To the extent that it oversees or nudges the economy, how much does the U.S. government value jobs for Americans?
Historically, that value has had to compete with other values—which is one reason we have a crisis in job creation now. That crisis has deep roots; it started a long time before Obama, even a long time before 2007. It illustrates an aspect of the price Americans pay for living in a country with aspirations to empire.
Here’s how. In 1984 Clyde Prestowitz, author of The Betrayal of American Prosperity, served on a task force charged by the Reagan administration with resolving trade problems with Japan, where the U.S. maintained (and still maintains) military bases decades after the close of World War II. The task force wanted to confront the Japanese about unfair trade practices such as product dumping and government subsidizing of firms that competed with unsubsidized American companies.
“In particular,” Prestowitz explains, “the issue of trade in semiconductors, a critical defense industry, remained problematic. While access to the Japanese market continued to be limited and patent and copyright protection difficult to assure, Japanese producers were, with government backing, aggressively dumping chips in the U.S. market, and had attained a more than 60 percent share.”
But when he and another trade representative asked the government to put pressure on the Japanese to level the playing field, Prestowitz writes, “…Assistant National Security Advisor Gaston Sigur slapped the arm of his chair and said: ‘We must have those bases. Now that’s the bottom line.'”
Though there had been “no indication of any risk of our losing access to the bases,” Prestowitz says, the government would not let the task force get tough with the Japanese. The result? “Eventually a number of U.S. chip makers closed up shop, and more than 100,000 Silicon Valley workers lost their jobs. Even more significant, the United States lost technological leadership in production of several important kinds of semiconductor.”
Which would Americans rather be: citizens of an empire, grasping for job security in an economy dominated by a military-industrial complex, or people working in private-sector enterprises that will provide them with a reasonable living as they contribute to a peaceful society?”
