Our Guns and Butter Economy
http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/13195/our_guns_and_butter_economy
With the economy still struggling and the debates over how to fix the problem more intense than ever, one word still evokes bipartisan consensus: exports. I want us to sell stuff, said President Obama, summing up the bipartisan sentiment.
That nebulous word stuff is significant. It asks us to see all exports as the same and to refrain from making nuanced value judgments about what exactly were shipping overseas. In this cold-blooded view, a job-creating export is a job-creating export, and thats as far as any conversation should go.
At first glance, such reductionism seems logical, rational, even boringly uncontroversial. But two recent news items highlight how in a globalized economy, there are troubling consequences that come from the particular kind of export economy were building.
The first bit of news came from the Washington Post, which this week reported that the Obama administration is crafting a proposal that could make it easier to export firearms and other weapons. Though the Homeland Security and Justice Departments say the new rules could make it easier for terrorist and drug cartels to further arm themselves, the White House is nonetheless citing the stuff theory of exports to ignore the objections.