Our Resources for Our People

Providence has truly endowed the geographic locale of America to become an industrial and civilizational colossus. America alone is a net exporter of almost every conceivable natural resource needed to sustain industrial civilization. On top of this, the Greater Mississippi Basin and Intercoastal Waterway, which outstrip the rest of the world’s navigable waterways put together, is laid over the single largest tract of arable land in the world, the Greater Midwest. When fully metabolized, some believe, North America can comfortably support over a billion self-confident, industrious Americans at a living standard that would make even the richest of the rest of the world blush. So why do we allow these endowments to be whisked away by the rest of the world?As Pat Buchanan lamented in his 2010 book “Suicide of A Superpower,” when one looks at the manifest of America’s exports to China and what we import from them alone, one would not be blamed for assuming that America is a Chinese colony. In times past, anyone holding American citizenship who participated in looting America’s resources for global profit in the way our elites are now would be promptly hanged for treason.One of the most sensible policies the post-1945 American government has implemented, at least for a time, was the export ban on most crude oil from 1975 to 2015 in response to America becoming a net importer of the resource. Our situation, then and now, calls for a much further-reaching declaration by national leadership that America’s resources are for America’s industry and ONLY America’s industry.America is truly alone in its situation as it pertains to resource endowments and industrial prowess. Most of the world’s nations fall into two categories with regard to resources and industry. One category of country is one where they have far more resources than what their population or industry could ever hope to absorb, no matter how hard they try. Think Norway, Australia, Canada, and the oil states. Out of all these, the only country that has done the right thing with their resource windfall has been Norway, where they insisted on keeping a sizable chunk of the oil and gas revenues into what essentially is a gigantic piggy bank. Indeed, at $1.6 TRILLION for a population of 5.3 million, it is the single largest Sovereign Wealth Fund (SWF) in the world, with equity stakes in 1.5% of the world’s publicly-listed companies. Other oil states have found ways to squander their resource wealth instead of saving it for future generations to benefit from. Australia and Canada have allowed mining corporations to loot their land without any benefit derived for the average Canadian and Australian, regardless of which party was in power.The second category is countries that have massive industrial capacity but relatively few resources to match. Think Germany, Japan, Korea, and China. In the case of all of these, Germany to the least extent, they have largely done right policy-wise for their situation, which is to selfishly protect their industry from foreign competition and secure resources by any means necessary.America is truly unique in that it has obscene stores of a broad spectrum of natural resources AND has the world’s second-largest industrial capacity, which can easily be returned to first place with proper America First policy prescriptions. What this means for America with regard to industrial and trade policy is that all our natural resources should best be kept within our borders. What this will do is put a low price ceiling on our resource prices and a high price floor for our competitors, especially the likes of China.Unfortunately, our leaders from both parties have allowed other nations to take the lunches of millions of hard-working Americans by pursuing treacherous trade and industrial policies. These policies have hollowed out our industry and even allowed our top geopolitical and civilizational rival to muscle its way into the center of the global economy.Fortunately, this also means that we know what policies must be reversed to derive the reverse effect of what our workers have been enduring for the last half-century. We know that we need to selfishly keep our natural resources to ourselves. We also know that there is no shame and nothing personal against any other nation in safeguarding a prosperous future for ourselves and our grandchildren, no matter what needs to be done. Let us do it.