Historically, countries with free trade are economically better off than countries without it, even when the trading partners of the countries with free trade do not have free trade.
That's actually totally not true. Historically, the best off countries are the ones that are protectionist sufficient to spur local industrial development. For example, see USA from 1800-1940. And, if you want a comparison between a free trade low labor society versus a protectionist, higher wage one, see the US Civil War. The protectionist North, because it has developed its own capacity for industry and invention, and protected, is able to overwhelm and completely crush the hapless South, which must purchase its rifles and steel its cannon because it doesn't even have the technology to make those.
Large industries operate with those kind of numbers all the time
I think the larger point is that we have gotten where we are, environmentally, from the unintended and unforseen consequences of building at that scale. Everything we have ever built at that scale has had some huge and terrible side effect that we didn't know about until we did it. Maybe its just me, but I think somewhere along the way, building 10 trillion dollars worth of windmills to suck a sizable portion of the total atmospheric energy up is going to screw something up. I think we're trading the devil that we know with an even dumber thing. Building a great wall of windmill raises some issues.
Drilling is a messy proposition. Heavy equipment trashes the ground, you turn the drilling area into a giant mudpie... the stuff you drill up has to go somewhere...That's the problem with geothermal. If drilling were nice and easy, and clean the USA wouldn't be arguing about ANWR.
Still, with that said, there's a five mile wide blob of molten rock below Yellowstone park that seems to be able boil water for hundreds of miles around. I'd be willing to bet that if were willing to trash a part of our national park, we could really have a lot of essentially free energy.
So in other words you're just a xenophobic fantacist?
If I am a xenophobic fantacist, then you are a goddamned traitor. My sentiments and support lay for the people who are my countrymen. Yours are obviously for some other country than you are own.
That's all well and good that you would twist my words around. I said that a labor shortage inspires automation, and quite frankly, it has. If you have plenty of slave labor, there's no need to innovate, and this is essentially why the Romans were more or less stagnant technologically during their reign.
You and other free traders keep telling protectionists that free trade is somehow grounded in reality, and protectionism is not. Yet, protectionism grew the British Empire, grew the United States, grew Japan and is growing China and South Korea. By comparison all you criminal assholes have delivered on is enormous trade deficits that will someday be balanced once we accept our assets are devalued.
Yes, I think deficits are a major issue, but to say choking trade off will make our economic prospects brighter, shows a lack of economic knowledge (I'm not trolling, I'm just suggesting you take a macroeconomics class - it's actually quite interesting)
See, I think the theory of macroeconomics doesn't fit the reality. China's currency manipulation is as mercantile as gold hoarding was in 1780... the thing is, it works, so long as there's some dope on the other end that plays ball. Right now, there is.
...that, since the satellites are looking TOWARDS Earth and not AWAY from it, it'll only see objects that are actually IN Earth's atmosphere, which is FAR too late to actually GUARD anything.
You don't understand... this is politics. Obviously, we need more satellites.
Generals! Let me help you out. Me and right wing buddies will start posting stories about how the USA is dropping its guard against meteors, and potentially large asteroid strikes, and we'll create a groundswell of support for getting this thing turned back on. If the lefties can come up with some stuff about how good it is to have this government program, then, I'm sure we can form a bipartisan consensus to get you the funding you need.
Quite the opposite - the IT profession in the US is quite overpaid. That is what has created the market for them thar Indians stealin' all our jobs.
What's overpaid? The whole problem of free trade is that, if somebody is overpaid, the currency should adjust in price to reflect the wage disparity. The only thing that economically actually matters is that a line of code in India is the same as a line of code in the USA. If the price of the two are different, this means that the currencies are not actually correct.
That there is any discrepancy at all in labor prices says that the present currency system is not an accurate indicator of the worth of a product. That currency arbitrage exists means that free trade doesn't work.
India has allowed us to save $0.05, $5, $50, maybe $500 on a consumer goods at the cost of our manufacturing base.
The problem is, the savings aren't actually real. Assuming no currency manipulation, India's labor prices will be met as the US dollar declines in value. What this means is that assets in the USA decline in value as well. Sure, you might be able to buy a $500 consumer good for $200 because it was made by slave labor, but, the end result is that your house will be worth suddenly much less than it really is, because the value of the dollar will drop to match the disparity of pricing.
My point was that, to the extent markets are efficient (they are not anywhere near 100%, but they do okay), a country can only maintain a sustainable trade deficit (because no one will finance an unsustainable deficit).
My thinking is that markets cannot be efficient on a worldwide basis until currencies are privatized. What we have now, with the dollar, is on one hand a bunch of idiots manning the printing presses in Washington DC, (both political parties, really), and on the other hand, a bunch of idiots in Asia trying to corner the market on them so as to maintain a mercantile advantage for themselves. There's no honest intent to trade freely among our asian partners, and honestly the continental Europeans are scarcely better.
Free trade is another idea like socialism... wouldn't it be nice if everyone were honest and fair and loved each other. But, they aren't. Just as much as you have people trying to bleed welfare states dry through laziness and sloth, you have people trying to bleed free trading states dry through currency mercantilism, safety laws, and other things.
Trade should be like spending, wisely, not freely.
The once great USA taking their ball and going home because they can't compete anymore. What a sad day.
Oh quit crying. The world wants us to act like "every other nation", and I agree, we should. It's time for the USA to quit buying the world's crap and pretending to have free trade when every other nation has no interest in doing so.
Fine, go head. You either increase import duties, have import quotas, or have complete bans on imports. You might like to consider a few consequences:
1) inflation: everything that is cheaper to import becomes more expensive, often a lot more expensive.
Nope, not at all. If anything right now free trade is inflationary is we are printing money to finance our twin deficits.
2) Lack of competition. A single domestic market is far more likely to become a monopoly or oligopoly
More competition, because its easier to start up against national companies than giant international ones.
3). Falls in exports. Other countries will either retaliate and stop buying your stuff, or your currency will appreciate making your exports uncompetitive
Our chief export is food. I suppose those nations could stop buying it...
Oh, you only meant lets forget free markets in your industry. Adam Smith got people like you right a long time ago.
Adam Smith was a traitor. He wrote what we he wrote because he was bitter about the British Empire and he wanted to figure out a legitimate sounding way to bring it down. It worked. Following Adam Smith blindly is as stupid as following Karl Marx. Both men were bitter people that wanted to ruin everyone that would listen.
If you cut off free trade with India and China expect a massive cost of living increase in the US to the point some of the poorer people in society wont even be able to afford clothes or feed their families.
No, what would happen is that we would see an uptick in the increase of automation in the USA and we would have robots making the stuff we need. No chinese or indians required, and we would have better products and a more advanced society. For that manufacturing we did do, we would have middle skill jobs that would allow people to do something with their lives that is useful, to get them to buy into the idea of a work ethic, and savings, and personal industry. Impoverished regions would be raised up, schools would improve for better funding and better students, and geez, the USA would be a happier, more advanced place.
The correct Libertarian approach isn't an idealistic one, but a societal "greedy" one. We shouldn't have 100% open trade because of some ideal. We should determine what policies will be in our best interests and will protect the rights of US citizens, everything else is secondary.
I'm in favor of something like a libertarian nationalism. Let ideas flow freely among the nations, keep trade balanced, don't be dicks around the world, and stop blaming gay people for the world's problems. I think that's a practical alternative.
I mean, why should we really have shiploads of cars and other goodies flowing from the first world to the third, when we could theoretically educate through the free exchange of information the third world's ability to manufacture for itself.
I find it a little too convenient when the/. libertarian audience
I'm not libertarian. I'm a nationalist. I've running stories advocating protectionism on my website and only buy American cars and products where ever possible.
We'll also have such a depreciated dollar, and the Indian talent will be relatively scarce, we will reach a parity, and all boats will rise.
We will never reach a parity with India. In order to have a parity, you have to have a notion of money that is genuinely free market and the advent of central banks has made that utterly impossible. So free trade is a sham.
We were promised forty years ago that we would reach parity with even Japan, and trade remains unbalanced. You know when we'll achieve this fairy tale parity with India? Never.
There is no stability attractor when it comes to trade.
he reason for America's current wealth was the dropping of that protectionism when you had a clear economic advantage over the rest of the world, most of which was quite literally in ruins.
Actually, that's largely a myth. American businesses have always been terrible exporters. The reason for our wealth is that the country produces its own food, and has a giant amount of oil, coal and steel, so we haven't had to actually import much in critical raw materials. It was only when we got really stupid and managed to use even more oil than our own rather large domestic production could sustain, that the problem emerged.
As we can see, being the reserve currency of the world is certainly a two edged sword. The higher our dollar is, the more it screws up our own businesses, but the lower it is, the more our energy costs go through the roof. Although I'm not a big Obama booster, I cross my fingers and hope that he is able to cut down our need for imported oil.
I'd like to point out that until WWII and the devastation of the global economy apart from the US, your protectionism wasn't making you rich.
Actually, the USA was actually quite rich. If you were to look at who the richest people in the world were circa 1920, I would bet that the list would have been dominated by the likes of Henry Ford, Rockefeller, the Vanderbilt family, and so on. The Pennsylvania Railroad, the various Standard Oil companies, General Electric, Ford, were all vying to be the largest company in the world.
Our issue, domestically, was the distribution of that wealth, but even with those issues the standard of living was rising dramatically in the United States.
The flipside of that, of course, is that, if, Abraham Lincoln was essentially a Democrat, then Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a Republican. The south was Roosevelt's power base. Ever wonder who the heck Carl Vinson was to get a carrier named after him? Why, he was Roosevelt's man in the Congress that rammed through a huge naval construction program just in time for World War II. Pretty much saved the USA from getting torched by Japan, but, he was pretty much a racist redneck.
There was a time America used to peddle stuff all over the world and insist on free trade. Now Third world countries are peddling their labor and insisting on free trade. Karma, what goes around, comes around!
Historically the United States has been a protectionist country. The USA was protectionist from its founding in the late 18th century all the way through the end of World War II. Then we got stupid.
It would be hard to neatly express the USA's $11,400,000,000,000 debt without the zero. Invented in India.
Ah yes, a stupid thing that we've run up because we trade freely with a bunch of nations that have no desire other than to screw the USA. The trade deficit, the budget deficit, go hand in hand.
OOOH BURN!
Dude, you got your ass kicked by Pakistan last year, rolled over even worse than the French, and you call us "BURN". At least until we get rid of the stupid free trade, you should be grateful that the USA is fighting your war for you.
Quite the opposite. Healtcare gets _cheaper_ all the time
If Healthcare is getting cheaper all the time, why not have people pay cash for it directly to doctors? You see, here's your problem. You want us to believe that health care costs are skyrocketing so that the government has to step in and provide health care. If it were getting cheaper, than, more people could be paying for it.
Bullshit. Nobody would stop you from paying to a pharmaceutical company for the best treatment.
I'd say its time to pull the plug on free trade and let these people jump start their own local economies on their own merits, and not on shoveling their crap into the USA. India has not done a damned thing for the USA and I see no reason why the USA should throw its people out of work to subsidize India's economy.
Slashdot Mirror
You can find out an exceptional example, a USA based company has recently opened a new branch in India
Another bunch of traitors. I'll be sure to add them to the national traitor database.
Historically, countries with free trade are economically better off than countries without it, even when the trading partners of the countries with free trade do not have free trade.
That's actually totally not true. Historically, the best off countries are the ones that are protectionist sufficient to spur local industrial development. For example, see USA from 1800-1940. And, if you want a comparison between a free trade low labor society versus a protectionist, higher wage one, see the US Civil War. The protectionist North, because it has developed its own capacity for industry and invention, and protected, is able to overwhelm and completely crush the hapless South, which must purchase its rifles and steel its cannon because it doesn't even have the technology to make those.
Large industries operate with those kind of numbers all the time
I think the larger point is that we have gotten where we are, environmentally, from the unintended and unforseen consequences of building at that scale. Everything we have ever built at that scale has had some huge and terrible side effect that we didn't know about until we did it. Maybe its just me, but I think somewhere along the way, building 10 trillion dollars worth of windmills to suck a sizable portion of the total atmospheric energy up is going to screw something up. I think we're trading the devil that we know with an even dumber thing. Building a great wall of windmill raises some issues.
Drilling is a messy proposition. Heavy equipment trashes the ground, you turn the drilling area into a giant mudpie... the stuff you drill up has to go somewhere...That's the problem with geothermal. If drilling were nice and easy, and clean the USA wouldn't be arguing about ANWR.
Still, with that said, there's a five mile wide blob of molten rock below Yellowstone park that seems to be able boil water for hundreds of miles around. I'd be willing to bet that if were willing to trash a part of our national park, we could really have a lot of essentially free energy.
So in other words you're just a xenophobic fantacist?
If I am a xenophobic fantacist, then you are a goddamned traitor. My sentiments and support lay for the people who are my countrymen. Yours are obviously for some other country than you are own.
That's all well and good that you would twist my words around. I said that a labor shortage inspires automation, and quite frankly, it has. If you have plenty of slave labor, there's no need to innovate, and this is essentially why the Romans were more or less stagnant technologically during their reign.
You and other free traders keep telling protectionists that free trade is somehow grounded in reality, and protectionism is not. Yet, protectionism grew the British Empire, grew the United States, grew Japan and is growing China and South Korea. By comparison all you criminal assholes have delivered on is enormous trade deficits that will someday be balanced once we accept our assets are devalued.
You should be shot.
If you ride through Lancaster, you are far more likely to run into a horse and buggy than you are a security camera.
Yes, I think deficits are a major issue, but to say choking trade off will make our economic prospects brighter, shows a lack of economic knowledge (I'm not trolling, I'm just suggesting you take a macroeconomics class - it's actually quite interesting)
See, I think the theory of macroeconomics doesn't fit the reality. China's currency manipulation is as mercantile as gold hoarding was in 1780... the thing is, it works, so long as there's some dope on the other end that plays ball. Right now, there is.
...that, since the satellites are looking TOWARDS Earth and not AWAY from it, it'll only see objects that are actually IN Earth's atmosphere, which is FAR too late to actually GUARD anything.
You don't understand... this is politics. Obviously, we need more satellites.
That's crazy talk.
Generals! Let me help you out. Me and right wing buddies will start posting stories about how the USA is dropping its guard against meteors, and potentially large asteroid strikes, and we'll create a groundswell of support for getting this thing turned back on. If the lefties can come up with some stuff about how good it is to have this government program, then, I'm sure we can form a bipartisan consensus to get you the funding you need.
Quite the opposite - the IT profession in the US is quite overpaid. That is what has created the market for them thar Indians stealin' all our jobs.
What's overpaid? The whole problem of free trade is that, if somebody is overpaid, the currency should adjust in price to reflect the wage disparity. The only thing that economically actually matters is that a line of code in India is the same as a line of code in the USA. If the price of the two are different, this means that the currencies are not actually correct.
That there is any discrepancy at all in labor prices says that the present currency system is not an accurate indicator of the worth of a product. That currency arbitrage exists means that free trade doesn't work.
India has allowed us to save $0.05, $5, $50, maybe $500 on a consumer goods at the cost of our manufacturing base.
The problem is, the savings aren't actually real. Assuming no currency manipulation, India's labor prices will be met as the US dollar declines in value. What this means is that assets in the USA decline in value as well. Sure, you might be able to buy a $500 consumer good for $200 because it was made by slave labor, but, the end result is that your house will be worth suddenly much less than it really is, because the value of the dollar will drop to match the disparity of pricing.
My point was that, to the extent markets are efficient (they are not anywhere near 100%, but they do okay), a country can only maintain a sustainable trade deficit (because no one will finance an unsustainable deficit).
My thinking is that markets cannot be efficient on a worldwide basis until currencies are privatized. What we have now, with the dollar, is on one hand a bunch of idiots manning the printing presses in Washington DC, (both political parties, really), and on the other hand, a bunch of idiots in Asia trying to corner the market on them so as to maintain a mercantile advantage for themselves. There's no honest intent to trade freely among our asian partners, and honestly the continental Europeans are scarcely better.
Free trade is another idea like socialism... wouldn't it be nice if everyone were honest and fair and loved each other. But, they aren't. Just as much as you have people trying to bleed welfare states dry through laziness and sloth, you have people trying to bleed free trading states dry through currency mercantilism, safety laws, and other things.
Trade should be like spending, wisely, not freely.
Trade equalization will be a natural consequence of the ongoing erosion of the dollar
Let's have a date. When will the USA trade be balanced?
The once great USA taking their ball and going home because they can't compete anymore. What a sad day.
Oh quit crying. The world wants us to act like "every other nation", and I agree, we should. It's time for the USA to quit buying the world's crap and pretending to have free trade when every other nation has no interest in doing so.
Fine, go head. You either increase import duties, have import quotas, or have complete bans on imports. You might like to consider a few consequences:
1) inflation: everything that is cheaper to import becomes more expensive, often a lot more expensive.
Nope, not at all. If anything right now free trade is inflationary is we are printing money to finance our twin deficits.
2) Lack of competition. A single domestic market is far more likely to become a monopoly or oligopoly
More competition, because its easier to start up against national companies than giant international ones.
3). Falls in exports. Other countries will either retaliate and stop buying your stuff, or your currency will appreciate making your exports uncompetitive
Our chief export is food. I suppose those nations could stop buying it...
Oh, you only meant lets forget free markets in your industry. Adam Smith got people like you right a long time ago.
Adam Smith was a traitor. He wrote what we he wrote because he was bitter about the British Empire and he wanted to figure out a legitimate sounding way to bring it down. It worked. Following Adam Smith blindly is as stupid as following Karl Marx. Both men were bitter people that wanted to ruin everyone that would listen.
If you cut off free trade with India and China expect a massive cost of living increase in the US to the point some of the poorer people in society wont even be able to afford clothes or feed their families.
No, what would happen is that we would see an uptick in the increase of automation in the USA and we would have robots making the stuff we need. No chinese or indians required, and we would have better products and a more advanced society. For that manufacturing we did do, we would have middle skill jobs that would allow people to do something with their lives that is useful, to get them to buy into the idea of a work ethic, and savings, and personal industry. Impoverished regions would be raised up, schools would improve for better funding and better students, and geez, the USA would be a happier, more advanced place.
Sounds like a winner to me.
The correct Libertarian approach isn't an idealistic one, but a societal "greedy" one. We shouldn't have 100% open trade because of some ideal. We should determine what policies will be in our best interests and will protect the rights of US citizens, everything else is secondary.
I'm in favor of something like a libertarian nationalism. Let ideas flow freely among the nations, keep trade balanced, don't be dicks around the world, and stop blaming gay people for the world's problems. I think that's a practical alternative.
I mean, why should we really have shiploads of cars and other goodies flowing from the first world to the third, when we could theoretically educate through the free exchange of information the third world's ability to manufacture for itself.
I find it a little too convenient when the /. libertarian audience
I'm not libertarian. I'm a nationalist. I've running stories advocating protectionism on my website and only buy American cars and products where ever possible.
We'll also have such a depreciated dollar, and the Indian talent will be relatively scarce, we will reach a parity, and all boats will rise.
We will never reach a parity with India. In order to have a parity, you have to have a notion of money that is genuinely free market and the advent of central banks has made that utterly impossible. So free trade is a sham.
We were promised forty years ago that we would reach parity with even Japan, and trade remains unbalanced. You know when we'll achieve this fairy tale parity with India? Never.
There is no stability attractor when it comes to trade.
he reason for America's current wealth was the dropping of that protectionism when you had a clear economic advantage over the rest of the world, most of which was quite literally in ruins.
Actually, that's largely a myth. American businesses have always been terrible exporters. The reason for our wealth is that the country produces its own food, and has a giant amount of oil, coal and steel, so we haven't had to actually import much in critical raw materials. It was only when we got really stupid and managed to use even more oil than our own rather large domestic production could sustain, that the problem emerged.
As we can see, being the reserve currency of the world is certainly a two edged sword. The higher our dollar is, the more it screws up our own businesses, but the lower it is, the more our energy costs go through the roof. Although I'm not a big Obama booster, I cross my fingers and hope that he is able to cut down our need for imported oil.
I'd like to point out that until WWII and the devastation of the global economy apart from the US, your protectionism wasn't making you rich.
Actually, the USA was actually quite rich. If you were to look at who the richest people in the world were circa 1920, I would bet that the list would have been dominated by the likes of Henry Ford, Rockefeller, the Vanderbilt family, and so on. The Pennsylvania Railroad, the various Standard Oil companies, General Electric, Ford, were all vying to be the largest company in the world.
Our issue, domestically, was the distribution of that wealth, but even with those issues the standard of living was rising dramatically in the United States.
That was before the Southern Strategy.
The flipside of that, of course, is that, if, Abraham Lincoln was essentially a Democrat, then Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a Republican. The south was Roosevelt's power base. Ever wonder who the heck Carl Vinson was to get a carrier named after him? Why, he was Roosevelt's man in the Congress that rammed through a huge naval construction program just in time for World War II. Pretty much saved the USA from getting torched by Japan, but, he was pretty much a racist redneck.
There was a time America used to peddle stuff all over the world and insist on free trade. Now Third world countries are peddling their labor and insisting on free trade. Karma, what goes around, comes around!
Historically the United States has been a protectionist country. The USA was protectionist from its founding in the late 18th century all the way through the end of World War II. Then we got stupid.
It would be hard to neatly express the USA's $11,400,000,000,000 debt without the zero. Invented in India.
Ah yes, a stupid thing that we've run up because we trade freely with a bunch of nations that have no desire other than to screw the USA. The trade deficit, the budget deficit, go hand in hand.
OOOH BURN!
Dude, you got your ass kicked by Pakistan last year, rolled over even worse than the French, and you call us "BURN". At least until we get rid of the stupid free trade, you should be grateful that the USA is fighting your war for you.
Quite the opposite. Healtcare gets _cheaper_ all the time
If Healthcare is getting cheaper all the time, why not have people pay cash for it directly to doctors? You see, here's your problem. You want us to believe that health care costs are skyrocketing so that the government has to step in and provide health care. If it were getting cheaper, than, more people could be paying for it.
Bullshit. Nobody would stop you from paying to a pharmaceutical company for the best treatment.
There is no doubt Democrats would.
I'd say its time to pull the plug on free trade and let these people jump start their own local economies on their own merits, and not on shoveling their crap into the USA. India has not done a damned thing for the USA and I see no reason why the USA should throw its people out of work to subsidize India's economy.
Free trade is not worth it.