a hard truth about trade imbalance and the meaning of manufacturing to the social culture and spirit

Last updated on May 17, 2025

I want to talk about some implications for trade imbalance and manufacturing.

The first is a hard truth about trade imbalance. Ultimately any trade is balanced, because you must pay something for what you buy anyway finally. The nature of trade imbalance is the imbalance between assets and commodities of trade. When you buy more commodities and services from others than you sell, it means you pay the excess part by your assets ultimately, or in another word, totally overall you trade your assets for others’ commodities and services. What do you think the others will use the dollars earned from you for ultimately except for buying your commodities and services? After all, a US dollar is meant and authorized to buy things of the US, right? If it’s not buying commodities and services then it should be buying your assets, including equities, land, house, any title or ownership, even your sovereignty in the form of national debt, and whatever. This is like that: a peasant doesn’t plant anything and eats food bought from another peasant and pays to the another his land, plows, house, barns, horse, cow, even kids and whatever although maybe little by little. What a future for this peasant!

The second is the meaning of manufacturing to the social culture and spirit. In software, electronic games, movies, songs and even drugs, you can create whatever content or pleasure you want, no matter how sick, how wrong, how unreasonable, how harmful and finally how far away from the truth of this universe it is, and similarly in finance, you can play human designed games to win and earn without any meaningful understanding and working on the nature matter of this universe. But manufacturing is working on the materials of this universe directly, and you cannot lie or cheat or fake or create illusion to get what you want in manufacturing, and you must face up to, understand, learn and handle the nature rules and truth of this universe in manufacturing to get what you want, no matter how hard, how difficult, how painful, how costly it is, because this is just the very core of social spirit and culture which is essential and crucial for your survival and getting better anywhere anytime. As I see, manufacturing and social spirit culture are muscles and bones to each other and to the body of civilization, in which the deterioration and corruption of one will inevitably lead to the deterioration and corruption of the other, in fact we can see this in US and Europe in last 20 years significantly.

Moreover, I believe that this universe is created to be a heavenly kinder garden and a simplified simulation created from the outside or under base of this universe just for us to learn how to survive and get better, and the outside or under base of this universe must be unimaginably more savage, turbulent and cruel than this universe. If we cannot even learn how to survive here, how can we survive anywhere? Manufacturing is one of the most important ways to keep social culture and spirit on the right track for us to survive and learn how to get better. After all, creating, making and building things in reality or real environment is the very base for survival and improvement, not in illusion or video or game or anything unrealistic.

And there are some other issues about trade and manufacturing which somebody else has talked about and gave me a deep impression.

Somebody said that you cannot rely on your possible opponent to produce your weapons. More generally, you cannot ignore the reality of huge differences, development gaps, oppositions, conflicts and confrontations in political, social and even spiritual aspects in this world, to unrealistically imagine a unified free market which may be fatally harmful to yourself.

Somebody talked about the loss of jobs and manufacturing industry brought about the decay of the Rust Belt and the severe social deterioration like mental sickness and drug addiction. And previously I said that you should not put your electors in a completely free open market with competitors of other kinds.

Somebody said that the obsession with cheap labor harmed technology and industry progress. Yes. Watt steam engine and Jenny spinning machine might be much more expensive and unreliable than human and horse at the very beginning, and if nobody insisted on deploying Watt steam engines and Jenny spinning machines to get them improved continuously but obsessed by human or horse power for the sake of immediate profit, there would never be the industrial revolution.