Somewhere along the line, in my teens, I thought: why don't countries who have the natural resources develop themselves and realize the profits meant for them by the PROVIDER.

Too, from wherever a product could be brought to market with the least amount of costs, that's where it should come from. For example, if beef could be more efficiently grown in Argentina, let Argentina supply the world with beef, and whatever part of the demand they could not meet, let marginal producers weigh in and set the price they and Argentina could get, bringing a profit to the marginal producers and a better one to Argentina.

I thought this would spread economic good fortune across the planet, and a peaceful trade policy would prevail.

In short, empires, with their need to manufacture goods for their markets, bludgeoned those countries with resources that came natural to them, not always bloodlessly, and created an economic system that favors the empires while the countries they pillaged live forever in poverty.

Had they paid a fair price for those natural resources, the world might have developed on grounds favorable to all.

Education, invention, creativity count. While the industrial revolution did not give birth to greed, it surely put it on a fast track.

A fast track right up to today's industrialists in the US; realizing that they were sharing too much of their profits with labor, decided they needed NAFTA and other free trade zones in which to lower their labor costs. Hence CAFTA too, (I don't think its been approved yet.) because of cheaper wages in Central America than in Mexico.

They promised us that goods made in China would be as good as those made here but would be much cheaper to buy. Bullshit! You ever try to uncurl a collar of a shirt made in China. Clothes that used to last a couple of years now need to be replaced more often. We wind up spending more in the long run.

There rises in all of this, however, a moral conumdrum. Is it morally acceptable to lower the standard of living of persons in the US--clearly wages have been abysmal for a couple of decades, as a result of Nafta and trade with China especially, in order to raise the standard of living in those countries with whom we trade freely.

Our standard of living, at least for the middle class, has been and is falling, while admittedly it is rising around the world, for the most part. It will be a long time before most of Africa and much of Central America, say, will emerge from the terrible poverty that seems to be their lot.

I'm torn, personally, as I see through the multi-national corporations promises of raising the standard of living in other parts of the planet as a blind for sheer greed of a desire for more profits.

Yet I want to see people of other cultures have their lives improved, better nutrition, better education, better training for jobs, and it tears at me that I lament the loss of jobs here, the lowering of educational standards here, the lowering of a standard of living here that war and the GI Bill created out of the Great Depression.

A wise man will come forth and tell us how to do both, keep raising the standard of living in advanced countries, yet continue to develop the rest of the world into that state of happiness our forefathers charged us to pursue by way of the Constitution in which they wrote the guidelines.

It should not be a case, as it has been, of robbing one to improve the other.

As for my late seventies, they're past, my early eighties are in full swing.

And I look forward with great anticipation to the solutions offered by generations younger than mine. We need better education, and we need health insurance for all. The stress of not having it is too great. Creativity comes rarely from a mind all stressed out, for whatever reason. and remember that John Locke and his followers among our founders insisted that health was part of the pursuit of happiness.