ALL countries, except the absolutely poorest ones, can make everything they need. To be sure, they’re advised by the rich-controlled World Trade Organization (WTO) to buy those things they need abroad instead, if they are already available, because that is the cheapest.
It is not, of course.
Still, when you come right down to it, each country can make everything it needs and wants—unless, as I’ve said, that country is the absolutely poorest one in, say, Africa.
But the WTO now advises—as the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade did before it, and the imperial powers before that—that it is still best for every country, except those in the West, to find the one or two things it is best at making or growing. Or, better yet, the one or two things the West thinks it can farm out to poor countries to make or grow instead, because the West doesn’t have the land, climate and docile laborers willing to do it for next to nothing.
This is David Ricardo’s theory of comparative advantage, whose discovery has eluded us for centuries.
For example, in the landmark two-volume study The Lands Beneath the Winds, it was observed that what came to be known as the Philippines after the Spanish conquest was never good at growing rice. There were always rice shortages; rice imports made up the bulk of foreign trade for the islands. What we were good at, the Spanish monks observed, was piracy and fighting for gain. We just liked it. No way could we be convinced, let alone compelled, to work in agriculture. Why we never had slavery, unlike in Latin American colonies, remains a mystery.
Not surprisingly, the Spanish cardinal in Manila advised the Spanish king in Madrid, after whom the islands were named, to consider invading Japan with a maritime force made up of Filipinos.
Learning of this somehow, the shogun at the time invited the cardinal to Edo to view his samurai forces, equipped with the usual razor-sharp swords—and with Portuguese cannons and rifles made and improved in Japan in staggering quantities. The Japanese did it better, even then.
Not surprisingly, future United States President Andrew Jackson welcomed the help of Filipino TNTs who jumped from Spanish galleons in New Orleans. With their help, Jackson beat back the British when they invaded the city. The Filipinos were honored by being allowed to bury their dead in what became the all-white Confederate cemetery in New Orleans, across from that superb restaurant,
Commander’s Palace.
Still, the search for a comparative advantage continued, in vain. Now we have finally discovered our comparative advantage, the economic activity at which we are the best: crocodiles, specifically growing ’em and serving ’em as a delicacy.
The Kremlin announced recently that the largest crocodile farm in the Philippines had been granted a permit to export crocodile meat to Russia. It currently bans imports of meat from the US, the European Union, Australia, Canada and Norway, as well as of fish, dairy, fruit and vegetables from the rest of the West in retaliation for the trade sanctions they imposed on Russia for its moves against Ukraine. Thus, cheese is scarce and expensive, and a brewery in Siberia is now making mozzarella from goat’s milk. The Italians say good luck to that.
But freshness is key when it comes to food, as Deniece Cornejo once told Vhong Navarro, who interpreted it the wrong way. And so it has been suggested that Congress be moved to Russia.
Nothing in the 1987 Constitution requires Congress to be situated here, where crocodiles are elected. For tougher leather, we can relocate the Palace, too, especially after 2016, when the next president may want to be close to those whose plunder matches the scale of a cupidity still in the process of demonstration.