The Real Issue On Aborted Dubai Deal

THE AWFUL SPECTACLE of the Republican Party scuttling to the right of the Democrats on national security over the Dubai ports deal obscures the real issue.

That Democrats are clueless, wrong on national security and wrong on economic policy. Again.

When President Bush infuriated the compassionate classes with his warning to the world that “you are with us or you are against us” he was articulating the overarching strategy of the United States.

That strategy is to invite the world to join us in our commonwealth of trust and good faith. We will trust those who are trustworthy, and we will fight those who are not.

The aborted Dubai port deal symbolizes this policy in spades. Dubai Ports World is, as Robert M. Green reminds us, probably the “global best practice” company in container port operations. They are right in the middle of the huge effort to upgrade the security and the efficiency of global trade.

Carved from the Dubai Ports Authority, the company's reputation for technological implementation dates back to its project to automate many of its processes in the 1990s. At that time, Dubai became one of the first ports in the world to implement so-called e-shipping, digitizing most of its planning, scheduling and operations while "building out" a CRM (customer relations management)/Web portal system that was one of the first of its kind used by a port.

According to American e-commerce experts who followed the UAE technology implementation as it has evolved, it was Dubai's willingness to invest in IT that allowed it to offer container shipping and related services at lowered costs for its customers. Last year, a Homeland Security official called the two-terminal Dubai facility "modern and extremely efficient ports."

This sort of story indicates that DB World is clearly showing, by its actions, that it belongs on the side that is “with us” rather than against us.

But you can see where the Democrats are coming from. If DB World represents global best practice in the ports business it is a threat to their union paymasters moving the cargo and driving the cranes and trying to continue as pencil-and-paper clerks in the face of a massive adoption of e-commerce practices. And it is also a threat to the monopolistic stevedoring companies that have comfortably extracted rent from the cosy port management trade for decades.

For ordinary Americans, DB World could be thought of as the Wal-Mart of the ports business. But for the port unions and companies, DB World is the grim reaper.

Well, after a week or so of political firestorm the Democrats have got their way, for the moment. No Wal-Marts in our ports! And no terrorist foreigners!

But we forget, as we obsess about terrorists and golden temples, that underneath all the froth and the confected rage of the well-educated Islamicist terrorists out for their bit of fun—just as European anarchists had their fun in Europe a century ago—a monster is stirring. That monster is what Marx called the productive forces. In the end, the monster will not be denied.

You can rail if you like at the Wal-Marts and the DB Worlds just as the fashionably radical railed against Standard Oil and U.S. Steel a century ago. But when these companies are bringing down the cost of doing business, you are railing against a force of nature.

One way or another, the world has to adapt to the new facts on the ground. When John D. Rockefeller reduced the price of oil by 90 percent and Andrew Carnegie reduced the price of steel by two thirds, the world changed. When Wal-Mart changes the face of retail with its relentless cost-cutting, and DB World galvanizes the freight forwarding business with its early adoption of web-based information management, then you’d better get with the program.

But for the progressive soul of the Democratic Party, that is inconceivable.

Sphere: Related Content |

Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

TAGS

Civil Society

“Civil Society”—a complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churches—builds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust

What Liberals Think About Conservatives

[W]hen I asked a liberal longtime editor I know with a mainstream [publishing] house for a candid, shorthand version of the assumptions she and her colleagues make about conservatives, she didn't hesitate. “Racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-choice fascists,” she offered, smiling but meaning it.
Harry Stein, I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next to a Republican

Liberal Coercion

[T]he Liberal, and still more the subspecies Radical... more than any other in these latter days seems under the impression that so long as he has a good end in view he is warranted in exercising over men all the coercion he is able[.]
Herbert Spencer, The Man Versus the State

Moral Imperatives of Modern Culture

These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self

US Life in 1842

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Society and State

For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008

Faith and Politics

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable... [1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

Never Trust Experts

No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.
Lord Salisbury, “Letter to Lord Lytton”

Conservatism's Holy Grail

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

Class War

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

Government Expenditure

The Union publishes an exact return of the amount of its taxes; I can get copies of the budgets of the four and twenty component states; but who can tell me what the citizens spend in the administration of county and township?
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

mysql close 0