Ex Post Facto

A short note, for once. The isolationist, modulo economic hegemony, meme has been around for hundreds of years. For most of those years, money meant specie, preferably gold but silver in a pinch. That's not been the case since Bretton-Woods, and finally definitely done when Nixon killed off the US Buck's conversion to gold.

When gold is money, then getting more is one way to measure economic progress. In such a regime, getting other economies' stocks of the stuff is a surer way of accomplishing that end than digging in one's own ground and hope to find some. The wonders of specie money easy to see in this sort of graph:

[Business Insider]

So, this is why, with a 19th century view of economics, Donald J. Quisling and his minions love to drive down wages and sell exports: they're thinking in terms of gold, not New Gold aka, the US Buck. All we get back for exports is our own bucks. We could do better by re-distributing the moolah internally, and supporting demand domestically.