Why Millennials Should Support Economic Nationalism

My generation has definitely been given a reputation, that's for sure. It's a reputation derived mainly from the "safe spaces" on college campuses, and it's definitely a negative one. Fellow millennials, *especially* left-wing ones, have been given a reputation as a bunch of entitled, spoiled brats who let their sensitivity control them. How did this happen? There are a myriad of factors, but one of them is the economy, which the mainstream media used as a ruse to deceive the people into electing Obama.

I was 14 in 2007, when the recession began, and 15 in June 2008 when my parents lost their house to it. Why did they? Because five years earlier, in 2003, my parents were victims of globalism. The people whom they were bosses of had their jobs offshored, and they themselves had their jobs outsourced to other states. Globalism is all about greed. Globalist trade policies create an environment in which businesses exploit the low minimum wages of foreign markets in order to amass more wealth for themselves while giving employees less, all the while also importing illegal immigrants from the third world in order to make the cost of housing more and more out-of-reach for us millennials. In terms of both of these simultaneous problems, my state of California has suffered the hardest.

This offshoring bubble was compounded by Bush era foreign policy. While the war in Afghanistan was certainly justified as a reaction to 9/11, the war in Iraq was a completely pointless one. Whenever a secular leader, like Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi, or Bashar al-Assad has his political power weakened, it provides an opportunity for jihadis 10 times more bloodthirsty than they are to fill the void. When Iraq was invaded by Bush and then abandoned by Obama, ISIS filled the void. The result? A humanitarian crisis 10 times worse than the one we started with. Meanwhile, how expensive was that war? Extremely. It created a defense deficit in the trillions of dollars.

So, what's the solution to this one-way cashflow? Enter economic nationalism. That means manufacturing and selling more American product to other countries than what we import. It means selectively tariffing popular outsourcing destinations like China and Mexico far more than less popular outsourcing destinations. It means only taking those tariffs down when the other countries take theirs down. It also means not only reducing unchecked illegal immigration but also reducing the minimum age to work in lieu of that, in order to make sure that it is our youth, and not illegal immigrants, who get to have those unskilled jobs as they work to be able to afford college and, hopefully after that, a better job. Guess what? These are all positions that the 45th President of the United States, Donald J. Trump, repeatedly asserts about possessing, and some of those promises, particularly those about repatriation, are ones that he is already delivering on.

People may try to cop out of this by using the tu quoque fallacy, by claiming that his own business represents a conflict of interest, but it's not that simple. For starters, memorabilia like the MAGA hat (which in itself is in fact made in the United States — well, the one I bought online via his campaign website is anyway) only account for about 5% of Trump's wealth. What accounts for the majority of his wealth? Buying and selling American real estate, and employing Americans off the street to work in the construction industry. While he has bought and sold real estate in other countries, the profits from those dealings went straight into his pocket, which is on American soil. Did he have any foreign bank accounts? No, because he has always been against giving money to other countries. Tu quoque is just as much of a fallacy as ad hominem is.

I'm saying this from one child of the recession to another: Let President Trump do his job. The benefits far outweigh the risks, and I fortunately knew this before I voted in November. Sadly, the left and the media have instilled so much hatred in the public that his name has been tarnished for no good reason, but I was smart enough to see right through those attacks and vote based on what he was running on.