Another good example of Graybill’s Law, written in the 1880s and massively true now.
= = = = = START GRAYBILL:
Thus the people of unprotected countries are forced into the business of transportation, merchandising, law, the church, or farming.
[DOES THIS SOUND FAMILIAR?]
This policy narrows and restricts the ordinary opportunities of men, and all pursuits are overdone, wages and returns are reduced, and poverty must and does ensue as the lot of the toiling millions.
Hence those diversified talents with which men are endowed are not developed but remain latent and unused, an incalculable detriment to the prosperity of their respective countries.
The lawyer class and the trading class absorb the concentrated benefits of such nations, live well, are educated, and generally are enriched at the expense of the uneducated classes.
= = = = = END GRAYBILL.
The narrowing down even applies to the ways of doing international trade. Before we turned into an imperialist WallStreetist monster, our auto companies had many different approaches to operating abroad, but NONE OF THEM OFFSHORED AMERICAN PRODUCTION and none used trade to DESTROY AMERICAN WORKERS.
GM was connected with independent companies like Vauxhall in England and Opel in Germany and Holden in Australia. These companies made their own cars with their own brands, which occasionally had a family resemblance to GM but never shared parts or bought parts from here.
Ford had semi-independent companies always named Ford, which made their own cars, sometimes identical and sometimes related, and sometimes licensed but didn’t buy US engines.
Hudson had large factories in Canada and England which built their own cars identical to US Hudsons, but didn’t buy any parts from US. All labor and suppliers were local,
Here the Canadian factory resumes production after WW2 with a strictly standard stepdown:
Willys had the widest reach and widest variation, with 32 international relatives, many in Africa and Asia. Argentina and Brazil were branches of the US company, making derivatives of the Aero and versions of the Jeep line, but rarely identical. Some bought parts from Toledo and assembled there. Some (like Mahindra in India) were independent firms building Jeeps with their own parts and only paying royalties to Toledo. In 1969 just before Kaiser sold Willys to AMC, 1/3 of its total profits were from those royalties.
Varied skills and varied approaches. NONE of the foreign firms made cars that were meant to REPLACE American workers. ALL focused on their own countries, paying their own workers to make cars that locals could buy.
Now all foreign branches are using local labor to REPLACE American labor, simply because it’s cheaper and leaves more money to enrich the CEO and Larry Fink.
Polistra's Mill 