by Jim Rogers
This trip had been the most enormous event of my life, and now that we were nearing its end, several emotions surged through me. I was having a hard time wrestling with the grim reality that the trip was nearly over. I ached for it to last longer, and at the same time I was pleased that it looked as if it would be successful.
On a broader plane, I was saddened for my country. Everywhere we’d been, every society was untying the statist knots that had strangled it for decades, centuries in some cases. Everyone was throwing off all sorts of social and economic shackles, but the United States was heading in the other direction, relentlessly putting on controls, regulations, rules, and laws to control centrally its citizens, businesses, schools, and charities, one of the prime methods the Soviets, Latin Americans, and Africans had used to strangle themselves.
We found that the rest of the world was trying to be like what they thought we were—and indeed were at one time.
Today many businesses in Europe and Japan are loath to sell to us because we sue at the first glitch and our myriad regulations eliminate all profit. As an example dear to motorcyclists’ hearts, BMW won’t sell its excellent motorcycle helmets here. The regulations, insurance, potential liabilities, possible boycotts, and lawsuits eliminate all incentive. The manufacturers of the French morning-after birth-control pill, RU-486, have been extremely reluctant to market their pill here. Today even though an ex-husband pays alimony and child-support promptly, his ex-wife can garnishee his salary, creating more paperwork for corporations, who must hire employees to administer these rules. Our doctors are drowning in paperwork and federal procedures, often spending twenty hours a week on them.
Our statist nightmare goes on and on. Under the Clean Air Act employers must actively help their employees develop alternatives to driving to work. Under the Disabilities Act an employer has to keep employees who have had nervous breakdowns on the job, and must find work they can do. As much as we need export earnings, even in 1994 many U.S. cities and states wouldn’t do business with companies that trade with South Africa, even though virtually every other country, including black African nations, have been doing so for years. In both South Africa and Vietnam, where enormous positive changes have taken place for some time, there’s a feast to which every country in the world was invited. We Americans didn’t get there till after dessert, in time to dine on the scraps.
The United States can’t compete with others who don’t have such requirements, so how beneficial to us are they in the long run? These may be worthwhile, but someone has to pay for them. And you know who that is, you and me—and eventually the entire country’s prosperity.
The North American Free Trade Agreement should be good for the United States, Canada, and Mexico.
If it’s good for California and Mississippi to trade duty-free with each other, why not the United States with Mexico and Canada? We forget free trade was one of the great secrets of the British Empire’s success. The British brought capital, markets, and administrative and technical know-how to the colonies, which in turn provided labor, natural resources, and markets, a perfect recipe for commercial success.
Many well-intentioned Americans don’t see it this way. Along the maquiladora, the industrial zone in northern Mexico where five hundred thousand Mexicans work for United States companies, Zenith pays a dollar an hour, Ford $1.25, and General Motors and General Electric pay hundreds of workers only thirty dollars to forty dollars a week.
These low wages put up the backs of many United States’ unions and workers. How can we possibly compete? they ask. Surely the U.S. should protect its citizens’ jobs.
I don’t see it that way. In fact, G.E. sells more goods to Mexico, $750 million worth, than all G.E.’s Mexican-based operations sell to the U.S., $500 million worth. This surplus contributes to our overall favorable balance of trade with Mexico of some $5 billion a year. Working off the Commerce Department’s assumption that every $1 billion in U.S. exports supports twenty thousand jobs, G.E.’s $750 million in exports to Mexico supports fifteen thousand jobs. Our positive balance of trade means that we have one hundred thousand extra jobs in this country because of our trade with Mexico.
With Mexico’s coming growth and elimination of protectionism, we’ll sell the country a lot more, too, particularly high-tech products like cars, computers, medical equipment, and machine tools. Only one out of sixteen Mexicans has a car, compared with one out of two Americans. What an opportunity for us instead of the Japanese with the advantage of NAFTA.
Freed at last of its statist restrictions, Mexico will grow. As it continues to expand, it will need to develop its infrastructure. The U.S. Agency for International Development has estimated that power demand in Mexico will grow as much as 7 percent annually between 1989 and 1999. In this expansionary boom it will spend tens of billions of dollars. The chairman of General Electric de Mexico estimates that a recent order his company received to help construct the Samalayuca II power plant is worth $200 million to G.E. and that it will generate more than seven hundred employee-years of work in Schenectady, New York, and Greenville, South Carolina. Is this bad for the United States?
From a long-term perspective, NAFTA ties together three natural trading partners. We have some capital and markets, the Canadians have the natural resources, and Mexico has abundant labor and growing markets.
Yes, there will be some worker dislocations here, but should we preserve several thousand steelworkers’ jobs and deprive 260 million Americans of the benefits of cheaper steel?
Yes, we might even lose large numbers of jobs, maybe 250,000 over the next several years, but we will gain another 500,000. The political problem is that those 250,000 who think they’ll lose their jobs are highly vocal, whereas Joe Smith, twenty-three, who in two years will go to work making air conditioners to be shipped to Mexico, doesn’t yet know about his new job, isn’t organized along with the other lucky Americans to clamor for it, and isn’t lobbying his congressman.
What worries me is something entirely different. The marriages of our individual states into the United States, and of the Common Market countries, each contains a mix of the rich and poor, the well-financed and the nearly bankrupt. However, NAFTA brings together the United States, Mexico, and Canada, three of the largest debtor nations in the world, all three nearly bankrupt. It is a good plan with benefits for all three countries, but no one has ever put together three such large bankrupt entities. In the end it could turn out to be three drunks leaning on one another in what might be a vain lurch to find home, but on balance it should benefit everyone.
The risk is that the three deadbeats might try to go it alone in their new union and build barriers to trade against the outside world. As with the Common Market, this would be the worst possible outcome, containing within it the seeds of our own destruction, as we would give up learning how to compete successfully with the rest of the world.
We crossed the U.S. border at Brownsville, Texas, and celebrated with a dinner of Church’s fried chicken and Pabst Blue Ribbon beer. We had to sit outside in the parking lot because of the beer, but who cared. We’d made it!
It astonished me how Hispanic southern Texas is. Brownsville is 80 percent Hispanic. Even the Brownsville newspaper, in existence since sometime in the nineteenth century, was now being published in Spanish.
The second night in the States we wound up in the Houston home of a friend, George Stark. This was the first time we’d been with Americans for almost two years. I was under so much culture shock, I was almost dizzy.
My friend’s wife, Lois, was taken by our voyage and kept asking us, “How has it changed you?”
We scarcely realized we were back. We were still worrying about crossing borders and finding gas, wondering if our tires were okay and if the road ahead was paved and where we could find a decent room for the night. She asked a lot of perceptive questions, but all I could mutter was “I hope next time we meet I’ll have better answers to your questions.”
Something was di
fferent within me, but I couldn’t say what. As we drove east I began to muse on the question.
I knew that for a long time I had wanted to scrap completely my old life and start a new one. I had yearned to find a new road that was right for me. If I could just find the right road, I’d know it and follow it to its culmination. If I could just find the right road … Would this trip lead to the epiphany I’d been seeking?
We went on to New Orleans and to Alabama, where my cousins Pettus and Cathy Randall gave us a celebratory barbecue.
Everybody else was in dress-up clothes, but all I had still were my jeans and leather jacket. I tacked our multicolored map of the world on the wall, traced out our route, and answered questions.
After that was over, a latecomer cornered me. “How was the trip?”
“Well, it’s not over yet,” I said. “We plan to head on up to New York in a couple of days.”
“My God!” he said. “Don’t tell me you’re going to drive all the way from Alabama to New York on a motorcycle!”
We had parties all along the coast, looking up people and eating dinner with friends in Montgomery, Birmingham, Atlanta, Charlotte, Washington, and Philadelphia. We’d seen so much and had been gone so long that I understood the difficulties Marco Polo must have experienced trying to communicate the glory and vastness of China to thirteenth-century Italians.
I kept warning Tabitha not to get overconfident just because we were close to home, but I was the one who fell off the bike. It happened in Tennessee. Again, I was pushing too hard in the evening, trying to make more mileage than I should. Ironically, having been around the world without mishap, I finally had an accident. I banged a rib, chipped two bones in my hand, and cut my chin.
We drove into Philadelphia and got caught in a huge rush-hour traffic jam.
Gosh, I thought, traffic jams are the same all over the world.
Finally we drove into New York on a fabulous November day accompanied by the bright, dancing strains of Chopin on WQXR.
We’d now been gone twenty months. My odometer said we’d covered 57,020 miles, and we hadn’t yet gone to Alaska. We’d been on boats and in the air another forty-odd thousand for a total of nearly one hundred thousand miles.
Arriving home we felt weak, overwhelmed, and tearful. As I entered my house, I wished the trip wasn’t over, but I also wanted to know if everything was all right. What had happened to my life over the past two years? Box after box of mail rose on the kitchen floor, and I had all the problems Judd had engineered to sort out.
I went through the entire house, basement to roof, to satisfy myself that everything was as I’d left it. Even though it was the seventeenth of November, on the roof garden two yellow roses had blossomed, which I took to be a sign of good luck.
We opened a bottle of Dom Pérignon and had black-eyed peas, rice, and collard greens for the first time in two years.
The next morning I went to a board meeting at nine o’clock.
“I haven’t seen you in a while,” a guy asked. “What have you been up to?”
“I’ve just been around the world on a motorcycle.”
He smiled and said that was nice.
It takes a lot to impress a New Yorker.
AFTERWORD
In December I gave Tabitha the gold necklace I’d bought in Buenos Aires, and she was surprised and delighted.
After a rest, we hit the road again, this time to Alaska, bringing our trip total to 65,067 miles.
When we got there, we realized how different people in the Yukon and Alaska are from those in Ottawa and Washington, D.C. As in so many places we passed through around the world, these people aren’t the joiners and backslappers of the capitals, they are loners and mavericks, a hardier breed produced by the rugged nature of their habitat. Thousands of miles and several time zones from Washington, Alaska has only a half-million people in a space a sixth the size of the lower forty-eight states.
How can Alaskans allow Washington to run their lives? What do the moles of the Beltway know of their lovely, stark country? Alaskans have only a single congressman and two senators in Washington, which means the capital largely ignores the wishes of its inhabitants.
In fact, Alaskans have more in common with their neighbors in the Yukon and in Siberia than they have with bureaucrats in Washington, Ottawa, or Moscow. If the three of them, fabulously rich in mineral resources, aligned themselves into an independent frontier nation, they could attract enormous development capital.
Her eyes opened to several things by her nearly two years of traveling, Tabitha’s off to graduate school now, studying international relations, although she might be better equipped to teach it than someone who’s only read about it in books.
To show you how fast the world changes, I have traded in several additional countries outside the United States, including Austria, Italy, Turkey, and Ireland, countries that when we passed through them didn’t seem like good buys. Not only did the market in Turkey drop 85 percent, but the government took many steps to make the environment better for investment, providing me with an excellent opportunity. As the African National Congress became more moderate, at least for negotiating and electorial purposes, I invested in the South African stock market for awhile. I’ve even started putting small amounts of money into other African countries, as the continent has evolved as I expected it would.
There’s a warrant out for Judd’s arrest, but the police tell me that even though he admitted forging my signature several times, it’s not worth their while to extradite him. It’s a sad state of affairs when the criminal-justice system is too busy with other crimes to chase down an admitted felon.
I fulfilled my dream. I now know the world in the way I’d hoped to, and it has not only helped me understand investing better, it has given me a better sense of who we are as a species. We’re certainly a lot more robust than statist politicians, seeking to solve every problem conceivable—real and imagined—would have us believe.
Now that I’m back, having seen a good part of the world close to the ground, people ask how the United States looks to me. I hate to say it, because this is my home, but I see America as an obvious short sale.
It’s painful to see how hopelessly provincial and isolated we still are in this country. It’s frightening that neither political party has been or is willing to address our economic problems.
Around the world we saw firsthand what statist shackles had done to so very many countries, and I can see clearly that here in the States it will have to become far worse before it gets better.
I am convinced that Clinton will be the last president of his party. In 1918, Lloyd George, head of the Liberal Party, was Prime Minister of England. To the Brits, he and his party won World War I. He was as popular as any post-war hero in history.
However, the British economy, the system, the society, the currency—you name it—was a mess underneath, just as ours is today. Even though Lloyd George was a world-renowned leader of his party, which had dominated U.K. politics for decades, there has never been a prime minister from his party since because of that mess, just as Clinton will be the last leader his party ever elects. The Democrats controlled both the executive and the legislative branches of government during the pivotal 1992–1994 period, so they will get a lot of the blame. The Democrats also have serious demographic problems. Their strength for decades has been (1) converts during the Depression who are now decreasing in numbers, (2) unions that continue to lose power, (3) white Southerners who are abandoning the party in droves, and (4) blacks from whom they cannot hope for more than the 80% support they get now. The Democrats will not just disappear any more than did the British Liberal Party. In fact, the Liberal Party still exists as a rump all these decades later. No, the Democrats will just wither away.
Don’t get me wrong, the Republicans deserve a lot of the blame; their split and/or demise will come later if they do not do something quickly about the problems we face. I worry when I hear Republicans saying they want t
o balance the budget by 2002. That says to me they do not understand the problem. Our situation is so severe that it needs to be corrected now. By 2002 it will be too late. Even assuming that the current politicians actually mean it, we have heard the same solemn resolve half a dozen times since 1979. We have even had laws passed requiring balanced budgets. If they ever report a “balanced budget” we should all insist on an independent audit to flush out the smoke and mirrors of Beltway accounting.
Republican talk, regulations, and requirements may be better than Democratic ones, but we need a lot more fast.
Let’s look at the big picture again if this seems shocking. Seemingly permanent politcal structures around the world are fracturing. Who could have conceived of a non-Liberal Democrat running Japan—much less a Socialist? The parties that dominated Italy since World War II have all been supplanted and/or disappeared. Look at what’s happening in Canada, Belgium, Sweden, and Mexico. During the Cold War, voters around the world accepted a lot of nonsense as they were afraid to ask too many questions. Serious changes in the status quo could lead to who knew where.
The Cold War is over so people worldwide feel free to question old assumptions.
Our system is so rotten, so corrupted and bloated with debt, obvious and disguised, that no matter what any politician does, it will become the focus of an immense crisis before the decade is over.
Our politicians, both Democrats and Republicans, have followed a policy of debasing and devaluing the dollar for years. It took the Romans four hundred years, the Spanish two hundred years, and the British seventy-five years to debase their currencies as much as we are debasing ours in a couple of decades. The people running the government don’t care, and the Federal Reserve would rather save the politicians than save the currency. I don’t see much hope for the dollar. Given what we’d seen as the consequences of weak currencies around the world, I expect a continued deterioration of our situation. We are going to hear the term “currency crisis” a lot more. The world won’t end; after all Britain is still around, as is Spain, but they are now only shadows of their former selves. Britain was the richest, most powerful country in the world in 1920, but coined the term “brain drain” as early as the 1950s, when people began leaving.