OLD BETHPAGE, NY – AUGUST 30: A drone is flown for recreational purposes in the sky above Old Bethpage, New York on August 30, 2015. (Photo by Bruce Bennett/Getty Images)
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The division of labor isn’t a national security threat. Quite the opposite, and for obvious reasons. To see why, consider drones that have the potential to transform retail, medicine, and countless other aspects of life that readers have not yet contemplated.
As the New York Times recently reported, “A single Chinese company, the Shenzhen-based DJI, is estimated to manufacture more than 70 percent of the world’s commercial drones.” It’s a bullish story. For Americans.
Seriously, are New Yorkers and Texans harmed because Watsonville, CA-based Driscoll’s is the world’s largest berry company? Far from it. Think how much wasted resources and effort would be required of New Yorkers and Texans if they fenced themselves off from Driscoll’s plenty. Translated, they’re richer in New York and Texas precisely because they leave berry making to Driscoll’s.
What’s true about unfettered movement of market goods around the United States doesn’t lose even a scintilla of its genius assuming innovators in China are the producers. Work divided is just that. What others can do for us frees us to specialize in what we do best.
Translated, as the U.S. economy becomes increasingly reliant on drone technology, Americans will be richer for DJI and others like it taking on the work of producing drones. The latter won’t occur to our detriment, rather it will save us from having to make drones so that we can focus on other things. This includes the arguably even more remunerative and wealth-creating work associated with using drones to meet and lead the needs of a base of consumers whose acquisitiveness grows by the day.
It’s so easy to forget that new commercial creations don’t have a beginning and an end. This is true about drones. Assuming they become what’s expected of them, the real wealth won’t be an effect of who “wins” the drone race, rather it will result from the greatest, most future-seeing minds using drones to devise all manner of ways to develop world-leading businesses given lift-off by the drones themselves.
To which some will say DJI isn’t just based anywhere, it’s in China. And China is a military threat. If so, all the more reason for Americans to revel in DJI’s status. If Americans are the biggest importers of DJI’s drones, it will become even more expensive for China to invade us militarily.
Assuming it does anyway? If so, never forget that governments don’t have spending power just because they’re governments. Instead, their consumptive ability is directly associated with economic growth that they have taxable access to. In other words, the division of labor powers growth like nothing else, and economic growth is what the U.S. Treasury relies on to attain the means to fund a military.
Some will say the Chinese could use the drones to gather information on Americans. The first answer is good. Business service improves the better those businesses understand their customers.
To which still others will say that DJI could gather information on Americans to hand over to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Ok, but that same CCP could purchase information on U.S. consumers assuming the biggest drone seller had a U.S. address. And if the latter refused to sell to the CCP, the CCP could buy from those it would sell to.
Except that the whole notion of China using drones to harm us brings new meaning to paranoia, delusion, and realistically both. Missed by China skeptics in the U.S. is that if China wanted to harm us, it assuredly wouldn’t export to us. Which means what DJI is doing is peaceful. Embrace it.
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