Four Nerds

Hey, here's a thought. Let's close the borders completely. No one goes in, no one goes out. You want to honeymoon at Niagara Falls? You'd better stay on this side. Want to take a cruise? It's called the Staten Island Ferry. Lovely ride.

Here's the thing. Our economy is utterly dependent on trade with foreign countries. Sure, we ship jobs over to China and India, but we also ship Coca Cola, Chevy's and McDonalds over there as well. Closing all trade with other nations is going to cripple out economy. If we decide not to sell our Dell Computers to say, China, then someone else will. Sony, Toshiba, The European Union.

Globalization is happening whether we like it or not. There’s no stopping it now, and you’re either on the boat or left back on shore. The economy is changing, just like it always has since the first Industrial Revolution. People are going to lose jobs, just like they always have. Before you were replaced by a machine, now you are being replaced by cheap foreign labor. People are going to be hurt and destroyed by globalization. I think if you fight it, you end up getting hurt even more.

If you want people to keep buying American, I have a few suggestions. The key to American success over the years has been our ingenuity. And right now our ingenuity is being replaced with complacency. So, how do we keep the edge?

One, put more money into education. Smart people come up with smart ideas. We’re frickin’ morons in this country. It’s not a question of how the money is allocated or whether we need a Department of Education. It’s gone way past that. If we had enough cash to spread around to all the schools, it wouldn't matter if it was poorly managed or not. Just look at the Pentagon. They're poorly managed but they work well because they have a fuckload of money. You give the schools all the money they need, then work on making it more efficient.

It’s like every time the subject of increasing spending on education comes up, Congress acts like they’re going to the dentist. They know they gotta, but they don’t wanna, and man I hate this, and whine and bitch and stall. It’s the teacher’s fault, it’s the Department of Education’s fault, it’s the parent’s fault. Blame, blame, pass the buck. Oh wait; there are no bucks to pass.

My second suggestion is to ease up on visas for foreign students. Ever since 9-11, it’s become damn near impossible for foreign college students to come here and get an education. It seems to me that if some genius kid in Beijing gets a chance to study in a Western school, he might try here in America. We’ve got some pretty damn good schools. But, if we don’t let him come, I don’t think he’s going to just go off some where and sulk. No, I think he’ll go to Europe.

It doesn’t end with them just coming here and getting that post graduate degree. What good is it to us to educate these kids and then just ship ‘em back home? No, you need to keep them here. Make a rule that says if you come here and get a Master’s degree or a doctorate, then you get a visa. Stay here and work for us. Sure, he might take a job that otherwise might have gone to an American, but his ingenuity could launch a new industry which could create thousands of jobs. Wouldn;t it be nice if those jobs were here? We’re a nation of immigrants, and our genius lies there. You know why we have a space program? Answer: German rocket scientists.

Also, if you want us to buy American, give us a quality product. Take the American auto industry. It amazes me how dumb they are. Right now GM is on the verge of bankruptcy. Ford is laying off people left and right. Why? Because they are making the same mistakes over and over again. During the boom years of the 90s and even into the 2000’s, these guys made a fortune off of the SUV craze that seemed to grip the country. People didn’t care that their Explorer got 2 miles per gallon.

Now here we are in 2006. Gas is at record highs. There’s a crisis in the Middle East. People can’t afford gas. And Ford and GM are wondering why they aren’t moving those Explorers and Hummers. The same thing happened in the ‘70s. People aren’t going to buy a gas guzzling Ford SUV when they can get a Honda SUV that gets twice the gas mileage. It’s that simple. Why is it that Japanese automakers have consistently been able to stay ahead of us when it comes to making fuel efficient cars?

Ford is actually developing a hybrid SUV that partially runs off of ethanol. I applaud Ford for finally getting their act together and trying to move in new directions. But make it something that actually makes a difference in the long run. Right now, producing ethanol requires the burning of more fossil fuels than would be used if we just had gas cars. So, in the long run, the cost of those fossil fuels is still going to be an issue when it comes to the bottom line. Whether you burn the fossil fuels at the ethanol plant or in my engine, either way it’s going to show up at the pump. I think the difference is that instead of needing oil; they can use coal, which we have a fuckload of.

Anyway, there’s a lot of stuff we could be doing. Shutting down won’t help. Some people say that George Washington wanted America to be an isolationist country and we should go back to that way. Well, back then we were a tiny, insignificant little agrarian country. Now we are the most powerful nation on Earth. You can’t shut out the rest of the world without shutting our hand in the door.