Free trade and protectionism.

Free trade ensures the availability of those things without which life is just not worth living -- cheap Chinese toasters. That much is holy writ these days. To think outside that box is a secular sin ensuring you'll end your days working for a Mexican lawn service company.

On the Minnesota-Canada border.

But are there other more terrible gods than the gods of efficient production and distribution? At this particular time of our nation's being hollowed out by Chinese and Arabs, this is a good question to ask:

We seldom ask, in this context, whether modern specialization makes a better nation or merely makes a more comfortable nation. . . . How curious that national self-sufficiency is not equated with national freedom? In opposition to self-sufficiency, our theorists and politicians talk glowingly of “interdependence” – that form of dependency that draws nations and continents together in a process that ultimately promises “one world,” one “global village” (a.k.a. globalism).

It is no accident that we are today afflicted with a reason-withering “political correctness” closing in from all sides. This oppressive ideology pretends that opposing forces can amalgamate under the shaky utopian ramshackle of “multiculturalism.” To solve the problem of human difference, a counterfeit unity has been conceived. Under the rubric of tolerance we have abandoned our own heritage.

Other issues face us that have implications for autarky. Off-shore oil drilling, for one. You know about the efforts of the left to prevent that at all costs . . . .

In the meantime, the hollowing out continues on all fronts at breakneck speed. All told, we seem seriously intent on living our lives as slaves or drones.

"Autarky and Ancient Wisdom." By J.R. Nyquist, Financial Sense Online, 3/28/08 (emphasis added).