country, then you cannot refuse to do what those who control the trade and international monetary regime tell you to do.

This is always the devil’s bargain offered in international regimes: “you can get all the stuff we have if only you open up”. It’s true, and for many countries it works for a while. The less you had, the shorter period it works for (countries who only have to be convinced to give up their ability to feed themselves by switching to cash crops and forcing subsistence farmers get a few years), but once you’ve given away your autonomy, the deal will, at some point, always turn bad. Those with the whip hand, will always eventually drive you down unless you have as much power over them as they have over you.

And knowing that your elites are no longer yours, but theirs, they will always find someone to do it for them, because your elites will be eager to sell you out for the flat in New York, the vacations in the south of France, the German automobile, the French mistress, the Swiss boarding school for their children, and for the fine luxury goods their own country cannot make.

If you get yourself into this position, you must overthrow your elites, and you must figure out how to become independent again. You must make deals with other blocs: the Russians and the Chinese, for the transition period, and figure out how to move your production of what matters back to local, and if you no longer can, how to feed yourself. You must inculcate in your elites and peoples a desire for what you make locally – local lovers, the food of your nation, the luxuries you can produce.

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