Used from McDonald's fryers, and I filter it myself.
It's been tried. Doesn't work. The rest of the world simply sails on by and continues developing economically while you recede.
Which, at this point, is EXACTLY what the United States needs to do. We need the rest of the world to catch up to us, and then rejoin it when the playing field is more even. We need to let the Islamics fight out their little reformation. We need to let Israel fail.
Then one day someone comes along and invades, wipes out your army, navy with superior weaponry and you're dead.
Well, if you keep a good eye on your borders and put some money into hundreds of millions of intelligent and mobile mines, maybe not.
OK. Time to stop importing US-made goods then. Everybody makes their own stuff and doesn't trade with others.
Fine with me, since there are no US-made goods left, only goods made in the third world and repackaged in the United States. Which is my whole point- we need to start making STUFF again instead of just managing a bunch of contracts that have no ability to be enforced.
Of course, it means any idea or design owned by a manufacturer in one country will be unavailable in any other. Lots of medicines and other ideas you'd be without.
No, actually, it means that any idea or design owned by a manufacturer in one country is a patent that can't be enforced in another. It's not THAT hard to reverse engineer stuff.
And the rare elements now used come from domestic or foreign sources?
See next point- just because it currently comes from a foreign source, doesn't mean that we can't find an equivalent that will work just as well right here in the good ole' USA- but we won't try because of labor cost.
Diamonds.
There's a public mine in Arkansas.
There is no industrial production of diamonds in this country.
Which is not the same as saying that we can't start one up- industrial diamonds are just crystallized carbon after all.
Of course, I won't say there are NO alternative technologies -- narrowly defining the scope of this issue creates a straw-man argument.
Well, when it comes to diamonds, we don't need any.
Are there domestic sources? Sure. Are they economically feasible to obtain? That's the question that needs to be asked.
And my point in this entire discussion is that economics can be engineered and is fungible. National security is not. By protecting and creating domestic industries to make everything we use, we can basically tell the world to fuck off if we need to (like during the current Islamic Reformation).
First off... did you have a brainfart, or are you actually advocating USA ISOLATIONISM, on all fronts, economic, political and military ?!?
I've actually been advocating that since 9-11-2001.
You know it can never work nowadays, do you ?
Depends on how you define "work". It'll probably hurt a lot. It will most certainly lose us the top 1% of our income earners- but then again I consider them to be useless parasites anyway. It will mean the loss of materialism. But we will survive, and that's all that counts.
Not that I wouldn't just love to see the USA shut the hell up already and keep its nose out of other people's bussiness, work out internal issues first... but that will and could never happend.
The only reason we're ever in anybody else's business is because of the trade to begin with. We have everything we need in our 50 states- there's no need for anything more.
Second... fiat currency is insignificant compared to the "virtual money" in circulation nowadays, at least 90% of today's "money" doesn't actually exist at all (with a pessimistic estimate of up to 98% of it being virtual money... yes, that's one "real, paper dollar" out every 50 in "circulation" in the worst case scenario, or one out of 10 in the best case scenario).
Same difference- I say go back to gold.
And government has zero fucking control over it, because it declined it in favor of the banking industry, just like most countries on this stupid planet.
I'd really love to see a "bank run" in the world of today, with the banking system's bubble burst wide open to its rotten core all across the globe, governments forced to make banking a state issue rather than a private one.
Actually, four times in the last 200 years the US Government has taken it over.
It's not coercion because no one is actively using force against you.
Ok, so where's my choice as a consumer? If there is no force, that means that there's a choice.
No one is forcing you to do something, or avoid something.
Except, of course, the people preventing me from buying 100% American made magnets.
You are free to go your merry way.
Really? Am I? Or is this just a fake freedom, like Stalin offered?
At most you can complain that they aren't acting on your behalf in a way that you would want, which is not the same thing as working against you.
I see no difference between treason and treason.
Enforced worker protections, such as forcing employers to hire union members, is coercion because it can't work without the government explicitly stepping in to override a voluntary transaction which would otherwise occur.
As is forcing me to buy magnets from China- which wouldn't happen without government explicitly stepping in to destroy American corporations producing magnets.
If I'm not a union member, and you want to hire me, but can't because someone is explicitly preventing it, that is coercion.
No problem, we'll just make you a union member.
If I'm not a union member, and no one wants to hire me for their own personal reasons but could if they chose to, that is not coercion.
Or rather we'll just have to send you to India because no jobs are available here.
This doesn't mean we can't enforce false advertising laws, or other anti-fraud measures, because use of fraud puts me in a transaction I didn't agree to.
Just as free trade puts me in a transaction I didn't agree to. I didn't agree to join the WTO, or NAFTA. I didn't agree to let Wal*Mart put my local mom&pop shops out of business. I didn't agree to let the market destroy my community. That is ALL fraud.
"foreign trade is ALWAYS about hiding fraud, theft, or coercion from the consumer". You really should avoid universal statments. Almost always at least provides some leeway. Your statment is assertion, with nothing to back it up. Foreign trade is USUALLY about maximising personal profit. That does NOT require fraud, theft, or coercion in order to occur. It's not theft from you if I hire someone who is cheaper, or buy from a cheaper provider, because I have no obligation whatsoever to act for your benefit. The only obligation I have is not to act against you.
All profit is theft of wages. Profit is the difference between cost and price- and is therefore unpaid wages. Maximizing personal profit at the expense of your neighbors is indeed theft; and treason. And it should be treated as such. Greed is a mortal sin. You know why they call them mortal sins, don't you? Because they encourage somebody else to kill you.
And if you stunt your nation's (already poor) economic growth by refusing to participate in, reducing, or over-regulating international trade, then the terrorists have won.
Yes, the terrorists have won. They have won because they care to win and we don't care. So the real question isn't how to keep the terrorists from winning, because they've already won. The question is what we're going to do about it. Are we going to allow them to continue to control our economy from foreign lands? Are we going to continue to let terrorists into our open borders? Are we going to continue to let the Chinese poison our children? I say foreign trade isn't worth the cost.
I don't say this to be trite, its just a fact.
Yes, it is. I'm terrorized. But I'm going to do something about it. I'm going to start treating "Made in China" like the threat it is. I'm going to buy American-made diesel engines and stop running my car on middle eastern crap, and switch to bio-diesel. In fact, I already have. I buy American anytime I have a choice to, even if I have to pay 10x as much. If everybody did that, we wouldn't need to be in Iraq. We wouldn't need to get scared about China calling in our debt. We wouldn't need to worry about the New York Stock Exchange raping our savings- because we'd have jobs again. Big business is a drain that we don't need.
One for an overpopulated world. We don't have the resources to be spending them on exports, we need them right here at home to feed our own 300 million people.
Ask Boeing, Microsoft and Cisco, just to name a few.
Then maybe they should have their headquarters where their customers are, if it's that big of a problem for them to be patriotic.
And what interests are actually better off with the policies of the last 7 years, Halliburton or Exxon maybe but they live of imports.
The culture of importing and exporting would be impossible without Middle Eastern Oil. And it's not just the last 7 years- this problem started with the discovery of oil under the Middle Eastern Sand in the 1920s.
you don't have a 'right to a job' you have to right to apply for a job.
In that case, why should I bother with a job when it's easier just to shoot you and take what I want?
if nobody wants to pay your for your services, learn some new services. nobody 'took our jobs away' they simply outperformed us for a lower price.
No, they were allowed to have access to our customers by a government who refused to protect the borders.
I'm not talking about quality necessarily, that's another issue, and it varies as well.
Quality means nothing in the market- price is the only data the consumer has available to them, so that's what they make their decision on. Want quality? You need a protected market for quality.
People go to work and get paid because someone feels the need for their services, and that it's worth forking out the cash for said service instead of, for example, doing it themselves.
The more you do for yourself- the more that is done in your local community- the safer and less dependent you are on foreigners who couldn't give a shit about whether or not you have a service to offer.
If someone else does it for a lower price, then quit your bitching and do one of two things: find another job doing the same thing somewhere else, or, learn to do something else and do that.
And if you want a local community or a family, then you should be loyal to your local community and family. If not, you're just another traitor.
Like I said, industries, especially in particular geographical areas, but eventually as a whole, go completely out of business eventually when we have machines or other products to replace them. So, in accepting the fact that we don't live in a stagnant society, and that nobody is going to just walk up and start paying you for producing nothing (services included), you should really quit bitching about 'poor people who don't have jobs,' and start thinking of 'how can we find useful services for these folks to perform.'
That's exactly what I'm doing. The way to find useful services for people in our society to perform is by being LOYAL to our society and buying from people in our society, instead of being a selfish traitor and going elsewhere.
Notice that's not the same thing as forcing someone (or the government) to pay them to do what they feel like doing, it's repurposing some good resources -- the people who need the jobs. If all of the sudden computers could write all of their own code, I'd be fucked too, but I'm well aware of that, and I'm ready to accept the risk, so I seek employment as a programmer. You're not going to ever find something that's just right and sit on it for enternity, it'll just keep moving, like the rest of the planet.
And yet our fathers and grandfathers were able to- of course, they could spell too....unlike you.
Oil, in the quantity that it is now used in the US?
Which could be replaced with a wide variety of other substances- fossil oil isn't the only oil.
There is no way to make up for the difference in short time (say an election term) without a recession exceeding the scale of the 30's Great Depression.
Oh, I'm not saying we'll be able to make the change to domestic production without a depression- I'm saying we need to make the change to lessen the danger of war to the United States.
Very simple. To make those plasma screens, you'll have to import rare earth elements from abroad.
We now have rare earth mines here in the United States for every one of the 92 naturally occurring elements, though some of them need some refinement that makes the ore too expensive on a world market. Try again.
Those computers you're using to opine on to slashdot? They require rare earth elements too.
Who do you think invented the microchip? Gallium and arsenic are available from domestic sources as well.
How do you propose to buy items this country requires from abroad if there is no international wealth created by being competitive internationally?
I challenge you to find an item we need from abroad, that has NO domestic production and NO potential for domestic production and NO alternative technology.
Once again, this is exactly what I'm talking about. Foreign Trade may very well be economically advantageous, but is it safe from a national security standpoint? I say no.
You're content to sell to a market of 300M Americans, from a labor force of 300M Americans.
Yes. I don't see any reason to go any further- nobody else has enough money for the labor cost we need to live on in America.
I'd like to expand that customer base by a factor of four, and in order to do that, I may have to increase the size of my labor pool by a similar factor.
Except you do it without increasing your labor cost, and all you do is encourage the race to the bottom. Want more? Then apply for statehood and accept federal laws regarding interstate trade, and accept a government in Washington DC.
Unlike you Marxists, we capitalists will do anything for a buck.
Including, apparently, feeding your children lead. Sorry- I don't accept killing human beings to make a buck as a viable business strategy.
Even if it means bringing 1.2 billion third-worlders up to Western standards of living.
Fine- get them to apply to Washington DC for statehood first, THEN trade with them when they have a minimum wage, an interstate highway system, and a reliable currency.
Sorry if that offends you:)
That doesn't offend me. Pretending to do so without first bringing them under the umbrella of worker, environmental, and consumer protections the United States affords to all of it's citizens is what offends me. Part of having Western Standards of Living means paying your workers $20/hr with full health and vacation benefits. When you capitalists can open an non-polluting factory in the third world that does that from the day it opens, I'll be all for it. Until then, only trade with countries which already have this. Is that so hard to understand?
What makes you think America has it's main export markets in the Third World?
Doesn't matter where the exports are going to- exports are a waste of resources we could be using right here in America.
The USofA (and the EU!) cannot (and should not) compete with the low-tech high-volume products China and their likes sells us, instead it should concentrate on it's strengths and that's high-tech like aircraft, machinery and certain electronics.
All of which, if you had RTFAd, is now made elsewhere. What's your next argument?
Of course the sceptics will claim the biggest foreign market for the US is war, but personally I think the world doesn't have much appetite for that industry right now...
No, that's our biggest reason for importing- protection of our interests costs quite a bit in military materials. Try again.
Thanks for showing your open hate at the end there, MH42. Nice to know that marxists are still empty violent rebel types.
I'm an American before I'm anything else- and when violence is the only solution left open, violence becomes the solution. You've taken away our jobs, you've taken away our way of life, you're in the process of taking away our houses with those stupid variable rate mortgages. What else is left?
Your economic theory is interesting but baseless.
It's not an economic theory, it's a national security theory.
If you get out a map you can draw arbitrary lines on it and make any silly economic point that you please. Suppose you draw a line around downtown San Francisco, and you notice that goods and services come in while only trash goes out. You haven't made an economic point about downtown San Francisco; you've just found where some rich people live.
Rich people should get what they deserve- death for stealing from everybody else.
National borders are of similar, diminishing relevance. I know that you believe that an American is somehow "worth" more than someone in China, but it's not really true; all men are created equal, and most of them manage to stay that way. Goods and services move into the US rather than out because the people in the US have more money.
I never said that an American is "worth" more than someone in China. I said that people in America don't owe the people in China a living. Let them build their own economy- and keep ours for ourselves.
Sure, it won't always be that way; taking money away from the rich has always been the favorite pastime of the poor. But your predicions of collapse and calamity are far from likely. The US economy still produces a huge amount of product, despite what John Edwards would have you believe. Enough to pay off those debts easily enough should China come looking for their money.
The US Economy produces nothing but paper. And even most of that is actually produced elsewhere- it's only the information on the paper that is the value added. When people elsewhere figure out that America's money is worth less than the paper it's printed on, they will go elsewhere. Money has no intrinsic value, only mythical value.
Oh the irony. How many countries has the US skewered because they refused to play the "we're bigger than you, give us your resources" game. Now the hat's on the other foot and "lock them out of our market" is the new strategy?
More, how many countries has New York City skewered because they refused to play that game? I'll give you a hint- the other 49 states were the first 49 to fall to this strategy, not the third world. Yes, it's time for protectionism not for the businessmen in New York City (for whom such protectionism would be really bad- as you say, large amounts of their business is elsewhere now) but rather for the other 49 states.
Fine, I define useful as producing a net benefit for both parties to the trade. Safety and protection are aspects of whether it's a net benefit, but they are not the only factors.
If you're dead, what other net benefit can exist? Money means NOTHING- price means NOTHING- efficiency means NOTHING if you cannot protect what you have.
Trade, foreign or domestic, is almost ALWAYS safe, because it is based on voluntary transactions rather than coercion, unlike many of the governmental and worker protections you think highly of.
If my only choice to buy a computer is to buy foreign, how is that not coercion? If my neighbor is starving because he got laid off from his job for cheaper labor elsewhere, how is that not theft? If you hide the pollution in China and claim that your US operation is environmentally safe, how is that not fraud? No, I'm sorry- foreign trade is ALWAYS about hiding fraud, theft, or coercion from the consumer- and thus libertarian free trade is just another con game like Stalinism was, promising much and delivering NOTHING.
Yes, but reserve currency is a bit like smoke- the US could, if we choose to, utterly destroy the entire Chinese investment in reserve currency merely by ending the printing of dollars and creating a new currency for use internal to the United States only. Very quickly the value of the "orphaned" US dollar would fall to the point that it would be just so much garbage.
No, it does NOT mean comparative advantage rules have broken down. Believe it or not, us buying more abroad just means that our money is worth more to foreigners than the objects they are selling, and the objects we are buying are worth more to us than the money being shelled out. That is all.
That's all if you are only thinking in the short term. But in the long term, this destroys our manufacturing industry to the point that we can't afford to keep paying Americans a high enough wage to have houses, let alone buy foreign crap.
Buying things abroad increases the nations overall wealth.
Or at least that's the religious myth they keep spouting at us with no real data whatsoever. Overall wealth means NOTHING- how much space you have between the poorest and the wealthiest counts for EVERYTHING, at least as far as national security counts, because the wider that spread the higher chance you have of violent revolution.
Even with an absolute advantage in every way, it is provably the case that trade can still be useful.
Depends on how you define useful. I define useful as being safe, protective of the future. Foreign trade is almost NEVER safe, because it strips away governmental consumer, environmental, and worker protections. It is in fact highly dangerous to anybody who isn't an investor; and remains so.
Hah, so american companies have enough to produce stuff locally and virtually be no further off because we'll spiral into an endless cycle of local inflation,
Well, there's a solution to that too- kill off the FED and stop producing fiat currency. The inflation will come down as the money supply tightens up (supply and demand, after all).
but we'll be able to afford it (thus staying the same in your perfect model.)
Yeah, unless of course we get smart and go back to the gold standard and stop allowing the government to print money.
Should we just forbid people from traveling too?
This is the information age, who needs to travel? Everything you can ever learn is right at your fingertips. Any experience you could ever want is available in the United States already, within 3000 miles of home, so who the hell needs to travel? Travel is just a waste of resources.
How about shut off the internet?
Rather, cut it off at the border- we created it, it's ours, why should we let somebody in China access it? Let them build their own.
There isn't, never was, and never will be a benefit to buying only american.
Except of course, NATIONAL SECURITY- but I guess you don't give a shit about that, being a traitor and all. Trade and other forms of foreign entanglement ties your economy to other economies, which allows dictators that the American people didn't elect to draw us into wars we don't want anything to do with. Like Iraq, for instance- there's no need for us to be in the Middle East at all- we have the ability to be entirely self-sufficient here, but because we choose to use cheap oil for our energy, we have to fight. If we had built our infrastructure based entirely on native materials, we wouldn't need to be messing around in the Middle East right now.
You don't have to agree with me, the market will back me up on this one.
The "market" is not loyal to America, and never has been, so is an insufficient predictor of what we need for national security at this point in history. In fact, the sheer chaos and greed of the so-called "free" market is a SEVERE danger to our health and well being as Americans.
so you're saying that if someone loses their high paying manufacturing job, then they can't go do something else ever?
No, I'm saying that the options to high paying manufacturing jobs pay less than a living wage.
not even 20 years from now?
Unless something comes along that pays a living wage, not even 20 years from now. The race for cheap labor is a race to the bottom, not to the top.
It's a local hiccup to lose a local industry to foreign competition, it doesn't make the next generation (next 4 year class of college students even) of workers immune to finding jobs.
It just means that the next generation only has burger flipping available- because nobody can afford anything else.
It's those high paying jobs anyway that make American companies unable to compete with foreign companies who don't pay them as much.
And we want to compete with them exactly why? Why not just lock them out of our market so that we don't have to compete with them?
So you're basically saying that we should somehow tell the other countries that they have to be fair and pay them as much as we'd like to make, because.. it's only fair that way... right?
No, I'm saying that if they want to sell goods here, then they have to pay equal to American wages. If they don't want to pay equal to American wages, then I see NO reason why we should allow their imports AT ALL.
I don't think they'll buy it. And you will be left behind whining about how life isn't fair, while the people who adapt will be moving on buying more plasma screen tv's they shouldn't be able to afford.
At least until China realizes that all they're getting for those plasma screens are IOUs that will never be paid off. I don't see any reason why we can't just sink the Chinese ships trying to cross our borders, and make the plasma screens here. But hey- if you like selling out your nationality for cheap labor, so be it. There's a name for that: treason. And someday, patriots like me will be handing out the proper punishment for that crime.
If we only bought american goods, then we'd inflate our local prices,
Thus increasing the wages of American Workers, which would in turn allow us to afford those higher local prices, and encourage production of goods here at home to keep us safe from foreign wars and governments.
and foreign companies would kick the crap out of us abroad,
Only if you're stupid enough to tie your business to a foreign market instead of creating goods for your own nation's people ONLY. We've got 300 million people who, to maintain their standard of living, need the same amount of goods as 1.2 billion third worlders. What kind of loser needs to sell to the third worlders with a market like that here at home?
and we wouldn't have anyone able to compete.
This makes no sense. Why compete for small third world markets when cooperation to use the larger first world market can bring larger rewards?
Then instead of losing SOME money to them, we'd have whole companies go out of business.
Only the non-patriotic treasonous ones- which should go out of business anyway.
You weren't paying attention in economics class where you. It might sound nice to say 'buy american' but if we really did that, and boycott foreign stuff, you'd drive the price on american shit up so much there would be no way in hell anyone but americans would buy american, and foreign business is what keeps a LOT of companies afloat.
Those companies, I call them free traitors, deserve to go out of business if they're too stupid to be able to stay in business with this big of a market. And yes- we're at the point where we've got such an incredibly high standard of living in comparison to everybody else that we either need to produce it all ourselves for ourselves while waiting for the rest of the world to catch up, or we need to go through a depression to reduce our standard of living. A BUY AMERICAN campaign will achieve both.
There's an easy way out- that each consumer needs to do. Refuse to buy. Treat Made In China as the warning label it should be. Just say no to buying. The resulting depression will fix the issue.
On this issue, you'd be better of not trying to fix it at the ballot box- and fix it at the cash register instead by refusing to buy foreign-made goods. If enough US consumers did that, the trade imbalance would be fixed.
Slashdot Mirror
Only one slight problem with that plan- We already know how to make oil, we actually don't need to pump it out of the ground anymore.
So... Where do you get your oil?
Used from McDonald's fryers, and I filter it myself.
It's been tried. Doesn't work. The rest of the world simply sails on by and continues developing economically while you recede.
Which, at this point, is EXACTLY what the United States needs to do. We need the rest of the world to catch up to us, and then rejoin it when the playing field is more even. We need to let the Islamics fight out their little reformation. We need to let Israel fail.
Then one day someone comes along and invades, wipes out your army, navy with superior weaponry and you're dead.
Well, if you keep a good eye on your borders and put some money into hundreds of millions of intelligent and mobile mines, maybe not.
OK. Time to stop importing US-made goods then. Everybody makes their own stuff and doesn't trade with others.
Fine with me, since there are no US-made goods left, only goods made in the third world and repackaged in the United States. Which is my whole point- we need to start making STUFF again instead of just managing a bunch of contracts that have no ability to be enforced.
Of course, it means any idea or design owned by a manufacturer in one country will be unavailable in any other. Lots of medicines and other ideas you'd be without.
No, actually, it means that any idea or design owned by a manufacturer in one country is a patent that can't be enforced in another. It's not THAT hard to reverse engineer stuff.
And the rare elements now used come from domestic or foreign sources?
See next point- just because it currently comes from a foreign source, doesn't mean that we can't find an equivalent that will work just as well right here in the good ole' USA- but we won't try because of labor cost.
Diamonds.
There's a public mine in Arkansas.
There is no industrial production of diamonds in this country.
Which is not the same as saying that we can't start one up- industrial diamonds are just crystallized carbon after all.
Of course, I won't say there are NO alternative technologies -- narrowly defining the scope of this issue creates a straw-man argument.
Well, when it comes to diamonds, we don't need any.
Are there domestic sources? Sure. Are they economically feasible to obtain? That's the question that needs to be asked.
And my point in this entire discussion is that economics can be engineered and is fungible. National security is not. By protecting and creating domestic industries to make everything we use, we can basically tell the world to fuck off if we need to (like during the current Islamic Reformation).
First off... did you have a brainfart, or are you actually advocating USA ISOLATIONISM, on all fronts, economic, political and military ?!?
I've actually been advocating that since 9-11-2001.
You know it can never work nowadays, do you ?
Depends on how you define "work". It'll probably hurt a lot. It will most certainly lose us the top 1% of our income earners- but then again I consider them to be useless parasites anyway. It will mean the loss of materialism. But we will survive, and that's all that counts.
Not that I wouldn't just love to see the USA shut the hell up already and keep its nose out of other people's bussiness, work out internal issues first... but that will and could never happend.
The only reason we're ever in anybody else's business is because of the trade to begin with. We have everything we need in our 50 states- there's no need for anything more.
Second... fiat currency is insignificant compared to the "virtual money" in circulation nowadays, at least 90% of today's "money" doesn't actually exist at all (with a pessimistic estimate of up to 98% of it being virtual money... yes, that's one "real, paper dollar" out every 50 in "circulation" in the worst case scenario, or one out of 10 in the best case scenario).
Same difference- I say go back to gold.
And government has zero fucking control over it, because it declined it in favor of the banking industry, just like most countries on this stupid planet. I'd really love to see a "bank run" in the world of today, with the banking system's bubble burst wide open to its rotten core all across the globe, governments forced to make banking a state issue rather than a private one.
Actually, four times in the last 200 years the US Government has taken it over.
It's not coercion because no one is actively using force against you.
Ok, so where's my choice as a consumer? If there is no force, that means that there's a choice.
No one is forcing you to do something, or avoid something.
Except, of course, the people preventing me from buying 100% American made magnets.
You are free to go your merry way.
Really? Am I? Or is this just a fake freedom, like Stalin offered?
At most you can complain that they aren't acting on your behalf in a way that you would want, which is not the same thing as working against you.
I see no difference between treason and treason.
Enforced worker protections, such as forcing employers to hire union members, is coercion because it can't work without the government explicitly stepping in to override a voluntary transaction which would otherwise occur.
As is forcing me to buy magnets from China- which wouldn't happen without government explicitly stepping in to destroy American corporations producing magnets.
If I'm not a union member, and you want to hire me, but can't because someone is explicitly preventing it, that is coercion.
No problem, we'll just make you a union member.
If I'm not a union member, and no one wants to hire me for their own personal reasons but could if they chose to, that is not coercion.
Or rather we'll just have to send you to India because no jobs are available here.
This doesn't mean we can't enforce false advertising laws, or other anti-fraud measures, because use of fraud puts me in a transaction I didn't agree to.
Just as free trade puts me in a transaction I didn't agree to. I didn't agree to join the WTO, or NAFTA. I didn't agree to let Wal*Mart put my local mom&pop shops out of business. I didn't agree to let the market destroy my community. That is ALL fraud.
"foreign trade is ALWAYS about hiding fraud, theft, or coercion from the consumer". You really should avoid universal statments. Almost always at least provides some leeway. Your statment is assertion, with nothing to back it up. Foreign trade is USUALLY about maximising personal profit. That does NOT require fraud, theft, or coercion in order to occur. It's not theft from you if I hire someone who is cheaper, or buy from a cheaper provider, because I have no obligation whatsoever to act for your benefit. The only obligation I have is not to act against you.
All profit is theft of wages. Profit is the difference between cost and price- and is therefore unpaid wages. Maximizing personal profit at the expense of your neighbors is indeed theft; and treason. And it should be treated as such. Greed is a mortal sin. You know why they call them mortal sins, don't you? Because they encourage somebody else to kill you.
And if you stunt your nation's (already poor) economic growth by refusing to participate in, reducing, or over-regulating international trade, then the terrorists have won.
Yes, the terrorists have won. They have won because they care to win and we don't care. So the real question isn't how to keep the terrorists from winning, because they've already won. The question is what we're going to do about it. Are we going to allow them to continue to control our economy from foreign lands? Are we going to continue to let terrorists into our open borders? Are we going to continue to let the Chinese poison our children? I say foreign trade isn't worth the cost.
I don't say this to be trite, its just a fact.
Yes, it is. I'm terrorized. But I'm going to do something about it. I'm going to start treating "Made in China" like the threat it is. I'm going to buy American-made diesel engines and stop running my car on middle eastern crap, and switch to bio-diesel. In fact, I already have. I buy American anytime I have a choice to, even if I have to pay 10x as much. If everybody did that, we wouldn't need to be in Iraq. We wouldn't need to get scared about China calling in our debt. We wouldn't need to worry about the New York Stock Exchange raping our savings- because we'd have jobs again. Big business is a drain that we don't need.
Hmm, an interesting new market philosophy :)
One for an overpopulated world. We don't have the resources to be spending them on exports, we need them right here at home to feed our own 300 million people.
Ask Boeing, Microsoft and Cisco, just to name a few.
Then maybe they should have their headquarters where their customers are, if it's that big of a problem for them to be patriotic.
And what interests are actually better off with the policies of the last 7 years, Halliburton or Exxon maybe but they live of imports.
The culture of importing and exporting would be impossible without Middle Eastern Oil. And it's not just the last 7 years- this problem started with the discovery of oil under the Middle Eastern Sand in the 1920s.
you don't have a 'right to a job' you have to right to apply for a job.
In that case, why should I bother with a job when it's easier just to shoot you and take what I want?
if nobody wants to pay your for your services, learn some new services. nobody 'took our jobs away' they simply outperformed us for a lower price.
No, they were allowed to have access to our customers by a government who refused to protect the borders.
I'm not talking about quality necessarily, that's another issue, and it varies as well.
Quality means nothing in the market- price is the only data the consumer has available to them, so that's what they make their decision on. Want quality? You need a protected market for quality.
People go to work and get paid because someone feels the need for their services, and that it's worth forking out the cash for said service instead of, for example, doing it themselves.
The more you do for yourself- the more that is done in your local community- the safer and less dependent you are on foreigners who couldn't give a shit about whether or not you have a service to offer.
If someone else does it for a lower price, then quit your bitching and do one of two things: find another job doing the same thing somewhere else, or, learn to do something else and do that.
And if you want a local community or a family, then you should be loyal to your local community and family. If not, you're just another traitor.
Like I said, industries, especially in particular geographical areas, but eventually as a whole, go completely out of business eventually when we have machines or other products to replace them. So, in accepting the fact that we don't live in a stagnant society, and that nobody is going to just walk up and start paying you for producing nothing (services included), you should really quit bitching about 'poor people who don't have jobs,' and start thinking of 'how can we find useful services for these folks to perform.'
That's exactly what I'm doing. The way to find useful services for people in our society to perform is by being LOYAL to our society and buying from people in our society, instead of being a selfish traitor and going elsewhere.
Notice that's not the same thing as forcing someone (or the government) to pay them to do what they feel like doing, it's repurposing some good resources -- the people who need the jobs. If all of the sudden computers could write all of their own code, I'd be fucked too, but I'm well aware of that, and I'm ready to accept the risk, so I seek employment as a programmer. You're not going to ever find something that's just right and sit on it for enternity, it'll just keep moving, like the rest of the planet.
And yet our fathers and grandfathers were able to- of course, they could spell too....unlike you.
Oil, in the quantity that it is now used in the US?
Which could be replaced with a wide variety of other substances- fossil oil isn't the only oil.
There is no way to make up for the difference in short time (say an election term) without a recession exceeding the scale of the 30's Great Depression.
Oh, I'm not saying we'll be able to make the change to domestic production without a depression- I'm saying we need to make the change to lessen the danger of war to the United States.
Very simple. To make those plasma screens, you'll have to import rare earth elements from abroad.
We now have rare earth mines here in the United States for every one of the 92 naturally occurring elements, though some of them need some refinement that makes the ore too expensive on a world market. Try again.
Those computers you're using to opine on to slashdot? They require rare earth elements too.
Who do you think invented the microchip? Gallium and arsenic are available from domestic sources as well.
How do you propose to buy items this country requires from abroad if there is no international wealth created by being competitive internationally?
I challenge you to find an item we need from abroad, that has NO domestic production and NO potential for domestic production and NO alternative technology.
Once again, this is exactly what I'm talking about. Foreign Trade may very well be economically advantageous, but is it safe from a national security standpoint? I say no.
You're content to sell to a market of 300M Americans, from a labor force of 300M Americans.
:)
Yes. I don't see any reason to go any further- nobody else has enough money for the labor cost we need to live on in America.
I'd like to expand that customer base by a factor of four, and in order to do that, I may have to increase the size of my labor pool by a similar factor.
Except you do it without increasing your labor cost, and all you do is encourage the race to the bottom. Want more? Then apply for statehood and accept federal laws regarding interstate trade, and accept a government in Washington DC.
Unlike you Marxists, we capitalists will do anything for a buck.
Including, apparently, feeding your children lead. Sorry- I don't accept killing human beings to make a buck as a viable business strategy.
Even if it means bringing 1.2 billion third-worlders up to Western standards of living.
Fine- get them to apply to Washington DC for statehood first, THEN trade with them when they have a minimum wage, an interstate highway system, and a reliable currency.
Sorry if that offends you
That doesn't offend me. Pretending to do so without first bringing them under the umbrella of worker, environmental, and consumer protections the United States affords to all of it's citizens is what offends me. Part of having Western Standards of Living means paying your workers $20/hr with full health and vacation benefits. When you capitalists can open an non-polluting factory in the third world that does that from the day it opens, I'll be all for it. Until then, only trade with countries which already have this. Is that so hard to understand?
What makes you think America has it's main export markets in the Third World?
Doesn't matter where the exports are going to- exports are a waste of resources we could be using right here in America.
The USofA (and the EU!) cannot (and should not) compete with the low-tech high-volume products China and their likes sells us, instead it should concentrate on it's strengths and that's high-tech like aircraft, machinery and certain electronics.
All of which, if you had RTFAd, is now made elsewhere. What's your next argument?
Of course the sceptics will claim the biggest foreign market for the US is war, but personally I think the world doesn't have much appetite for that industry right now...
No, that's our biggest reason for importing- protection of our interests costs quite a bit in military materials. Try again.
Thanks for showing your open hate at the end there, MH42. Nice to know that marxists are still empty violent rebel types.
I'm an American before I'm anything else- and when violence is the only solution left open, violence becomes the solution. You've taken away our jobs, you've taken away our way of life, you're in the process of taking away our houses with those stupid variable rate mortgages. What else is left?
Your economic theory is interesting but baseless.
It's not an economic theory, it's a national security theory.
If you get out a map you can draw arbitrary lines on it and make any silly economic point that you please. Suppose you draw a line around downtown San Francisco, and you notice that goods and services come in while only trash goes out. You haven't made an economic point about downtown San Francisco; you've just found where some rich people live.
Rich people should get what they deserve- death for stealing from everybody else.
National borders are of similar, diminishing relevance. I know that you believe that an American is somehow "worth" more than someone in China, but it's not really true; all men are created equal, and most of them manage to stay that way. Goods and services move into the US rather than out because the people in the US have more money.
I never said that an American is "worth" more than someone in China. I said that people in America don't owe the people in China a living. Let them build their own economy- and keep ours for ourselves.
Sure, it won't always be that way; taking money away from the rich has always been the favorite pastime of the poor. But your predicions of collapse and calamity are far from likely. The US economy still produces a huge amount of product, despite what John Edwards would have you believe. Enough to pay off those debts easily enough should China come looking for their money.
The US Economy produces nothing but paper. And even most of that is actually produced elsewhere- it's only the information on the paper that is the value added. When people elsewhere figure out that America's money is worth less than the paper it's printed on, they will go elsewhere. Money has no intrinsic value, only mythical value.
Oh the irony. How many countries has the US skewered because they refused to play the "we're bigger than you, give us your resources" game. Now the hat's on the other foot and "lock them out of our market" is the new strategy?
More, how many countries has New York City skewered because they refused to play that game? I'll give you a hint- the other 49 states were the first 49 to fall to this strategy, not the third world. Yes, it's time for protectionism not for the businessmen in New York City (for whom such protectionism would be really bad- as you say, large amounts of their business is elsewhere now) but rather for the other 49 states.
Fine, I define useful as producing a net benefit for both parties to the trade. Safety and protection are aspects of whether it's a net benefit, but they are not the only factors.
If you're dead, what other net benefit can exist? Money means NOTHING- price means NOTHING- efficiency means NOTHING if you cannot protect what you have.
Trade, foreign or domestic, is almost ALWAYS safe, because it is based on voluntary transactions rather than coercion, unlike many of the governmental and worker protections you think highly of.
If my only choice to buy a computer is to buy foreign, how is that not coercion? If my neighbor is starving because he got laid off from his job for cheaper labor elsewhere, how is that not theft? If you hide the pollution in China and claim that your US operation is environmentally safe, how is that not fraud? No, I'm sorry- foreign trade is ALWAYS about hiding fraud, theft, or coercion from the consumer- and thus libertarian free trade is just another con game like Stalinism was, promising much and delivering NOTHING.
Yes, but reserve currency is a bit like smoke- the US could, if we choose to, utterly destroy the entire Chinese investment in reserve currency merely by ending the printing of dollars and creating a new currency for use internal to the United States only. Very quickly the value of the "orphaned" US dollar would fall to the point that it would be just so much garbage.
No, it does NOT mean comparative advantage rules have broken down. Believe it or not, us buying more abroad just means that our money is worth more to foreigners than the objects they are selling, and the objects we are buying are worth more to us than the money being shelled out. That is all.
That's all if you are only thinking in the short term. But in the long term, this destroys our manufacturing industry to the point that we can't afford to keep paying Americans a high enough wage to have houses, let alone buy foreign crap.
Buying things abroad increases the nations overall wealth.
Or at least that's the religious myth they keep spouting at us with no real data whatsoever. Overall wealth means NOTHING- how much space you have between the poorest and the wealthiest counts for EVERYTHING, at least as far as national security counts, because the wider that spread the higher chance you have of violent revolution.
Even with an absolute advantage in every way, it is provably the case that trade can still be useful.
Depends on how you define useful. I define useful as being safe, protective of the future. Foreign trade is almost NEVER safe, because it strips away governmental consumer, environmental, and worker protections. It is in fact highly dangerous to anybody who isn't an investor; and remains so.
Hah, so american companies have enough to produce stuff locally and virtually be no further off because we'll spiral into an endless cycle of local inflation,
Well, there's a solution to that too- kill off the FED and stop producing fiat currency. The inflation will come down as the money supply tightens up (supply and demand, after all).
but we'll be able to afford it (thus staying the same in your perfect model.)
Yeah, unless of course we get smart and go back to the gold standard and stop allowing the government to print money.
Should we just forbid people from traveling too?
This is the information age, who needs to travel? Everything you can ever learn is right at your fingertips. Any experience you could ever want is available in the United States already, within 3000 miles of home, so who the hell needs to travel? Travel is just a waste of resources.
How about shut off the internet?
Rather, cut it off at the border- we created it, it's ours, why should we let somebody in China access it? Let them build their own.
There isn't, never was, and never will be a benefit to buying only american.
Except of course, NATIONAL SECURITY- but I guess you don't give a shit about that, being a traitor and all. Trade and other forms of foreign entanglement ties your economy to other economies, which allows dictators that the American people didn't elect to draw us into wars we don't want anything to do with. Like Iraq, for instance- there's no need for us to be in the Middle East at all- we have the ability to be entirely self-sufficient here, but because we choose to use cheap oil for our energy, we have to fight. If we had built our infrastructure based entirely on native materials, we wouldn't need to be messing around in the Middle East right now.
You don't have to agree with me, the market will back me up on this one.
The "market" is not loyal to America, and never has been, so is an insufficient predictor of what we need for national security at this point in history. In fact, the sheer chaos and greed of the so-called "free" market is a SEVERE danger to our health and well being as Americans.
so you're saying that if someone loses their high paying manufacturing job, then they can't go do something else ever?
No, I'm saying that the options to high paying manufacturing jobs pay less than a living wage.
not even 20 years from now?
Unless something comes along that pays a living wage, not even 20 years from now. The race for cheap labor is a race to the bottom, not to the top.
It's a local hiccup to lose a local industry to foreign competition, it doesn't make the next generation (next 4 year class of college students even) of workers immune to finding jobs.
It just means that the next generation only has burger flipping available- because nobody can afford anything else.
It's those high paying jobs anyway that make American companies unable to compete with foreign companies who don't pay them as much.
And we want to compete with them exactly why? Why not just lock them out of our market so that we don't have to compete with them?
So you're basically saying that we should somehow tell the other countries that they have to be fair and pay them as much as we'd like to make, because.. it's only fair that way... right?
No, I'm saying that if they want to sell goods here, then they have to pay equal to American wages. If they don't want to pay equal to American wages, then I see NO reason why we should allow their imports AT ALL.
I don't think they'll buy it. And you will be left behind whining about how life isn't fair, while the people who adapt will be moving on buying more plasma screen tv's they shouldn't be able to afford.
At least until China realizes that all they're getting for those plasma screens are IOUs that will never be paid off. I don't see any reason why we can't just sink the Chinese ships trying to cross our borders, and make the plasma screens here. But hey- if you like selling out your nationality for cheap labor, so be it. There's a name for that: treason. And someday, patriots like me will be handing out the proper punishment for that crime.
If we only bought american goods, then we'd inflate our local prices,
Thus increasing the wages of American Workers, which would in turn allow us to afford those higher local prices, and encourage production of goods here at home to keep us safe from foreign wars and governments.
and foreign companies would kick the crap out of us abroad,
Only if you're stupid enough to tie your business to a foreign market instead of creating goods for your own nation's people ONLY. We've got 300 million people who, to maintain their standard of living, need the same amount of goods as 1.2 billion third worlders. What kind of loser needs to sell to the third worlders with a market like that here at home?
and we wouldn't have anyone able to compete.
This makes no sense. Why compete for small third world markets when cooperation to use the larger first world market can bring larger rewards?
Then instead of losing SOME money to them, we'd have whole companies go out of business.
Only the non-patriotic treasonous ones- which should go out of business anyway.
You weren't paying attention in economics class where you. It might sound nice to say 'buy american' but if we really did that, and boycott foreign stuff, you'd drive the price on american shit up so much there would be no way in hell anyone but americans would buy american, and foreign business is what keeps a LOT of companies afloat.
Those companies, I call them free traitors, deserve to go out of business if they're too stupid to be able to stay in business with this big of a market. And yes- we're at the point where we've got such an incredibly high standard of living in comparison to everybody else that we either need to produce it all ourselves for ourselves while waiting for the rest of the world to catch up, or we need to go through a depression to reduce our standard of living. A BUY AMERICAN campaign will achieve both.
There's an easy way out- that each consumer needs to do. Refuse to buy. Treat Made In China as the warning label it should be. Just say no to buying. The resulting depression will fix the issue.
On this issue, you'd be better of not trying to fix it at the ballot box- and fix it at the cash register instead by refusing to buy foreign-made goods. If enough US consumers did that, the trade imbalance would be fixed.