"Population is a resource"
"We need to bring millions of immigrants to our country to keep the economy going. And by 'need' I mean 'we should actively recruit people from other countries to come and live in ours'. Fortunately, none of the governments of the other countries will be suspicious of our recruiters at all. Nor will they try to impede your recruiting work.
"We must focus all our efforts as a nation on depending on international trade for our survival"
"Any alternative to implementing the economic globalization and just-in-time economics as soon as possible is economic suicide and must be nipped in the bud"
"Any motivation and argument that is not directly related to the economy can and should be ignored: outside nationalism, religion, culture and everything that cannot be expressed in monetary units. Fuck off about what people will think about this"
"People will give up their traditions and beliefs if you only talk them about how all of this is against economic logic"
"The best form of economic regulation is that there is no regulation at all"
"We must prioritize the economy first and ignore everything else"
"Everything is an addition game zero in which every dollar our neighbor earns is a dollar we lose,"
"Slavery should be abolished solely because it is uneconomical, and the only way we will care about the debate about its immorality is to use it as an excuse to get the population to accept this decision,"
"We really shouldn't have colonies, but this is because they're uneconomical and cost more than profit. Fuck prestige, fuck morality, and fuck that means everyone else can colonize all they want."
All of which will sound like utter insanity, if not delusions completely out of touch with reality, to virtually any political leader living in 1914 or earlier.
No, not all of that would sound like utter insanity. It really seems you have an ideological axe to grind about capitalism and markets. And engaging in the trope of thinking people in the past were extremely stupid, and not humans like us making a reasonable job with the information and ideological heuristics they had available.
Yes, people did understand population and migration were a resource. Potsdam Edict ring a bell. Or the Ottomans accepting the Jews and Moriscos. Or all the Eastern European leaders who invited German settlers in, from Hungary to Russia. The Romans, the Inca, the Chinese, and lots of other Empires engaged in population movement projects.
People as a resource is literally the foundation of serf and slave economies, which were designed around controlling the population.
Yes, some people did focus on international trade as a matter of survival. The Dutch Republic fought the Spanish, had a massive percentage of its male population in the army and navy, and carved out a world-spanning commercial empire all at the same time, in order to fund the mercenaries, arms, and other measures and even subsidies to other powers to fend off the Habsburgs. And they did so as strong proponents of free trade.
Other nations, of course, had silly ideas about trade, like believing in fixed values for goods and so merchants provided no value.
"Everything is an addition game zero in which every dollar our neighbor earns is a dollar we lose,"
Thats, not a position any economist would endorse. That's literally old-time mercantilism. That's the old-time ideas that you're defending.
Lots of people in the past, did point out that colonies were economic deadweights and that slavery imposed broad costs on society that make it a dead loss. These are all arguments that abolitionists and anti-imperialists made back then. And they were entirely correct.
Also, it's very weird that you are saying that the anti-imperialists are the ones saying fuck morality? Which of the colonial powers were the moral ones again?
Yes, the past did have bad economic ideas. Most of them were ferocious gold bugs, didn't reinvest capital and had terrible human development plans. But you are stretching it to absurdity and have terrible examples.
Do not forget either the extremely fragile supply chain, which means that as long as there are delays, not just days, but HOURS, the chain reaction can end up completely pulverizing the economy and society of a country.
And the solution to that is... do nothing and pray that there are no such problems. Why, you probably say? Simply because someone believes that strengthening the supply chain is "very expensive".
It's those kinds of things that make me wonder at what point did anyone think that globalizing the economy/adopting the "economy first and foremost, everything else can and should be ignored" model was a good idea.
Economic systems always involve tradeoffs. That's just a fact, and anybody preaching a utopian vision without a detailed evidenced-based plan is selling you bullshit.
We've seen in action economies that step back from free trade. And their economies falter hard. Thats why people think its a good model. And that's why people want to move further than free movement of capital and goods and allow free trade of people. Recent human history, which has seen these openings, has seen the greatest economic growth in human history, which has lifted billions from poverty.
Strengthing supply chains is something you can do. But yeah, it does involve costs. Maybe those costs are less than the benefits. Buts it's a calculus you have to make.
The issue is that it wasn't a conscious choice. The market must expand exponentially to cope with the falling rate of profit (physics be damned!), so it just devolved into game theory, with tiny cogs in the machine making the only choice they could logically make to maintain the bottom line. I've come around to the idea that the market, like the political system*, is something between an eldritch abomination and an egregore,— it's vast, not conscious or truly knowable, and has the nasty tendency to drag everyone in its wake as it just mindlessly writhes around. The idea that individuals have any meaningful input or influence on either is the most dangerous delusion of the modern world, since it's essentially a Hobbesian Leviathan where each of the faces thinks the thing is working at their will and in their interest.
*Since no matter what any respectable person thinks economics is sociology not hard science!
I'd advise you to actually read Marx because this is some nonsense degrowth. Marx was a big believer in technological and productive measures that increase aggregate production. You seem to be taking more ideological inspiration from Malthus.
Economic growth and the use of resources are not tightly coupled. Economies around the world have sharply cut emissions, while still increasing their economic output. In other metrics, the US produces more industrial products than it has previously, but with both fewer workers relative to the broader economy and fewer workers absolutely
Bringing up physics is nonsense. We have access to vast amounts of energy and resources, it's really just a matter of accessing them. More energy than all of the human civilisation hits the earth from the sun. Gravity keeps windpower going. Vast geothermal power is below our feet. All can be tapped with current tech.
We've also greatly increased electrical efficiency and made devices much smaller. Computers the size of rooms couldn't muster the computing power of the cheapest devices in our pockets. It's a massive reduction in materials.
And with the rate of progression, we will get access to space minerals, sooner or later.
