Soybean Futures

That bastion of liberal socialist thinking, the Wall Street Journal, published another piece on trade today, "Market Skeptical of China Trade Deal."  I'll cut to the chase, the last few paragraphs.  "The U.S. and China have ended up in an odd position.  China, a one-party state with communist roots, insists that market forces determine the outcome of its purchase commitments.  Meanwhile, the U.S., a voice for capitalism, depends on massive state intervention to meet purchase commitments."

After I stopped laughing, I pondered this.  First of all, we live in a world wide economy.  There's a new virus in China, and we're very worried that it might spread quickly throughout the world.  That wasn't a problem a hundred years ago, much less fifty.  The article pointed out that soybeans come to China from Brazil and the U.S..  If we increase our soybean imports to China, then Brazil will increase theirs to some other country, etc., etc. In a world wide economy, the meaning of specific trade deficits quickly seem to fall apart.

What is the meaning of all this?  So, we send more money out of our country than we bring in.  Do we bring in more products? Or, do we just spend more money on the products that we bring in?  They're numbers.  Everyone tries to make sense of these numbers.  But the numbers don't exist in a vacuum.  Is this much ado about nothing, similar to our countries federal deficit, which seems to matter except when it doesn't?

What I actually found most fascinating about this article was the point that China seems to have focused on capitalist concepts.  Their communism, has little to do with economics, and everything to do with governmental power.  Our supposed socialism, which could be seen as our price supports for soybean farmers, has everything to do with economics and little to do with governmental power.  It can't, otherwise we'd have to run the Republicans out of Washington for having converted to socialism.

Shouldn't this all be a reminder that we're all just human beings, trying to live the best life possible.  America is about the individual person, not the individual soybean.