Final Exploration

     In "The Idea of a Local Economy", I disagreed with most of what Wendell Berry said. My first problem is the lack of an alternate system proposal. Berry compared capitalism and communism without saying what other system would work best. In fact, the only proposed change this author suggested was to decrease imports. As far as I know, this comes closer to falling under communism than any other political view. Berry seemed to complain for the most part about everything while explaining how to fix nothing.
     In what appears to be an attempt at seeming intelligent, Berry used a large vocabulary, which is not a problem as long as it adds clarity. It didn't. For instance, the third sentence: "Concern for the problems has acquired a certain standing, a measure of discussability, in the media and in some scientific, academic, and religious, institutions." This could be said like this: "Concern over these problems is a legitimate topic of discussion everywhere." See? No fancy written ambling required for maximum understandability to those reading it, whether they are male, female, unspecified gender, in grade school, high school, college or graduated. You don't even have to words only found on wiktionary. My point is, if you remove the unnecessarily long words, the essay becomes much clearer and really, much more refutable.
     One subject touched on by Berry was that of the flaws of capitalism. The author stated several things that were 'assumed' by large corporations. The very first one was this: "That stable and preserving relationships among people, place, and things do not matter and are of no worth." Uh, what? This came out of nowhere. If you boil down what the author said in his earlier writings, he basically is saying he hates large corporations because they aren't people and try to make things as cheaply as possible. This apparently means that increasing the divorce rate of their employees will also increase manufacturing efficiency. Or maybe burning memorials will help them sell their products for more because they aren't a person. This section makes no logical sense.
     Finally, Berry states that putting a tariff on 'cheap' foreign goods will be a benefit to our economy. Let's look at what happens when you do that. First, now companies like Walmart have to pay more for their raw materials. In order to counter this without going out of business, they must reduce costs. This will happen, mostly, in two ways: fire less important employees and increasing prices. So now those without an solid education have lost their job and now all products are beginning to cost more. Another disadvantage of reducing imports through restrictions is global relations. Regardless of any benefits cutting imports may have, restricting trade, particularily imports, with other countries decreases how usefull America is to them. If a country with nuclear capability loses nothing by nuking the crap out of America, then we have a substantial, uncontrollable threat. Trade is one of the largest factors that has kept the world from world war 3 for so long.


     As my essay reading, I read The Universal Declaration of Rights. As I stated in class, I found this to be very, very similar to the Decleration of Independence, albeit an updated edition. One section, "Everyone has the right to life, liberty, and security of person," was almost straight out of the original Declaration. The major difference is this Declaration was done by the UN, and it wasn't necessarily to anyone specific. It was mostly to set some rules for the entire world so we all had a common ground, whether we agreed on it or not.
     I would have to ask the question though, why did they make this document? It's not as if they can always stop these things from happening. In fact, going to war breaks most of the rights they presented. It gets to the point where they are almost setting a religion of their own, complete with their commandments. Still, it makes a few good points as to what we should and should not do as a general rule. I guess it just seems like they assume they have more authority than they actually do.