Comment by flanked-evergl
15 hours ago
The wages of the West's deliberate deindustrialization and deliberate dependence on Asian manufacturing.
30 refineries were closed in Europe in the past 15 years about, and that is just a small example of a pathological situation.
I was reading that oil from the Middle East had to go to South Korea to be refined before being shipped as diesel to Australia.
Cost of hiring an oil tanker has ballooned massively (like 40 fold) since America decided to bomb its supply chain, so these long supply chains are massively expensive.
The Republican Party has decided that running a world of global free trade was no longer desired. America wont pay the price for another decade or two, but it will.
Europeans can lament the choices the Americans made all day, but Europeans deliberately chose over dependency on the Americans, Chinese and Russians.
Europe can easily be more dominant than the Americans if we chose it.
Well capitalism is responsible for that.
I think in a few hundred years we'll have learnt what a disgusting, poisonous system it is.
I think in a few hundred years the very small number of survivors of humanity will be living in caves and huts in the high Arctic and in a greening slowly-reafforesting Antarctic, they'll be hunter-gatherers with maybe some simple small-scale unmechanised agriculture, and they won't have money. Maybe a barter system for a few.
Among the many other things they won't have is an economic model.
Europeans and Americans choose to make things unsustainable and unprofitable to do in Europe, and chose to make it possible to import things cheaply from places like China and India who use slave labour and destroy the environment … and then blame Capitalism.
As you like … but blaming capitalism is not going to bring industry back, and it won't stop China from using slave labour or India from using their rivers as landfills.