On Specialization: The Globalist & Libertarian Love Child

What does the International Monetary Fund, other globalists, and libertarians all love?

Specialization. The “international division of labor,” as it is commonly called:

The growth in global markets has helped to promote efficiency through competition and the division of labor—the specialization that allows people and economies to focus on what they do best. Global markets also offer greater opportunity for people to tap into more diversified and larger markets around the world. It means that they can have access to more capital, technology, cheaper imports, and larger export markets.

This is a favorite of both globalists and libertarians (yes, that is redundant, but the distinction is important for people that don’t yet realize they are the same thing).

In reality, specialization is just a national version of autism. It’s a hyper-fixation on particular economic plans. Specialization is fragility. It is becoming beholden to the “international community” (centralizers) for everything that one is not specialized on.

Economists, like myself back in the day, like to pretend that this is not the case with fancy models and figures. But it’s plainly obvious to anyone that wants to see it, and you don’t need millions of pieces of data, just open your eyes and your history books. A community reliant on a few specialties often crumbles, whereas those built around promoting greater self-sufficiency thrive (a great recent example is the auto industry—entire cities were abandoned when the automobile industry cratered).

I was thinking about this the other day, given some recent events that happened around my area. We have a family friend that has dairy cows and sells their raw milk. Sadly, this particular family just lost an entire year’s worth of income due to one rough year.

What happened, you ask?

Well, at least one of their cows ingested a protozoa parasite, which causes spontaneous abortions, weakened immune responses, and a whole host of other problems, including death of the infected animal. No cure and no test for it. The only way to manage it is to kill off the animals with symptoms.

The problem is that even though it does not cross through milk, no one wants to buy milk with potentially infected animals, and it’s unethical to do so when the animal could have weakened immune systems leading to potential problems that could pass through the milk.

So, my family friend went from selling milk to hundreds to selling milk to no one (not to mention killing off a chunk of her herd) all within a week.

They specialized in milk production and it collapsed, and now they are on the equivalent of community food stamps. When I was talking with that family, they were saying over and over how they felt stupid not diversifying with some pigs, chickens, or slaughter cows. I mentioned how it’s pretty common today for people to focus on just one specialty — and they retorted by stating very firmly: “Well, look how that turned out for us.”

Very true. Look how it did turn out for them.

It is sad, but a good learning lesson for us. Specialization comes with fragility.

Now, take this example and multiply it to an entire nation. Should we specialize in only a handful of things? What will happen if those industries get the equivalent of a protozoa infection, or go the way of Detroit automakers, or a major conflict radically changes our priorities? We’ll also need some community food stamps for a while, apparently.

We don’t have to fully guess what would happen, however. COVID gave us just a minor glimpse of what is coming once that happens: “Breaking News: COVID Proves Foreign Dependency Is A Bad Idea.” We can learn from COVID, or we can make the same mistakes again. Unsurprisingly, it seems like we’re taking the latter route.

I have to give the disclaimer: I recognize that specialization isn’t always inherently bad. We all specialize in some ways. But what is bad is how radical the form is that has been propped up in the modern era. The original ideal of “Be great at one thing, but sufficiently manage the rest” has transformed into “Be great at one thing, and don’t even bother with anything else.” This is what the economic models push for. But it is foolish, and its dangers are rapidly spiraling in our uncertain world.

Conventional wisdom has always been to not put all your eggs in one basket, whereas modern globalist economics tells you to not only put all your eggs in that one basket but to then trade that basket for a Goodwill-quality plastic bag. Good luck with your eggs when that wind gust comes along.

The sad fact is that the globalist and libertarian economic lies only work in labs hand-designed by economists who ignore anything that may throw off their models. Fragile specialization is not formidable in the real world when trouble occurs, and given human nature, trouble invariably will occur.

No one calculates in the rise of hegemonic competitors and fragility costs. But this lesson will be made abundantly clear once the United States collapses, and hopefully with that libertarians will finally no longer exist. But given what we’ve learned from communists — that even when a system spectacularly fails in front of everyone’s faces — they’ll just pretend it wasn’t “real” libertarianism or globalism. So don’t get your hopes up too much.

What dissidents must take from this is that theorists and men of words are worthless. Experience matters. Additionally, ideology should never be at odds with basic common sense. People with a functioning brain realize that if a theory doesn’t work on the local level, it won’t work on the higher level. Specialization doesn’t even work with a basic cow farm. It’s not going to work when dealing with a world economy full of competing entities that have a vested interest in the other losing. Men of action understand this; men of words do not.

Vox Day recently penned an article in which he called free trade “economic heroin.” I agree whole-heartedly. We may love specialization, but it’s going to get us killed.