"Finish your dinner! There are people in India and China who don't have what to eat."

That's what parents used to tell their food-wasting kids around the North American (i.e. US and Canadian) supper table.

Today, this is what they instead say:

"Finish your homework! There are people in India and China who don't have any problem taking away your job."

Which, I suppose, brings me to the reason for this post's perplexing title.

Here's some good advice: how about we take these latter days of double-oh seven to think about what our government's doing to safeguard our economy from its eventual shift towards Asia, other than its fanatic rush to cut, slash, and disintegrate our annual deficit into nothingness.

No jo jasne, ja vim...Hyundai's splurging a cool 1 billion euros in Nosovice to supplement its auto manufacturing activities in neighouring ZIlina, Slovakia. That's significant, you'll tell me, that's a good sign, isn't it?

So what. It's confirmed, aren't you happy? We've become a goddamn Emerging European Motor City; as if we needed the additional pollution and the even greater proliferation of vehicles on Prague's already insane roads. (Like we weren't already in enough mortal pedestrian danger just crossing the Vaclavak, vole).

Another pertinent question: have CzechInvest and their Mala Stana bureaucratic handlers been thinking about what happens when it's no longer cost-effective for the Koreans, the French, and the Japanese to build gas guzzlers and petrol usurpers in this corner of the globe?

Unlikely...

How many useful years have our Korean friends actually projected for the Nosovice plant? Three, four -- half a decade at best?

Let's be generous...a grand total of five years before the cost of producing a car rapidly approaches the cost of selling that same car. When profit margins become so anorexic that the time must come to shift its production to our Eastern European neighbours, hungry for a slice of the yummy pie?

Then, when it becomes cost-ineffective to produce metal coffins near Kyiv, production will likely shift to Western China -- a deft move on the part of Beijing to quell its disgruntled Uighur citizens in its Far Western territory. Or maybe the plant might be moved -- lock, stock, and barrel -- to some Southern Indian town, complete with port services and easy access to the world's markets by sea?

Do you see what I'm building up to here, ctenari?

Young Czechs are educationally-intoxicated with the executive MBA. They aspire to diligently serve at the foot of the Western expatriate boss. Gleaning from his/her wisdom and learning "how to win friends and influence people" in the process.

Much like other issues surrounding politics in this country, the capable intelligent future leaders of our Czech nation -- and there are many, believe me -- are swallowing the corporatist message hook, line, and sinker. They're hardly thinking about what tomorrow may bring (or not bring, more correctly), so busy are they to get their meat hooks on the interest-bearing lucre.

Is anyone thinking about what happens when the money runs out?

Is anyone thinking what we're going to make or do for hard currency in this country once real estate is no longer our major cash cow?

How good will your expensive MBA help you when the Indians and the Chinese -- the wellspring of 21st-century brainpower and ambition -- are laughing all the way to the bank?

Let's have ourselves a think about that, my friends, while we're out spending our December's pay packet this coming Saint Sylvester.