Open Borders and Free Trade induce national suicide slowly and gradually, without the victims waking up to what is going on until it is too late. But the coronavirus has brought home with global clarity that human societies need governments and regulated borders for their own survival.
The bottom line is clear, societies that have had open borders to previous major centers of infection and transmission, like Iran and Italy which kept open strong flows of people to and from China in the early stages of pandemic, suffered exceptionally badly. Countries obsessed with maintaining liberal values and open borders like France, Germany, the United Kingdom and the U.S. also suffered disproportionately.
Countries that have allowed their domestic industry to decay have found they cannot now produce the crucial equipment they need, from respirators to gas masks. Countries with strong manufacturing bases like China, or with a prudent nationalist sense of preparing ahead for emergencies like Russia, have done far better. The shortage of respirators in Britain has become more than a national scandal: It is a national shame. That is another inexorable consequence of the pernicious doctrine of Free Trade.
I documented this history in some detail in my 2012 book “That Should Still Be Us“.
There, I showed how even the French Revolution of 1789 was in fact triggered by the catastrophic Free Trade Treaty that hapless King Louis XVI approved with England only three years before. It led immediately to the worst economic depression in French history which triggered revolution. In three years, liberal Free Trade succeeded in destroying a society that had flourished for a thousand years and the most powerful state Europe had known since the fall of the Roman Empire.
In his classic television series and accompanying book “How the Universe Changed”, the great British broadcaster and historian James Burke showed how the discipline of statistics was responsible for discovering the way the cholera bacteria spread through contaminated water in 19th Century London, then the largest urban area ever experienced.
Today, we see a similar pattern in the spread of the coronavirus: While half the counties in the United States remain so far virtually free of the virus, infections have soared in most major metropolitan areas, especially in so-called Sanctuary cities. Invariably these centers are ruled by liberal Democrats where illegal immigrants congregate. They are the places where the values and consequences of Free Trade and Open Borders most clearly flourish. And they ar ealso the places where the terrifying costs of those policies are most evident as well. The chickens have come home to roost.
Countries like Russia and China itself, which have reacted most quickly and decisively to shut down international and domestic travel, have been able to keep their numbers of infections and rates of spread down.
In Europe, by contrast, the impact of the virus has been appalling, The European Union has been as useless as New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio,. Pro-EU liberal national leaders like President Emmanuel Macron in France and the venerable Chancellor Angela Merkel in Germany (Berlin’s version of Nancy Pelosi) just sat back in bemused silence till it was too late. In Italy and Spain, the political splintering of societies has woefully added to the chaos.
This is in fact a very old lesson indeed: The ruling elites of the world should not have had to relearn it.
But for more than 225 years, the ruling elites of the West have mindlessly embraced Open Borders and Free Trade.Yet these have always been mere assertions of prejudice and mindless faith: They have never been proven to be true in any scientific manner.
Instead, when we look at the factual evidence of economic history over the past two centuries, it has always been the case that developing industrial societies which protect their manufactures behind strong tariff barriers flourish with enormous foreign trade and balance of payments surpluses. Then the livign standards of their people soar.
In contrast, free market societies too powerless, or just too plain dumb to protect their economic borders get swamped by cheap manufactures and their domestic industries get decimated. This was the case with liberal free market Britain caught between the rising Protectionist powers of the United States, Japan and Germany for the next century.
It has been true for the decline of American industry since the 1950s, the more the United States embraced global free trade, the more its own domestic manufactures and their dependent populations suffered. This never bothered the liberal intellectual elites of the East and West Coast at all. It still doesn’t. Having inflicted lasting ruin and despair on hundreds of millions of people for generations, they despise their victims as “deplorables” for crying out in pain and seeking to end the disastrous policies.
Russia suffered the full horrors of the merciless laissez-faire, unregulated Free Market policies of the liberal West in the 1990s. Boris Yeltsin never woke up to the catastrophe that Bill Clinton and Larry Summers were inflicting on his country. Over the past two decades, Russia’s recovery from that Abyss under President Vladimir Putin has been miraculous. National social responsibility has succeeded where the crazed, simplistic theories of Adam Smith, David Ricardo and Ayn Rand all palpably failed.
The coronavirus pandemic therefore should serve as a wake up call to the peoples of the West, what Thomas Jefferson memorably called “A Fire Bell in the Night.” They need to start following Russia’s examples of self reliance, prudent preparation and maintaining strong borders.
The ravages of Liberalism – its Open Borders and Free Markets – have already stripped the West of all its defenses, social, demographic, industrial and economic. The West is out of time: The Audit of Pandemic has been taken, and the reckoning is now due.
