Free Enterprise: For Whom the Bell Tolls

I read something this morning that made me want to throw up just a little bit in my mouth. The sad thing is that the point of the article I refer to was one that I would otherwise agree with. It's just that there's a certain self pitying, xenophobic tangent in which the author indulges, and it requires some response.

My response to Mr. Yellen below:

I neither have an apartment in New York, nor am I a European or a South American, but the reference to exploitation strikes me as greatly ironic, and somehow profoundly insulting.

It comes laced with a sense of hypocrisy, though perhaps both are understandable and forgivable when seen to manifest themselves in people that have known little else.

I would ask Mr. Yellen, who's self confessed (and as quickly dismissed) xenophobia verily drips from some words in his article, where the cries of exploitation were when the American machine used the very same principles of buy and sell in so called third world countries, working into labor, land and capital?

Ah, but when exporting American money, it was labeled by all parties as 'Foreign Investment'. Today, evidently, the tables, to some small extent, have turned. Suddenly the 'cheap dollars' allow the 'exploitation' of cities like New York by 'foreigners'.

The whole thing stinks of this all pervading arrogance, really. Specifically, the idea that it was alright for us, but it's not alright for them to do the exact same thing is what sticks in my craw.

For decades now, the US Government, both Democrats and Republicans, have fervently pushed the Global Economy into being this giant instaweb that it is today. They shoved free trade down the world's collective throat, forcibly at times, coercively at other times, breaking down barriers that in some part protected small time operators in underdeveloped economies from competing with robust megacorporations, and as far as the local small timers went, someone might want to wander down to take a careful peek at the categories of local produce that the US subsidizes in order to create a bulwark for the resident economy. Ah well, dog eat dog world, and all that. Except it wasn't always and it needn't be this savage.

Well, I've got news for you, Mr. Yellen: Free enterprise is a frightful bitch. And she swings both ways.

Don't get me wrong, while I don't tend to talk about economic policy as much as I rant on social issues, I find the unchecked and irresponsible levels of growth one of the greater evils of modern society. Just the wrapping in which this particular point was conveyed was, in a word...

Repugnant.