Suppose you're raising two kids, and you need job stability. And your company says that you have to get an RFID chip implanted, or else you're fired. Suppose you're raising two kids, and you need job stability. And your company says that you have to let the boss sleep with your wife, or you are fired.
Somehow, I don't see any company being able to make that demand, no matter if there is a law or no law. No one would accept that, feeding their kids or not. Such a thing is a social taboo, which is even more powerful than a law.
Likewise, a law isn't going to protect you from having to get an RFID. OK, so the employer can't legally REQUIRE you to have an RFID. But employees who have the RFID are going to have higher productivity (otherwise, what advantage would it be for a company to pay for such a system?)... and so the employeer can just fire the less productive employees who will inevitably the ones who can't interact with the RFID system.
However, a taboo against RFID... a certain absolute unwillingness for anyone to get an RFID implant, is far more powerful. People break laws all the time (just look at the drug trade), people however almost never break taboos (how many people engange in cannibalism, for example)?
a state legislature that "gets" it... No, not really. Notice how the state legislator didn't pass a ban on the government requiring RFID implants, or schools requiring RFID implants, or the military requiring RFID implants.
All fascist and/or totalitarian governments impose strict regulations on private buisnesses. The state legislature is really more concerned that if private employers use RFID implants, that there will be less of an excuse for a government RFID system.
1. Because for the Marxist interpretation of the Labor Theory of Value to mean anything, there needs to be an objective "social value" to all goods, as the Marxist version the the Labor Theory of Value measures labor based on its 'social good'. Since 'social good' is a completly unquantifiable subjective value, and Marx never even bothered to try to create an objective system for measuring "social value", the labor theory of value is pretty much useless for state economic planning. In reality, planning for the "social good" helps the political elite (state capitalist class), because they get to decide what "social good" is.
2. Because Marxism is built on the assumption of historically inevitable economic changes. History goes from capitalism, to socialism, to communism, and only moves one way. Any revolution, according to Marx, is a "progressive" revolution, as it happens when it is nessicary to shift the economy from one form of economic production to the other. Revolutions happen when an economy is ready to shift from one stage to another, but the entrenched economic elite don't let it happen.
Emperical evidence of revolutions, including Marxist sort of revolutions, clearly demonstrate otherwise. If the working class overthrow the government, it doesn't always lead to socialism (it could be argued that it never has lead to socialism, that places like the USSR where practicing State Capitalism). If your revolution is not garanteed to produce socialism, it is not nessicarily desirable for the working class to overthrow capitalism. For example, if the USSR wasn't really "socialism", but it was really "state capitalism", that means that socialist revolution can be a one way ticket to an even more oppressive capitalist system.
3. Marx claims that the material circumstance / productive output of a society is what leads to social justice. Marx believes that socialism outproduces capitalism, and this is why a socialist society is better for the working class. Experience shows that capitalism outproduces socialism.
4. Marx ignored the fact that capitalists are also workers. Capitalist provide the labor of economic planning. Since Marxist Labor Theory of Value measures labor in the amount of "social good" produced, it is arguable that some capitalists do more labor than the combined efforts of the people they hire.
5. Marx completly ignored the fact that supply and demand would mean that companies must compete for workers, and that would drive wages up. Marx assumed that competition with other companies can only drive wages down. Since 95% of Americans make more than legal minimum wage, obviously workers wages aren't in a race to the bottom under capitalism. If Marx was correct, most buisnesses would pay their workers the lowest wage possible: the minimum wage.
So there, a few reasons of the top of my head, why Marxism is deeply flawed. Happy?
And Marxism is dead, because virtually every state in the world is practicing a mixed economy (sans maybe North Korea... Even Cuba is liberalizing its economy to a certain extent), because most self-proclaimed Marxists don't actually support anything of the sort (they are neo-Maoists, or Bolivarians, or socialist-anarchist), and that mixed economy Euro-Socialism has pretty much replaced Marxist style socialism as the goal of people on the left.
Security risk, boo hoo... Really, we might as well use the plutonium for fuel too. You might be sarcastic, but I am serious. We can't keep the rest of the world in the first half of the 20th century forever. Countries *ARE* going to get nuke weapons, and we are going to have to learn to deal with it. It has been more than 60 years since the invention of nuclear weapons... any country capable of building jet aircraft is capable of building nuclear weapons.
Really? Your statement sounds like a dodge to me. Anyone who has taken anything more than a cursory glance at Marx's economic writings wouldn't write such a sweeping generalization like that. I suspect that you are vaguely familiar with Marx from second, third or fourth-hand sources (he was killed by Stalin, right?), and find that good enough reason to dismiss him. And that's fine. Just don't think that I feel any obligation to take you seriously when you write something like that. Once again, the religious style reasoning... "if you don't agree with Marxism, obviously you don't know anything about Marxism, because of course everyone who reads Marx would see the undeniable truth of Marxism".
Pretty much everyone with an education has had to read the Communist Manifesto and Capital at some point, so please get off that trip. I read the CM and Capital... CM is sloganeering, and Capital is mid-19th century pseudo-science. I read the Bible too, but that doesn't make me a Christian.
Marx was a crappy economist, and it is tedious to go through page by page of his work pointing out flaws when so many people of many diverse political beliefs have already done that.
In claiming that Marxism is somehow "closer to a religion," what are you talking about? The fact that a 150 year old work is held as the paragon of economic and social understanding by some people. Psychologists understand the relevance of Freud, but only a dwindling few actually believe it is an accurate model of human behavior. Economists respect the works of Adam Smith and Fredick Bastiat, but no one would consider them them the be-all end-all of economics. And in the medical field, if you were using a mid-19th century textbook as the basis of all medical knowledge, you would be considered a quack.
After all, I am the one who has read lots of Marx, lots of non-Marx, and lots of anti-Marx social, cultural and economic theory, evaluated them, found some wanting, some less wanting, and some incredibly insightful. Can you say the same? I read the Bible, and that was enough. I don't need to devote my life to its study to understand that it is random historical narrative mixed with superstition and not the divinely inspired word of god. Same with Marx.
Surely with such a strong statement like that you can tell just exactly which parts of Marx's critique of capitalism are no longer valid. That is a loaded question. Marx's critiques of 'capitalism' were never valid.
However, you misinterpreted what I am saying. I am saying that Marxism as a popular ideology is dead. Most so-called Socialists support the non-Marxist European model. Those who still claim to be Marxist are largely the diseffected bourgeois who are attracted to the 'Che Guavara' revolutionary chic of it all, and aren't really Marxists in any meaningful sense (maybe vaugly some sort of Socialist-Anarchist in ideology, and consumer capitalists in practice).
Much like I don't need to debate the 'spiritual truth' of Zoroastrianism to make the arguement that it is a dying or dead religion (compared to Christianity, Islam, Bhuddism, even Scientology or Mormonism), I don't need to argue the validity of Marxism to see that it is no longer one of the definitive world ideologies, the way it was in 1960 for example.
Please be as specific as possible so that I can refer to the proper texts to check up on Marx's reasoning and find out exactly where he went wrong. I trust that you know what you are talking about, so please do fill me in and please do so in some detail. After all, I wouldn't want to come away thinking that you made a claim like this without having any idea of what you're talking about. Debunking Marxism is beyond the scope of a causal Slashdot post. Check out this for more info as a starting point: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticisms_of_Marxism
Check out the links and references if you are still interested. Needless to say, I doubt I can change your mind, because Marxism is an all encompassing belief system, closer to a religion or philosophy than economic theory. People on both the left and right have been tearing apart Marxism for years, and so if you haven't heard at least some of the arguements, you are willfully oblivious to them.
ltimately it's up to the parents and the student to insure the student's educational future and success, and always has been. But, if that is the case, why not let the parents and students choose the school they want to go to. You can't have a socialist education system that takes all possible and power away from parents and students, then say "but it is their responsiblity". If you don't have power and choice, you don't have responsiblity.
Its pathetic, really. Either you are (like Lenin) for the self-determination of nations regardless of their stage of economic and social development; or you support some variant of nationalism. Either you are against colonization, or you are for it. If Parenti were at all consistent or intellectually honest, he would say: "I support the Chinese invasion and colonization of Tibet because China is more progressive. I also support the US invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan because, as much as it pains me to say it, the US is the more progressive side in those conflicts. Israeli settlements in the West Bank are wrong, and so is the Chinese population transfer to Tibet." But he doesn't. And he doesn't because he either isn't that bright or isn't that honest. Take your pick. Marxism is dead. There are a small and ever-diminishing number of true old-school Marxists left, but most people who consider themselves "Marxist" nowadays are really just anti-Capitalist or anti-American reactionaries from the Western Bourgeois... or third world dictators like in Cuba or North Korea, who use Marxism as an excuse to justify their power.
Parenti is against the Iraq War, and for the Chinese occupation of Tibet, because supporting both these positions is contrarian to U.S. foreign policy, not because he reasoned his opinions out according to some coherent ideological structure.
Could you at least show the Dalai Lama some respect by spelling his name correctly? The guy has won a Nobel Peace Prize and I suspect you haven't. Yeah, but the Dalai Lama owned human beings as slaves, and I haven't. I don't really consider slave-owners to be the paragon of virtue, even if they win a political popularity contest like the Nobel Peace Prize.
I suppose it hasn't occured to you that there might be a way of life that doesn't revolve around power and greed? I would say owning human beings as personal property is the ultimate expression of power and greed. But so long as he makes inscrutable fortune-cookie style soundbite proclamations every once in a while, sucker Westerners will lap that stuff up and consider him some sort of sage.
And I thought Canada was the largest producer of grain (wheat at the very least) Canada is a larger per-capita producer of grain, but has 1/10th the people.
There is thousands of years of coal available, which can be processed into a diesel fuel. There is also nuclear electric power, with hydrogen fuel cells as batteries, if we are concerned about CO2 emmissions (but the "envoirnmentalists" will probably make sure that we go with coal).
The U.S. has no shortage of energy options. It is just that oil is so damn cheap that unless the supply is seriously endangered, the U.S. isn't going to make the investment to change.
Just because you're overseas doesn't exempt you from US law. Go use drugs or sleep with an underage person overseas and then come back and tell the FBI. Turning over data to police who have a warrant is not illegal in the United States, nor in China. If you want to argue the legitimacy of the Chinese government, that is fine... but you don't do that by trying to extort money from a U.S. company.
Really? Last I checked, it was still illegal for Americans to violate human rights, even while overseas. Actually, it is illegal for foreign subsidieries of U.S. companies to disobey the laws of the countries they do buisness in. In this case, it would be a violation of U.S. law not to turn over the data to the Chinese.
They do indeed, if you buy locally in an area with a high cost of living. The agribusiness model is predicated on quite a few things (monocropping, for example) that don't make sense on a local level (where people have a vested interest in the quality of their water and the ecological effects of the pest controls that monocropping requires.) If you look at high-density population centers in North America and Western Europe, and combine that with highest possible crop yields of nearby farmable land, you will see that buying locally is pretty much impossible for the vast majority of people. Local produce is a luxury good.
The survival of our urban population absolutly depends on the modern agribusiness model. At least until atomic powered multi-story hydroponic urban farming is possible and politically acceptable.
If you stop doing buisness with countries that violate human rights:
1) You are going to stop doing buisness with pretty much every country, because they all have their own dirty laundry.
2) You aren't nessicarily going to encourage the country that you are isolating from doing bad things... the more isolated a country is, the worse the human rights situation is going to be.
3) Different countries have different ideas about what is human rights, so by taking action you are asserting the superiority of your culture - Hardly a peaceful and tolerant action.
While Europe has strict privacy laws against private institutions, but there are very few privacy protections from the government itself.
I don't think you can say privacy laws are more or less strict in Europe... rather, the privacy laws in Europe tend to reflect European cultural biases (i.e. innate trust in the government, and innate hostility towards non government institutions).
and oil. And the people who export the oil then spend it on U.S. goods, or trade the currency with other people who want to spend it on U.S. goods. The people who export oil don't want to be paid in worthless currency.
U.S. exports are about a trillion dollars a year, the global market for oil is at about 300 billion dollars a year. The U.S. is the single largest exporter, with even more exports than China! The demand for U.S. goods and services is where the value of U.S. currency ultimatly comes from.
Yes there is an objective measure of 'loudness' it's the Root Mean Square average volume. RTFA No, there is no objective measure of 'loudness', since there are different psychoaccoustic properties to different frequences, and some people hear certain frequencies better than others. The percieved loudness can even be influenced by your speakers and room acoustics (something with higher frequencies will usually sound louder in a room with lots of reverb, than something with lots of bass in a room with lots of reverb, despite having the same RMS, due to the way the sound reverberates).
RMS is used by certain devices to try to predict and normalize loudness, but it is very far from perfect. And it doesn't represent any sort of objective measure of loudness.
Those exporting countries are willing sit on trillion+ dollar reserves because oil typically hasn't been available for import with any currency other than US dollars. Cutting a deal with Saudi Arabia (the OPEC swing producer) to price oil only in dollars in exchange for propping up their oppressive dictatorship, has caused the rest of OPEC to fall in line... But if the Euro was particularly more desirable than the dollar, why wouldn't Saudi Arabia just switch to Euro? It isn't like European governments are opposed to proping up oppressive dictatorships when the need arises, nor are they any less dependent on middle eastern oil (the U.S. imports about 49% of its oil, where as Europe about 90% of its oil). They have just as much to lose by seeing a radical Islamic government take over in Saudi Arabia.
LOL, and many of those "US" products the Europeans are buying were produced in China. None. Most of those tech products European are buying from the U.S. are software, biotech and pharmaceuticals, aerospace technology, industrial electronics and robotics, etc., things that China doesn't export.
China exports low cost consumer electronics, such as DVD players. That is because the cost of labor is the biggest single cost of consumer electronics. However, the cost of labor on a 787 is negligible, the cost of labor on an industrial CNC mill is negligible, the cost of labor on Adobe InDesign in negligible, the cost of labor on the newest cancer drugs are negligible.
Europe buys their consumer electronics directly from China as well. That includes so-called "European" brands such as Nokia, which are mostly manifactured in China, India, or the less developed eastern european countries where labor is cheap, such as Romania.
Okay, so our dollars can be spent on other country's goods, too. No, I didn't say that, you just made that up completly off the top of your head. U.S. dollars are the official currency of the U.S., and are only good for trading for U.S. goods (or trading the currency with other people who want to purchase U.S. goods).
Now we can't buy foreign goods with our dollars? But didn't you just say we are sending them our dollars? We purchase their goods with U.S. dollars, which goes into an account at a U.S. bank, which they can then spend on U.S. goods... or trade that currency for other currencies in countries where they want to purchase something.
But they can't use that U.S. currency to purchase things in France, or to purchase things in the UK, or to purchase things in Japan, unless they find a bank that will be willing to trade them a corresponding amount of those currencies... and to do that, there have to be people in France, or the UK, or Japan, who want to buy U.S. goods and so are willing to trade their own currency for U.S. dollars.
There is no gold standard... The dollar isn't backed by any commodity. The only value that the U.S. dollar has is that it can be used to purchase U.S. goods. For every dollar the U.S. spends on foreign goods, those foreign traders need to spend a dollar on U.S. goods (or on U.S. stocks or bonds or property).
I don't think you have any idea how international trade actually works. This from someone who thinks the U.S. is still on the gold standard and wants to emulate the trade policies of Cuba.
Wages are even higher in Europe, yet according to the story you import more electronics from Europe than you produce yourself. WRONG! According to the article, the U.S. imports more tech products from Europe than it does from Canada and Mexico (i.e. North America). It doesn't say anything about more tech goods being produced in Europe than the U.S..
The U.S. actually maintains a trade surplus in tech good with Europe, to the tune of $13 billion... Europeans buy far more U.S. tech products than the U.S. buys European tech products. http://www.aeanet.org/PressRoom/prac_TCS_2007.asp
China, and their cheap consumer electronics is where the overwelming majority of the U.S. deficit is coming from. Europe is in an even worse state in that regard.
And then, when you buy foreign made goods, that recycled money leaves the country, leaving you with less to purchase with. It is an entropic cycle, and will eventually fail. U.S. dollars only have value because they can be spent on U.S. goods. When the U.S. has a 'trade deficit', it means that those foreign countries are sitting on those dollars we send them (or, more likely, purchasing U.S. government bonds). We give them peices of paper (or nowadays, bits on a computer), and they send us DVD players and Barney toys.
Eventually, they will spend those dollars on U.S. goods, as that is the only thing they are good for, or sell them to someone else who will spend those dollars on U.S. goods.
International trade no longer takes place in gold... the countries we are trading with have no choice to buy U.S. goods eventually.
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Somehow, I don't see any company being able to make that demand, no matter if there is a law or no law. No one would accept that, feeding their kids or not. Such a thing is a social taboo, which is even more powerful than a law.
Likewise, a law isn't going to protect you from having to get an RFID. OK, so the employer can't legally REQUIRE you to have an RFID. But employees who have the RFID are going to have higher productivity (otherwise, what advantage would it be for a company to pay for such a system?)... and so the employeer can just fire the less productive employees who will inevitably the ones who can't interact with the RFID system.
However, a taboo against RFID... a certain absolute unwillingness for anyone to get an RFID implant, is far more powerful. People break laws all the time (just look at the drug trade), people however almost never break taboos (how many people engange in cannibalism, for example)?
All fascist and/or totalitarian governments impose strict regulations on private buisnesses. The state legislature is really more concerned that if private employers use RFID implants, that there will be less of an excuse for a government RFID system.
I think you are forgetting the N-Gage!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N-Gage
OK,
Some of the many reasons Marxism is flawed:
1. Because for the Marxist interpretation of the Labor Theory of Value to mean anything, there needs to be an objective "social value" to all goods, as the Marxist version the the Labor Theory of Value measures labor based on its 'social good'. Since 'social good' is a completly unquantifiable subjective value, and Marx never even bothered to try to create an objective system for measuring "social value", the labor theory of value is pretty much useless for state economic planning. In reality, planning for the "social good" helps the political elite (state capitalist class), because they get to decide what "social good" is.
2. Because Marxism is built on the assumption of historically inevitable economic changes. History goes from capitalism, to socialism, to communism, and only moves one way. Any revolution, according to Marx, is a "progressive" revolution, as it happens when it is nessicary to shift the economy from one form of economic production to the other. Revolutions happen when an economy is ready to shift from one stage to another, but the entrenched economic elite don't let it happen.
Emperical evidence of revolutions, including Marxist sort of revolutions, clearly demonstrate otherwise. If the working class overthrow the government, it doesn't always lead to socialism (it could be argued that it never has lead to socialism, that places like the USSR where practicing State Capitalism). If your revolution is not garanteed to produce socialism, it is not nessicarily desirable for the working class to overthrow capitalism. For example, if the USSR wasn't really "socialism", but it was really "state capitalism", that means that socialist revolution can be a one way ticket to an even more oppressive capitalist system.
3. Marx claims that the material circumstance / productive output of a society is what leads to social justice. Marx believes that socialism outproduces capitalism, and this is why a socialist society is better for the working class. Experience shows that capitalism outproduces socialism.
4. Marx ignored the fact that capitalists are also workers. Capitalist provide the labor of economic planning. Since Marxist Labor Theory of Value measures labor in the amount of "social good" produced, it is arguable that some capitalists do more labor than the combined efforts of the people they hire.
5. Marx completly ignored the fact that supply and demand would mean that companies must compete for workers, and that would drive wages up. Marx assumed that competition with other companies can only drive wages down. Since 95% of Americans make more than legal minimum wage, obviously workers wages aren't in a race to the bottom under capitalism. If Marx was correct, most buisnesses would pay their workers the lowest wage possible: the minimum wage.
So there, a few reasons of the top of my head, why Marxism is deeply flawed. Happy?
And Marxism is dead, because virtually every state in the world is practicing a mixed economy (sans maybe North Korea... Even Cuba is liberalizing its economy to a certain extent), because most self-proclaimed Marxists don't actually support anything of the sort (they are neo-Maoists, or Bolivarians, or socialist-anarchist), and that mixed economy Euro-Socialism has pretty much replaced Marxist style socialism as the goal of people on the left.
Pretty much everyone with an education has had to read the Communist Manifesto and Capital at some point, so please get off that trip. I read the CM and Capital... CM is sloganeering, and Capital is mid-19th century pseudo-science. I read the Bible too, but that doesn't make me a Christian.
Marx was a crappy economist, and it is tedious to go through page by page of his work pointing out flaws when so many people of many diverse political beliefs have already done that. In claiming that Marxism is somehow "closer to a religion," what are you talking about? The fact that a 150 year old work is held as the paragon of economic and social understanding by some people. Psychologists understand the relevance of Freud, but only a dwindling few actually believe it is an accurate model of human behavior. Economists respect the works of Adam Smith and Fredick Bastiat, but no one would consider them them the be-all end-all of economics. And in the medical field, if you were using a mid-19th century textbook as the basis of all medical knowledge, you would be considered a quack. After all, I am the one who has read lots of Marx, lots of non-Marx, and lots of anti-Marx social, cultural and economic theory, evaluated them, found some wanting, some less wanting, and some incredibly insightful. Can you say the same? I read the Bible, and that was enough. I don't need to devote my life to its study to understand that it is random historical narrative mixed with superstition and not the divinely inspired word of god. Same with Marx.
However, you misinterpreted what I am saying. I am saying that Marxism as a popular ideology is dead. Most so-called Socialists support the non-Marxist European model. Those who still claim to be Marxist are largely the diseffected bourgeois who are attracted to the 'Che Guavara' revolutionary chic of it all, and aren't really Marxists in any meaningful sense (maybe vaugly some sort of Socialist-Anarchist in ideology, and consumer capitalists in practice).
Much like I don't need to debate the 'spiritual truth' of Zoroastrianism to make the arguement that it is a dying or dead religion (compared to Christianity, Islam, Bhuddism, even Scientology or Mormonism), I don't need to argue the validity of Marxism to see that it is no longer one of the definitive world ideologies, the way it was in 1960 for example. Please be as specific as possible so that I can refer to the proper texts to check up on Marx's reasoning and find out exactly where he went wrong. I trust that you know what you are talking about, so please do fill me in and please do so in some detail. After all, I wouldn't want to come away thinking that you made a claim like this without having any idea of what you're talking about. Debunking Marxism is beyond the scope of a causal Slashdot post. Check out this for more info as a starting point: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticisms_of_Marxis
Check out the links and references if you are still interested. Needless to say, I doubt I can change your mind, because Marxism is an all encompassing belief system, closer to a religion or philosophy than economic theory. People on both the left and right have been tearing apart Marxism for years, and so if you haven't heard at least some of the arguements, you are willfully oblivious to them.
Parenti is against the Iraq War, and for the Chinese occupation of Tibet, because supporting both these positions is contrarian to U.S. foreign policy, not because he reasoned his opinions out according to some coherent ideological structure.
Mod this person up! Slavery was actually legal in Tibet until the Chinese takeover, and argueably the Dali Lama himself was a slave owner.
China may have taken over Tibet for purely imperialist reasons, but that doesn't make pre-China Tibet some glorious Shangri-La paradise.
There is thousands of years of coal available, which can be processed into a diesel fuel. There is also nuclear electric power, with hydrogen fuel cells as batteries, if we are concerned about CO2 emmissions (but the "envoirnmentalists" will probably make sure that we go with coal).
The U.S. has no shortage of energy options. It is just that oil is so damn cheap that unless the supply is seriously endangered, the U.S. isn't going to make the investment to change.
The survival of our urban population absolutly depends on the modern agribusiness model. At least until atomic powered multi-story hydroponic urban farming is possible and politically acceptable.
If you stop doing buisness with countries that violate human rights:
1) You are going to stop doing buisness with pretty much every country, because they all have their own dirty laundry.
2) You aren't nessicarily going to encourage the country that you are isolating from doing bad things... the more isolated a country is, the worse the human rights situation is going to be.
3) Different countries have different ideas about what is human rights, so by taking action you are asserting the superiority of your culture - Hardly a peaceful and tolerant action.
While Europe has strict privacy laws against private institutions, but there are very few privacy protections from the government itself.
I don't think you can say privacy laws are more or less strict in Europe... rather, the privacy laws in Europe tend to reflect European cultural biases (i.e. innate trust in the government, and innate hostility towards non government institutions).
U.S. exports are about a trillion dollars a year, the global market for oil is at about 300 billion dollars a year. The U.S. is the single largest exporter, with even more exports than China! The demand for U.S. goods and services is where the value of U.S. currency ultimatly comes from.
RMS is used by certain devices to try to predict and normalize loudness, but it is very far from perfect. And it doesn't represent any sort of objective measure of loudness.
That is, of course, aside from the fact the the worldwide spending on oil, each year, is about 300 billion dollars ( http://media.www.michigandaily.com/media/storage/
China exports low cost consumer electronics, such as DVD players. That is because the cost of labor is the biggest single cost of consumer electronics. However, the cost of labor on a 787 is negligible, the cost of labor on an industrial CNC mill is negligible, the cost of labor on Adobe InDesign in negligible, the cost of labor on the newest cancer drugs are negligible.
Europe buys their consumer electronics directly from China as well. That includes so-called "European" brands such as Nokia, which are mostly manifactured in China, India, or the less developed eastern european countries where labor is cheap, such as Romania.
But they can't use that U.S. currency to purchase things in France, or to purchase things in the UK, or to purchase things in Japan, unless they find a bank that will be willing to trade them a corresponding amount of those currencies... and to do that, there have to be people in France, or the UK, or Japan, who want to buy U.S. goods and so are willing to trade their own currency for U.S. dollars.
There is no gold standard... The dollar isn't backed by any commodity. The only value that the U.S. dollar has is that it can be used to purchase U.S. goods. For every dollar the U.S. spends on foreign goods, those foreign traders need to spend a dollar on U.S. goods (or on U.S. stocks or bonds or property). I don't think you have any idea how international trade actually works. This from someone who thinks the U.S. is still on the gold standard and wants to emulate the trade policies of Cuba.
The U.S. actually maintains a trade surplus in tech good with Europe, to the tune of $13 billion... Europeans buy far more U.S. tech products than the U.S. buys European tech products. http://www.aeanet.org/PressRoom/prac_TCS_2007.asp
China, and their cheap consumer electronics is where the overwelming majority of the U.S. deficit is coming from. Europe is in an even worse state in that regard.
Eventually, they will spend those dollars on U.S. goods, as that is the only thing they are good for, or sell them to someone else who will spend those dollars on U.S. goods.
International trade no longer takes place in gold... the countries we are trading with have no choice to buy U.S. goods eventually.