Skyrocketing macroeconomy. Massive production glut. Artificially low wages. Déjà  Vu?

American businesses in the 1920s caught a wave of technological advance. Ford’s assembly line technology was catching on everywhere, and workers were becoming more and more unnecessary as automated machines replaced humans in all sorts of sectors. With this key new technology arriving from the automotive sector, the auto industry is in fact strikingly parallel to the American economy on the whole.

Ford Motor Company, the pioneer of the assembly line, had a strikingly progressive mindset: In 1914, Henry Ford cut the labor hours of his workers, as many other companies were doing in light of new automated capital expenditures, but in doing so, did not cut their pay. In fact, Ford for a long time was a leader in the automotive industry in wages. After all, without money, how would his employees buy his cars?

If only the rest of the industry had such a long-term outlook. GM under the leadership of Charles Kettering took the view that “The key to economic prosperity is the organized creation of dissatisfaction“. This, along with the short-term profits mindset, led GM and most heavy industries to replace workers with machinery, pay as little as possible to stay competitive in the job market, and watch profits soar.

Now look at China. Vast, austere and impersonal, the average Chinese corporation has the cost-cutting, profit-maximizing mindset of the 1920s American corporation taken to a ridiculous extreme. With little regard for even the lives of the consumers, Chinese corporations unscrupulously substitute cheaper parts and ingredients to shave costs. Wages are suppressed far below any standard ever held by Americans, and they, like America of the 1920s, produce far more than their population can absorb.

So what’s the difference? Why did America crash, and will China do the same?

As Federal Reserve Chairman Marriner Eccles put it, “mass production has to be accompanied by mass consumption”. Because wages were kept low, companies like GM tried to force out mass consumption in a massive advertising blitz according to the aforementioned Kettering philosophy. Consumers were forced to buy on credit, which was in the long run an unsustainable income supplement for such a large number of people. Now China would certainly be in a position even worse than we were; the income disparity has been consistently rising since 1985, and their population has far less purchasing power on a whole than the American population of the 1920s. The difference, however, is that China’s production glut is not intended for its own population.

Now that we’ve established in economic terms what everyone already knew, we can look at the consequences of China’s structural choices. While they will continue to grow as long as the West – the primary absorbent of their overproduction – does, if the West ever runs out of steam or if China somehow catches up economically, China will have nowhere to go. Their continued growth depends on our continued consumption, and if we for whatever reason stop absorbing their glut, then China will be in exactly the same situation as America of October 29, 1929.

Mitt Romney’s speech on religion last week was a missed opportunity. He took the occasion to posit some feel-good Universalist theology that, frankly, there’s no way he actually believes, when he could have turned it into a major advantage over every one of his opponents. His goal should not have been to convince the Christian Right that Mormonism is an acceptable religion, but rather to prove that he himself is a qualified and capable candidate to lead the country. And that task is, or could have been, much easier.

Firstly, we are not electing a religious leader. Even given the Christian Right’s agenda to legislate morality, how different could the legislative agendas of the Mormon Church and the wider Christian Right be? As great as the doctrinal chasm between Mormonism and Orthodoxy is, no difference between his position and the goals of the Christian Right can be attributed to his Mormonism. Of course, the Christian Right’s agenda is dubious at best anyway (I’m looking at you, Huckabee and supporters). Though Romney actually is in line rhetorically with a lot of it, the main thrust of his campaign is elsewhere – fiscal policy, for example.

But the Mormon issue is not necessarily a campaign detriment to be neutralized, as he has so far made it out to be. Mormonism is a demanding religion, requiring intense self-discipline. In everything. From wider personal moral conduct to little things like diet, every aspect of life is strictly self-controlled. Now compare to Giuliani, now on his third marriage, or Clinton, who was recently caught planting reporters in her press conferences. The thought of the words “Romney” and “scandal” in the same sentence is almost ludicrous, because people know him as a sober and self-controlled guy.

But enough about personal lifestyle. The real question is how this discipline translates into job performance. The answer, as it turns out, is stunningly well. As governor in Massachusetts, he reengineered the healthcare system from wasteful and incomplete to lean and complete. And he did it without incurring exorbitant deficits, all because he had the tenacity to look over the numbers and draw ambitious but realistic conclusions from them. As CEO of the Salt Lake Organizing Committee for the 2002 Olympics, he took a $379 million revenue deficit and restructured the entire hierarchy to produce a $100 million profit. And as far as the nation has fallen into debt, we need now more than ever not only fiscal responsibility, but ambitious cost cutting and a massive waste-cutting government restructure if we are to reclaim for the long-term the value of the Dollar.

Fiscal responsibility isn’t the only effect of Mormon self-discipline. Foreign policy will benefit from his propensity towards impossibly ambitious yet always pragmatic approaches. Such competence could only serve to quell the vitriol increasingly coming from places like Europe and Asia (but don’t expect Venezuela to quiet down anytime soon regardless of what we do). In fact, there’s hardly a function that the President serves that wouldn’t benefit from a disciplined and phenomenally competent bearer.

I just hope that he can capitalize on that in time for Primaries.

Freedom requires religion, just as religion requires freedom. Freedom opens the windows of the soul so that man can discover his most profound beliefs and commune with God. Freedom and religion endure together, or perish alone.
-Mitt Romney

This is shaping up to be one of the most interesting elections in recent memory, with three different candidates seeking to break a different axis of the White Male Christian dynasty of US presidents. Mitt Romney, who would be the first Mormon in the White House should he win, is in a unique position in that his religion, unlike Obama’s race and Clinton’s gender, positions him at a major disadvantage from the establishment without his minority group providing him with much of a corresponding advantage.

Romney’s recent speech was meant to allay the Christian Right’s fears of a Mormon in office, and if the news reaction is any indication, was a smashing success. The thrust of his speech was an ecumenical plea to ignore the differences of our religions with a bit of patriotic “Yay Freedom!” thrown in for good measure.

What he is trying to say is “I am a person of faith. Forget the fact what my faith is, that I am a Mormon. You might be Christian. You might be Jewish. I’m a person of faith. I believe in God”
-Roland Martin, CNN

Shy of the Unitarian Universalist Church, hardly any marginally doctrinally versed Christian – even one who would gloss over the doctrinal divisions among Protestantism, Catholicism, and Eastern Orthodoxy – would consider Mormonism of the same lineage as the Christian faith. Though the Universalist idea that all religions point to God is appealing to the masses as a nice feel-good belief, I doubt most Christians will buy it. Kennedy appealed to a similar popular idea in his famous speech to which many are comparing Romney’s – that religion is private and inconsequential in the public sphere.

Romney also purported that religion and freedom are necessary for each other. He even said explicitly that one without the other will perish. The point that freedom requires religion requires a very loose definition of freedom and religion: the Greeks of ancient Athens, for example, were by any modern definition “free” in the political sense, but their religion had become an allegory for the machinations of the natural world, and the gods were effectively nonexistent by the time of Aristotle. Whether this can be called religion is debatable, but his juxtaposition of the first point – that religion requires freedom – is flatly and demonstrably false. In fact, nearly the opposite is true: it is amid the lack of freedom that religion most flourishes. Persecution is a fire that refines and purifies faith.

There are countless historical examples of this, for it is the martyrs that people of any religion esteem: the Confessing Church is arguably the best snapshot of the ideal of the Church in modern history. Forced underground after a Nazi program banned the Bible in churches to be replaced with Mein Kampf (“the most sacred book to Germany, and therefore God”) and required the adoption of a doctrine of Positive Christianity – a reformulation of the Christian faith to conform with Nazi ideals, the Confessing Church exemplified not only compassion by hiding Jews and other persecuted groups, but doctrinal integrity by continuing to meet under the banner of Orthodoxy. The Church worldwide is still indebted to the Confessing Church for the theology that came out of it during that period. It was only when the war ended and freedom in the Western sense was restored that, to the dismay of leaders like Moltmann, the Confessing Church was rendered all but unnecessary and the German Church as a whole strove to return to its prewar state.

The Church in China is another oft-cited example. The house churches that meet against the will of the State and its theologically flaccid official churches embody on a larger scale than in any Western country the devotion and sacrifice inherent to true Christianity. The Early Church is another, persecuted under the Roman Empire until Constantine instated religious freedom in Rome, securing for it a dominant material and political position that sent it on a long slide of decay and corruption.

No, though freedom may or may not require religion in the loosest sense of the word, religion if it is truly of God in no way requires freedom, or any earthly institution to persevere. False faiths may fall away under stress, but it is the mark of Godliness to be made stronger by persecution.

Tune in next time for: Why I support Romney anyway

More than logic, more than emotional appeal and more than fear of punishment, there’s nothing like ridicule to kill an idea. People fear looking stupid in many cases more than they fear consequences – after all, you could go down as a martyr. And where’s the fun in that for the status quo power? It looks like the RIAA has picked up on this concept with a new set of posters being put up in campus dorms claiming that copyright violations will make you look stupid (click on images for larger version).

And of course, if that doesn’t work, there’s always good old-fashioned scare tactics. Apparently the gallows await foolhardy filesharers.

Never before in history has global communication in so many media been so accessible. Cultural elements now spread across the world, taking us ever closer to what increasingly appears to be a homogenous global base culture marked by subcultures rather than regional variation. In looking at this trend, one must ask, will this resulting culture become a conglomerate synthesis of the cultures of the world, or will one in particular come out on top?

Looking around the world, one can undeniably see the pervasive influence of American consumer culture, and by all accounts this is the culture coming out on top. Consumer culture appeals to the innate desire of the individual to pursue his own interests at the expense of a greater good, whatever that may be, like cocaine appeals to the innate personal desire for raw pleasure. And in the long run for a society it is no less addictive or destructive. The appeal of Western luxury to the developing world in Asia and Africa is almost irresistible despite the outspoken antipathy of many of their governments to the West.

Or does the antipathy to the West regard its policies rather than its culture? Why is it that Middle-Easterners can cry “Death to America” while drinking a Pepsi?

During the Cold War, the United States used culture very deliberately as a form of soft power. Listening to the Beatles broadcasting through the Iron Curtain sowed seeds of discontent among Soviet youth with the Union’s isolationism, and was eventually an important factor in bringing about the downfall of Marxism in the Soviet bloc. In recent years however, without a Soviet union to keep us on our toes, our deliberate use of soft power in this fashion has dropped off to near nonexistence. This does not mean that our culture is not spreading – on the contrary, it is spreading faster and more pervasively than ever – but now it is like the spreading of a virus rather than the injection of a serum: passive rather than active. Donald Rumsfeld even stated at one point that he did not even understand the concept of soft power.

The problem is that modern third-worlders in anti-American governments, rather than adopt pro-American sentiments as they adopt American consumer culture, dissociate the culture from the nation and shamelessly take on the most shameful of American ideals while positioning themselves ideologically opposite from, for example, the US’s favor towards Israel and Democracy in general. I do not of course refer to the higher anti-American ideologues – many of whom renounce consumerism just as strongly as American policy – but rather the lower classes in their sphere of influence, who see dissociation as a way to align themselves with their own ideologues without giving up the goods they have become accustomed to, however meager they may be (especially compared to the goods we receive in America).

We are then in the precarious position of having self-preservation from inner corruption at odds against self-preservation from outside forces. The most obvious way to protect ourselves from continuing terrorist threats is to dull their ideology with deliberate injections of consumer culture. As their youth grow into complacency as ours have, then the threat of attack diminishes. But with this diminished threat of attack comes an increased threat of collapse under the unsustainable load of deficit spending and indebtedness, both on the personal and federal level, and not just in the West, but worldwide should we consumerize the third world.

The answer we find on this the sixth anniversary of the most vivid demonstration of Western antipathy in American history, lies in the tedium of a continued war on terror coupled with a concerted internal propaganda effort aimed at breaking consumer culture. It is as Machiavelli says unfathomably difficult to reform a deeply corrupted nation, but what choice do we have? Perhaps it’s wishful thinking, but one could imagine the number of anti-American ideologues greatly diminishing if we do break through consumer culture.