Solutions

 I've written a few articles about financial bubbles and our economic troubles. It's easy to write about what's wrong, but what about solutions

Free trade doesn't work. It took Britain from food surpluses to importing 2/3’s of her food during World War II. The people who benefited from their free trade policies were Americans. Is it any wonder that Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt were all protectionists?

Now when this term's used, people who are supposed to be conservatives call this big government because the government collects the fees and enforces laws when it protects American jobs. What these people leave out is that it's in the Constitution for the government to collect excise taxes and regulate trade. Not all government is big just because some of it is.

Also, free trade leads to budget deficits. This is because with a debt currency, budget deficits are needed to put the money lost from the economy overseas back into it. How big of a budget deficit do you need when the U.S. has a trade deficit of $ 800 billion dollars yearly. Get the point. Also someone has to pay for the newly unemployed people's unemployment costs, the welfare costs for their children, the economic hardship breakup of marriages, etc. and it ain’t going to be China.

We need only bi-lateral trade treaties. We are 28% of the world’s economy, even weakened. We should negotiate treaties for our employment. Businesses want to stay here. Americans are the most productive people on earth, and our political institutions are stable.

But many don't because the government's become enormous and overreaching. 70% of jobs are created by small businesses, businesses which can't survive in a big government climate. Many of the alphabet agencies were created as payoffs to big business to kill competitors. One CEO of a huge firm had to pay a million dollar fine which also put his two small business competitors out of business, another ex post facto environmental fine. ( Where is The Supreme Court ?) The CEO said as he wrote the check to the EPA, “Best money I ever spent.”

So most companies that send jobs overseas aren't big businesses anymore, they're smaller companies. But it isn't only the government driving away businesses.

The Congress needs to end the full employment mantra it legislated upon the Fed which leads to an unstable dollar. It's creating business uncertainty. The Fed being required to prevent recessions created a depression. Anyone who's happy about the Clinton prosperity years needs to keep on reading.

Those good times were created by a vacuum cleaner being put into the future that sucked the prosperity from here to there. That's what happens when prosperity monetization happens; prosperity by printing money. Money's a representation of productivity and when money's printed ( I call it currency ), the productivity it's supposed to represent has to be created for smooth economic sailing.

We printed so much currency it was impossible to fill it with productivity and when the financial bubble burst, we really crashed. These economic bubble bursts always act the same as bank runs in the sector in which they happen, something the Fed was invented to prevent ( It did in banks, but ironically passed it on to other sectors by its full employment directive).

Finally we need a dynamic, practical energy policy. High energy prices equal higher business costs. We have more cheap energy available than any other nation if Congress would act. The people need to wake up. And if they don't, it's just possible it's because we have become too silly to be a nation anymore.

By Jeffrey Ruzicka

Jeffrey Ruzicka is a retired executive of a small company that specializes in industrial water treatment. He lives happily with his wife in Western Pennsylvania and is a contributing writer to FinancialJobBank, FinancialJobBankBlog and Nexxt.