[ffn]

I like to remind you that we, as mere lowly humans, require food grown on a farm to survive a lot more so than we need software or music. If we collapse our agricultural backbone and just willy-nilly decide to depend upon a foreign nation for food, then be prepared to fight a lot more "oil wars" (except for human fuel and not just car fuel).

Furthermore, we'd be putting our trust into the governments and politicians of foreign nations. And, quite honestly, despite all the shit we see about our politicians being corrupt, cheating on their wives, embezzling thousands of dollars a year, letting the rich get away with billions in tax loopholes, being stupid in congress, being radical not-born-in-murica communists, etc., at least keep in mind we at least see them in all their human imperfections (and sometimes less-than-human vices), whereas we have absolutely no idea what the hell goes on behind the closed doors and smokescreens at a foreign government. Politics and power is inherently a very difficult game of balancing flexible compromises and hardline stoicism, not a place for cults of personalities and naive idealism.

As for me, I'd much rather trust the politician who is getting publicly crucified for having told a racist joke 10 years ago, flirted a little too much with some girl not his wife, is a closest homosexual, tweeted something dumb like "#killasians lolwat", or committed some other sensationalist-media-breaking-news-but-realistically-inconsequential-to-his-character "sin" than the perfect politician who has never commit any sin and who no one dares to speak ill against (e.g. today's chairman Xi).

[civilian]

You wrote some jingoist 19th-century bullshit. You're ready to fight in World War 1.

The idea that we need to protect strategic resources is outdated. We continue to do so, at our own detriment. Our sugar costs something like 5x what it costs in the rest of the world, because we place tariffs to keep it from coming in from the Caribbean. We are DESTROYING WEALTH CREATION with this market engineering. It is a tax that we see no benefit from and that is paid to no one.

Increased trade between countries increases stability. Some of my college classmates thought that we were due for a war with China just b/c they're the other huge power. What horseshit--- our mutual trade requires our politicians to play nice and not take any Crassian steps towards war.

If the US actually needed to make sure that we produced all of our strategic resources by ourselves then our economy would be tanked because we wouldn't be taking advantage of factories in BRIC. Do you think we make all the hard drives we would need to sustain a war against the rest of the world?

[eveningcoffee]

Loosing control over rare earth metals played out very well. For China.

Not being able to produce enough wood tanked Soviet Union.

[civilian]

I'm not familiar with the wood theory of the downfall of the Soviet Union. Link? I figured it was their centrally planned economy.

Yeah, so China has most rare earth metals. Are you advocating imperialism and occupation? Do we have evidence that they are managing their resource in an abusive way? (After a bit of reading, it appears that China does have large export restrictions. That market inefficiency is being solved by smuggling. :D http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare_earth_industry_in_China#Hi... )

[eveningcoffee]

Of course there are multiple factors for collapse of SU but from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_goods_in_the_Soviet_Un...

> By the time of the Soviet Union's collapse at the end of 1991, > nearly every kind of food was rationed. > Non-rationed foods and non-food consumer goods had virtually > disappeared from state owned stores.

Do you think that people were happy about this kind of situation?

China was not the only producer of rare earth metals but they used dumping and by that made production of rare earth metals unprofitable elsewhere. After other producers closed their plants, they started to heavily increase the rare earth metal prices.

[tekknik]

The problem here is that you expect history to indicate future performance. You expect each country to act morally instead of what's in their best (monetary) interest. How are wars fought these days? Sanctions, it has happened in recent history. Now what is a nation to do when a sanction against them on food imports? One thing is for sure, it'll help solve a population problem.

[rhino369]

The Midwest grows enough crops to feed the whole country if some major disaster or famine happened.

[kibwen]

The Midwest is rapidly depleting its own water supply as well.

"About 27 percent of the irrigated land in the United States overlies the aquifer, which yields about 30 percent of the ground water used for irrigation in the United States. Since 1950, agricultural irrigation has reduced the saturated volume of the aquifer by an estimated 9%. Depletion is accelerating, with 2% lost between 2001 and 2009 alone. Once depleted, the aquifer will take over 6,000 years to replenish naturally through rainfall."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogallala_Aquifer

[rhino369]

The core Midwest doesn't depend on that. The great plains do, but Iowa, Indiana, Illinois, etc. don't. You would probably get bored as fuck with corn and soy beans. But it would v feed tons of people if we didn't feed it to cows or gas tanks.

[kangaroo5383]

1. "Software or music" doesn't require water... most of them anyways.

2. Software / data and more modern approaches to agriculture can potentially optimize water usage.

3. startup / company opportunity here, if the policy makers can incentivize the agriculture industry to innovate instead of keeping the old inefficient ways.

[tokenadult]

"Ricardo's Difficult Idea" is an essay that provides a good online education in economics and why trade makes everyone richer, as demonstrated not just by history but also by mathematics.

http://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/ricardo.htm