The Fourth World or Help! I need an Economist. Each time I go into a petrol station I am confronted by a different bargain next to the till at a price at which it would be impossible to buy even the raw materials in Europe. Yet we are presented daily with Penknives, Binoculars, Sunglasses, Torches, Garden Furniture, Clocks, Radio's, Toolkits, Road Maps etc. On the surface it appears to be a harmless way to spend money on trinkets. Underneath, it could be the pernicious mechanism by which we are disassembling our own economy. Take the example of Rover Cars. An Eastern company stripped Rover of their rights to build their own cars then left the company to flounder in its own mess. Initially it has the look of a bad business deal until you add it to the bigger emerging picture. We now see the erosion over the last few decades of our national manufacturing ability. The ability of industry in the West to take raw materials and convert them into saleable goods is what made this country a great manufacturer. Now we are seeing that ability removed at an increasing rate. Soon our only remaining national resource will be oil and as the existing reserves become increasingly depleted it is becoming more expensive to extract until it too will have to give way to third world imports. Ultimately this country will lose the ability to compete on any terms with the emerging economies. Very soon we will no longer be able to make manufactured goods even if we wanted to because we will have lost the ability. At this point we become vulnerable to pressure from the emergent nations who being aware of our inability to manufacture can charge whatever they like for the goods they supply. Except that by now, having no domestic product we have no way of halting the haemorrhage of our economy to Asia. When we have no national income we can no longer afford the products from the current third world that we are finding so cheap today. We then become the Fourth World, reliant on handouts from the third world to maintain a subsistence existence. This may not happen in our lifetime but all the signs are that it will happen. Is there a flaw in the logic that leads that leads to this conclusion? I hope so. |
