Letters to the Editor
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What's in it? Depends on what you've got
... it's also easy to understand how citizens of Ohio could be looking at a 250-point rise in the Dow (an hour before markets closed on Friday,) based largely on American multinational overseas sales, and wondering, what's in it for me?
Part of what's going on is the advantage of a weak dollar to domestic manufacturing. American bulldozers are great machines, and you can get them for cheap right now if you're ... basically anyone else in the world aside from an American.
So if you're one of those people in the US who makes their living assembling — or manufacturing, if there's anyone left who still does it — bulldozer machine parts or the like, then it's modestly good news for you, whether or not you live in Ohio.
But in the long term that's a dead-end line of thinking. Hoping for the US to develop an economic relationship with the rest of the world that's akin to those of industrializing third-world nations and banana republics isn't really an encouraging vision (except maybe for those who would end up being the tin-pot dictators and mirror-shaded commandantes under such an arrangement).
What we all should be asking, whether we're in Palo Alto or Akron, is how to equip ourselves to better function in an economy where design is paramount. Survival in a design economy requires education — with breadth, not just specialization — and a competitive economic sector unencumbered by monopoly, political patronage, and corruption.
Americans enjoy neither at the moment, and might do well to think about why and what to do about it.
Otherwise ... you know. We were colonies once before. I'm sure the Old World would be happy to take us back.