1. Only if you measure value by money alone- I measure it by the full chemical contents of the product involved. By that measure, significant value is being destroyed to make a profit.
2. I'm fine with a lack of subsidies- I'm not fine with allowing access to foreign markets.
3. Selling "ownership" in a company is exactly the fraud I'm refering to. We are stewards and custodians of what we have, not owners.
4. If you can't pay for it, you're not a consumer by capitalist standards; you're just so much meat to be used and thrown away.
1 Freezing and pasteurization are now known to destroy some of the food value of dairy products.
2. The WTO calls this free trade- despite the complaints of second and third world nations that their entire local agricultural industry is being destroyed by subsidies.
3. I consider both tall buildings and cities to be bad, and stock exchanges to be basically fraud. All three of these contribute to anonymous capitalism where the end consumer does not know the manufacturer of the goods they consume, thus destroying a vital human relationship that is neccessary to keeping markets fair.
4. Not everybody is a consumer- different people play different roles to different degrees in society, and if you aren't a worker you're usually not allowed to be a consumer either (due to lack of funds to be a consumer). That's why the eternal search for efficiency and profit is a bad thing overall.
Yes- but more a distributist nowadays. Economics and communism are much easier when human beings are organized into tribes and villages instead of states and nations.
Hint: Any place that doesn't have a lot of grassland to spare.
There are forms of cattle that don't eat grass.
Raising cattle is tremendously land-intensive. Countries in eastern Europe often don't have a lot of grassland to begin with, and countries like Great Britain and Japan don't have a lot of unindustrialized land, period.
No, in fact it isn't- it explains why comparative advantage is a crackpot theory and only absolute advantage exists in today's "free trade" debacle.
I don't think you really understand what a trade deficit implies. Grab an econ textbook and look up "balance of payments".
A trade deficit implies that an absolute advantage exists due to disparity of labor laws. And yes, my dear little naive student, balance of payments is what it really is about.
Yes, the people who spend their lives studying this topic should bow to your crackpot theories.
You mean the people who have spent their lives following the crackpot theories of Adam Smith and David Ricardo, both of whom were in pay to the mercantilists to give them political power over everybody else?
What dignity is there in living a lie?
What lie is there in paying somebody for work done? None that I can see. Rather, the lie is in paying somebody less than the work is worth.
You can't "toss" anything out due to trade imbalances.
It's a waste of time and resources- we'd be better off if the bankers and economists were actually working for a living.
Really, it's just as bad as saying "the 2nd law of thermodynamics precludes evolution". It's based on a misunderstanding of the theories involved.
The theories involved in both cases are nonsense anyway- just an attempt to give political power to a given minority.
Trade imbalances are cash imbalances, not value imbalances. When you have a $1tn trade deficit, you pay out $1tn more in cash than you take in. However, you're not any poorer, because you've $1tn worth of goods to offset that. It's just like if you had $1m, then bought a house with it. You're not any poorer, your net worth is still $1m.
And yet you've just thrown $1tn worth of your own citizens out of work. That is a net loss as far as I'm concerned- because the purpose of the economy is not to gather material wealth, it's to provide your citizens with a living. Anything that can be made here should be made here, as close to the consumer as possible, to provide the most people possible with jobs. Same with India and China- they should be creating their OWN economy instead of parasiting onto us.
And where is this evidence of a falling standard of living in the US?
The falling value of the dollar and the widening gap between the rich and the poor (especially since the rich don't act like citizens, but that's another argument).
Because standard indices don't agree with your characteriziation.
The "standard indices" have been fakes since the Reagan Administration started monkeying with the equations. They can not be trusted.
TFA doesn't say anything along these lines, and its not a viewpoint that is bourne out by the statistics.
A second world nation is now innovating. If you can't understand the implication of that, it's little wonder you believe the economists when they actively lie to you.
Citizens as a whole, or specific citizens? Because in this era of free trade, prosperity and unemployement are pretty much lower than they've ever been.
During WWII, unemployment was zero. I sumbit the same should be for the GWOT. But right now, you can't trust numbers coming out of the Department of Labor- they've been ordered to move unemployed people to "disabled" status to keep the numbers low and the apparent prosperity high.
Because the standard of living to which Americans are accustomed is largely dependent on our being at the top. How long do you think we can get away with using 1/4 the world's energy when we don't have the intellectual, economic, and military capability to back it up?
If we started energy farming, we could essentially replace that 1/4th of the world's energy entirely with domestic production, and then all we'd need to do is close the borders.
Are you trolling? The EU now has the largest economy in the world. Their GDP growth rate is generally lower than ours, but in the last few years has been nipping at our heels certain quarters.
If you like it so much, why don't you move back there? Europe sucks- it's a horrid place to live.
The Euro is very strong, and is looking increasingly attractive as a replacement for dollars in the international investment market.
Good, then maybe we could get back to American dollars for Americans Only.
They've still got a long way to go in terms of technological competitiveness (in most respects, American research is still the best in the world), but that's the kind of thing that doesn't last forever.
Maybe when they upgrade their sewer systems they'll be better off...but right now I wouldn't drink the water there.
Even if we don't slow down, your children might live in a world where the EU has replaced the US as top dog. If we do, they might even live in a world where China and the EU have both overshadowed the US.
As long as they don't come here, that would be fine with me. Maybe then they'll have an immigration problem instead of us.
What research backs this up?
30 years worth of trade deficits. That and the whole mess of international communism that is the WTO. Economics is simpler when it is small scale- and more human when you know who you are buying from personally (and can punch them in the nose if they cheat you).
You're talking about harm to a small group of people offset against the benefit to a larger group of people.
Actually, other way around- I'm saying that free trade benefits a small group of people to the detriment of the larger group of people.
Consider the fact that with American farmers exporting cheap milk around the world, people in countries that aren't amenable to raising large numbers of cattle can now increase their consumption of milk.
And exactly what countries do you think aren't amenable to raising lare numbers of cattle? I'll give you a hint- anyplace that has a climate temperate enough for human beings is temperate enough for cattle.
Wheras thousands of local dairy farmers in one place may lose jobs, potentially millions of children in other places may improve a critical part of their diet.
Wouldn't it be better just to export the cows, thus providing potentially millions of the parents of those children with jobs?
Your argument is illogical. Free trade promotes industrialization
Correct
and economic development.
Incorrect. Industrialization and economic development are not always linked, and the correlation is sometimes negative.
Economic development discourages rapid population growth.
No, it doesn't. At least, not always. Industrialization discourages rapid population growth it is true, but that's mainly due to polution and less time for family.
It's easy to see why. If you're a subsistence farmer, having more children is beneficial, because children can work on the farm and increase production. If you consider a country where most of the population is engaged in subsistence farming, then you can see the reasons for rapid population growth. On the other hand, if you work on a factory or in a service job, having more children is a liability. They can't contribute to your production, and you have to feed, cloathe, and care for them.
True, but that's industrialization- not economic development.
Ending international trade would have the effect of creating more farmers, not just in developing nations, but in developed nations. That would cause birth rates to increase world-wide.
Also not entirely correct- international trade is not the only reason for industrialization, and industrialization by itself creates less need for farmers, because we can use less labor intensive methods to create the same output.
Estimates of carrying capacity vary from below one billion to over 20 billion. Estimating carrying capacity is not an exact science. I refuse to use some arbitrary date as the day when we began to be fucked. Besides, carrying capacity varies widely with technological development and human attitude, which is not fixed from situation to situation.
In this case they're using natural resource generation vs natural resource usage- which is right now at about 130% of resource generation. Yes, technology can change that somewhat- but there are some very hard limits.
Actually, if you look at American economic propsperity, it's highly correlated with the breaking down of trade barriers.
True, but up until 1960 or so, the method of doing so was by creating new States and Protected Territories- that is, by subverting new lands to American Law. This worked well because it insured that the minimum wage would be a federal minimum regardless of where you were- the Philipines, Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands, Hawaii, the Lower 48, or Alaska. It's when we started breaking down trade barriers *without* exporting our labor and industry regulations that we started having trade deficits- and since 1976 we haven't had a single trade surplus.
That free trade makes you wealthier overall is something that almost nobody who knows what they're talking about (economists) disagrees with.
I personally think the last 30 years have pretty much proven that economists don't know what they're talking about with respect to free trade.
It's been blatently evident for literally hundreds of years in the history of Europe.
No it hasn't- pretty much all wealth generation in the first world is protected by regulations and tariffs of various sorts. Without regulation you can't even form a corporation.
The concerns that are brought up regarding free trade are better targetted at social policy. Now, a lot of pro-protectionists don't like talking about social policy, because they see it as a hand-out. But the truth of the matter is that protectionism is just another hand-out. If our consumers pay several times as much for a product just to keep Americans employed, how is that different from just buying the product more cheaply and contributing the difference to job-retraining programs? Either way, society is burdened with the welfare of a particular worker, it's just that in the latter case, there is no pretense about it.
Here's the difference: Human dignity. If the extra price is hidden, the worker feels useful. If the extra price is just charity, the worker feels worthless.
However, that doesn't change the fact that the real numbers show that America has been tossing away approximately 10% of it's gross domestic product in trade imbalances for the past 30 years of so-called "breaking down trade barriers". Either free trade simply does not work, or the imbalance wouldn't have appeared. The data proves the economists wrong. Pretending to ignore the falling standard of living in the United States doesn't help either.
Don't get things wrong. The US still has the most solid and fastest growing (in absolute terms) economy in the world. It'll take a lot of unseat us from first place. But, if we can't adapt to changing conditions, then decades from now we may look on in envy as we are relegated to "middle of the road" status.
RTFA- we're already being regulated to middle of the road status. This shouldn't worry us very much, as long as our internal economy stays strong. It's when our internal economy is linked to the outside, through foreign trade, that we need to worry. What does it matter if we're the fastest or slowest growing economy, as long as OUR citizens still have jobs and are able to raise their families?
It's a system that works (albiet suboptimally in terms of generating new wealth), as long as our competitors, namely Europe, don't free up their economies. As the EU gets stronger, our only options are to follow suit, or be left behind anyway.
Why should we care what they do? Also, the EU isn't going to be anybody's competitor economically soon- they waste too much time with vacations and spend too much on socialized health care. Our real competitors are in the second world- India and China- and soon to be in the third world as Africa and S. America start investing in infrastructure.
However, if access to OUR market is protected, there still isn't any problem. It's only when we open up our market to outside competition, that a problem exists.
Well, keep in mind that IANAEconomist but it's not that it's suddenly flawed, it's always been flawed. The flaw is that it creates artificial imbalances which cannot be perpetuated indefinitely.
And where is our evidence for that? If the artificial *balances* have been balanced enough to work for generations, what makes them *unbalanced* now?
There are two reasons for this. One is simply that differentials are where the greatest energy exists. You can see this principle of nature at work everywhere you look. Energy has the property that it affects things, which I realize is an understatement but is part of the logical flow of this conversation... But anyway, what I mean by this is that there will constantly be forces working against it, so that it takes a great deal of effort to maintain it. That effort typically takes the form of regulation - but one of the effects of regulation is that it always creates imbalances of its own, which leads to more regulation. It's a self-perpetuating system, which is why trying to change the system from within is typically fruitless. Just in order to enter the system, you become a part of it. The other reason is that if we really did successfully wall ourselves in, then the rest of the world would just find a way to function without us. This is pretty much what's happening now - e.g. China's currency is no longer based on ours.
This to me is a good thing- each culture needs to learn to function within the budget of their own natural resources, that is, without us. Trade should be limited, and then only between surplusses so that you don't harm those within your culture merely for profit.
So basically, it was a doomed system from the beginning - this doesn't mean it wasn't useful then, it allowed us unparalleled economic growth. But it should have been abandoned when it was no longer useful and started to work against us, and it was not discarded only because certain individuals in power could profit from the status quo.
But the real point is that it WAS working for us- protectionism was working for quite a large number of generations. Insisting that it suddenly wasn't working is quite a shock to the system.
The attitude that you can get everything you want without helping others is a ridiculous one. The more you have, and the less others have, the more motivated they are to take away what you have. If you help yourself by helping others, then there is little reason for them to try to deprive you of anything. This has never been proven on a global scale because it has never been tried on a global scale.
Why not just be satisfied with what you NEED rather than what you WANT, and limit your population to fit within the carrying capacity of your territory?
From my perspective- any time a company chooses to go multinational it is indeed offshoring. I'm of the old opinion that people should be patriotic instead of profit minded.
However, free trade also creates jobs, especially in my home state of Wisconsin. With tariffs and other protections removed that make offsourcing and exporting possible, our dairy industry now sells a great deal overseas. This is especially true for the smaller farmers - they didn't have the infrastructure the corporate farms did to effectively deal with trade barriers; now, they have a market to sell to that they didn't before.
This seems to me to be a huge negative from a few different angles. 1. Energy usage- is it really a good thing to be selling parishable dairy products a half a world away at all, essentially creating huge multinational corporations, where millions of local dairies served before and created a fresher product for the mere reason that it didn't have to travel hundreds or thousands of miles to get to you? 2. If we're selling dairy overseas, what is happening to local dairies overseas? Are they losing their market to US Government subsidised dairy products? 3. And what happens to those overseas dairy farmers? Do they end up coming here to compete with us for land and resources (by coming here illegally, as the Oxacan Chicano Indians did when the same thing happened in Mexico) or by committing suicide (as farmers in India are doing)?
So the problem isn't the free market, it's two things: First, it's not really a free market; and second, the fact that we had even less free trade for a long, long time means that there will be a period of settling out that, yes, will likely be disastrous for the US. Our economy is based on trade not being Free, because it has been that way for generations. The longer a flawed system is perpetuated, the longer it takes to correct the situation.
Good point, first of all. But secondly- if a system has worked for generations, why is it suddenly flawed now? And if it's not really flawed, why "fix" a working system?
Democrats in DC perhaps were stunned by Americans voting "Truth to Power" and were too scared of their own shadows to take on Ronald Reagan's legislative agenda - but they still had control of the House and could have stopped it.
More along the lines of- they saw the stupidity of it, and set a trap that they could then milk for the next four years by giving out fund raising dinners consisting of hot dogs, ketchup, and potato chips with small milk cartons. The Democrats aren't some holy group- they'll take a political gift from the Republicans *even if it hurts schoolchildren* and then use it for their partisan politics. In other words- they had no real political reason to *oppose* this bit of stupidity until after the fact- much like they knew that going to war in Iraq for a second time would be bad, but all except for one or two of them went ahead and voted to give W the power to do so anyway- thus buying themselves four years, and counting, of getting votes by "opposing" the war in public speeches, the very war they voted for.
I have read "The Ancient Art of War", the message I got from the text was that force should be used intelligenly and sparingly. The classic senario of Sun Tzu is the story of the 100 conqubines and the greedy emporer. "Sinking to the enemy's moral level" is in my mind the basic point where we differ and is NOT advocated by Sun Tzu's teachings.
Should force be used intelligently and sparingly? YES! But understanding one's enemy is neccessary to the intelligent use of force; and to truly understand one's enemy, you must become that enemy.
Ever hear of a thing called the cold war?
Yes- and look at how we won that one: by totally destroying our own middle class and ending up with an economic system that looks surprisingly like the Soviet Communist Model (where you have basically a two-class economic system of winners and losers). The only difference is that we call our party members, stock brokers.
Complete anhilation of an opposing civilization is in fact very rare, just as rare as complete harmony between the two. The "reality" you speak of lies somewhere between the two extremes.
True. But that's more a matter of technology than anything else.
BTW: Your final point depends on your definition of winning.
In this case, I'd be satisfied with mere survival. In fact, if it wasn't for the other side's genocidal prechings from the mosques, I wouldn't be preaching genocide now.
Which *might* give us an option, if it wasn't for the martyr effect. It would be hard to do- would have to be one heck of a covert op- but what if we abandoned our "separation of church and state" and adopted a more moderate form of Islam as our state religion? Then we also could open up missionary mosques in other nations- preaching a more moderate form of Islam- and making sure the preachers in other mosques do *not* enjoy physical protection from Allah, making their deaths look like accidents. Eventually, only our mosques would have leaders- taking over the religion.
I think the rest of the conversation is over; we understand each other's position well, but I wanted to respond to this:
Do you use X10? In part I want the challenge but I also love travelling and would like to access the home system while away, say be able to turn ac or heating on before arriving home when I've been gone for weeks or months. Or check the webcams and what have you for security. Or even to check the status of the electrical system, I want to build off the grid and have a hybrid electrical power generation system, with solar and wind gennies charging a battery bank.
I use a combination of X10, A10, and more traditional wired alarm. When the alarm goes off, it triggers a universal module, which notified Homeseer, and sends an e-mail to my cell phone. Right now the web portion of the system is down due to being on an old Win98 machine that doesn't like my DHCP server, that will change next spring when I get the money to buy the newer version of Homeseer (that runs on XP) and a USB interface to the X10 system (currently running on serial, which is why it's still on a Win98 system). If I had to do it all over again, I'd probably use Linux and Mr. House instead, but I've got several hours of VBS programming on my Homeseer system, so I'm reluctant to change.
Which, if you think about it, public school lunches (and now BREAKFASTS) are! It's not the rich kids (who can afford to go off campus to McDonalds or whereever and spend $10 a day on lunch) who would eat that slop.
If salsa is hand prepared at all (I'm not at all willing to discuss factory-made salsas) then it's got about as much nutrition as a chef salad. In fact, that's what salsa in Mexican Spanish *means*- Salad. Using it as a condiment or worse yet a dip (didn't anybody tell the Texans that dips are supposed to be thick enough to stick to the chip?!?!?!?!?) is way more modern.
Yes I do, I don't want my id stolen or my credit messed with. Maybe you haven't been paying attention but I have been watching how people have their credit worthiness destroyed by those who have stolen their id.
Got news for you- all they have to do is simply invent an SSN. All of the credit reporting agencies now know those are non-unique. As for stolen ID, if they want to do that all they need to do is work for a business that does credit applications.
The way things are today all you need is someone's snn to do this. People can easily get credit cards and loans with someone else's snn, unless their credit isn't good to begin with.
Which is also a good way to defend yourself against identity theft- keep your credit score *below* 555 and deal in cash instead of sinful credit.
And if it is bad they aren't as able to get credit for say a mortage. If they are able to get one then they will pay more for the loan as loan points and interest on the load is partially determined by credit worthiness. The better a person's FICA credit score is the less they pay on loans.
True- which should tell you not to buy on loans.
But once their credit is messed up by someone stealing their id it takes years and years to get it straightened out as well as a lot of money. Innocent people have even been arrested because someone stole and used their id. I try to keep as much info about me private as possible so as to not make it any easier for someone to steal my id. I used to markout and rip up or burn credit card offers and everything else that gave someone else the possibility of gaining access to my credit but I plan on getting a paper shredder instead.
Hint- if you're getting credit card offers, you're too late already- they send out credit card offers based on the information FICA sells.
Agreed, it cuts both ways and I wouldn't want to work for anyone who would look for info with these tactics. However some don't know what they do online is there permanently and that employers look for it, and not everyone may have a choice. Who knows, I may end up without a choice myself. I'm on disability and haven't worked in years but I want to start working as soon as I can, but I won't have much of a choice as to what I'll be able to do.
Look at the name- the correct way around this is to work for the government. Find a job that your disability doesn't impair, and then apply for a boss who has other cares than the bottom line.
No abortions that I know of are done in a public place. Most happen on private property, which is no different than say a mall. The mall is private property and the owners can ask or requeast that you leave the property and if you don't they can have the police forcibly remove you or arrest you if you resist. Simply a public place is a place that is owned by the public, which usually means the government.
Actually, if a business is open to the public, then what happens there is public information, like it or not. Like I said before, this is reality vs the law- the law is in fantasy land on this one.
Though I don't like it and it's short sighted for the near term it's more profitable for insurance to do this, their expenses are lower. However if they think about the long term then they'll realize that baby may become a paying client and pay more than what insurance paid.
And that baby is just as likely to become a paying client of the competition. That's the entire problem with profit margin economics, aka capitalism. It's also the reason why FICA scores are so screwed up as to be rather useless.
Yea, Larry Elison, ceo of Oracle, years ago said there is no privacy. Obviously it's in his interest to say that as he leads a database company and if someone wants to save electronic communications and have them easily searchable then they need a database. There is privacy but only as much as a person is willing to work to keep their privacy and stay ho
Also note that I blame the Reagan administration, not Reagan personally, for this; it was Congress that gave the original orders and Reagan Political Appointees that came up with the actual stupid recomendation (and defense thereof).
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1. Only if you measure value by money alone- I measure it by the full chemical contents of the product involved. By that measure, significant value is being destroyed to make a profit.
2. I'm fine with a lack of subsidies- I'm not fine with allowing access to foreign markets.
3. Selling "ownership" in a company is exactly the fraud I'm refering to. We are stewards and custodians of what we have, not owners.
4. If you can't pay for it, you're not a consumer by capitalist standards; you're just so much meat to be used and thrown away.
Businesses aren't charities
And this, in short, is the real problem. Capitalism doesn't give a rip about people- it cares about PROFIT.
1 Freezing and pasteurization are now known to destroy some of the food value of dairy products.
2. The WTO calls this free trade- despite the complaints of second and third world nations that their entire local agricultural industry is being destroyed by subsidies.
3. I consider both tall buildings and cities to be bad, and stock exchanges to be basically fraud. All three of these contribute to anonymous capitalism where the end consumer does not know the manufacturer of the goods they consume, thus destroying a vital human relationship that is neccessary to keeping markets fair.
4. Not everybody is a consumer- different people play different roles to different degrees in society, and if you aren't a worker you're usually not allowed to be a consumer either (due to lack of funds to be a consumer). That's why the eternal search for efficiency and profit is a bad thing overall.
Yes- but more a distributist nowadays. Economics and communism are much easier when human beings are organized into tribes and villages instead of states and nations.
Hint: Any place that doesn't have a lot of grassland to spare.
There are forms of cattle that don't eat grass.
Raising cattle is tremendously land-intensive. Countries in eastern Europe often don't have a lot of grassland to begin with, and countries like Great Britain and Japan don't have a lot of unindustrialized land, period.
So maybe they need to deindustrialize?
This is a crackpot theory.
No, in fact it isn't- it explains why comparative advantage is a crackpot theory and only absolute advantage exists in today's "free trade" debacle.
I don't think you really understand what a trade deficit implies. Grab an econ textbook and look up "balance of payments".
A trade deficit implies that an absolute advantage exists due to disparity of labor laws. And yes, my dear little naive student, balance of payments is what it really is about.
Yes, the people who spend their lives studying this topic should bow to your crackpot theories.
You mean the people who have spent their lives following the crackpot theories of Adam Smith and David Ricardo, both of whom were in pay to the mercantilists to give them political power over everybody else?
What dignity is there in living a lie?
What lie is there in paying somebody for work done? None that I can see. Rather, the lie is in paying somebody less than the work is worth.
You can't "toss" anything out due to trade imbalances.
It's a waste of time and resources- we'd be better off if the bankers and economists were actually working for a living.
Really, it's just as bad as saying "the 2nd law of thermodynamics precludes evolution". It's based on a misunderstanding of the theories involved.
The theories involved in both cases are nonsense anyway- just an attempt to give political power to a given minority.
Trade imbalances are cash imbalances, not value imbalances. When you have a $1tn trade deficit, you pay out $1tn more in cash than you take in. However, you're not any poorer, because you've $1tn worth of goods to offset that. It's just like if you had $1m, then bought a house with it. You're not any poorer, your net worth is still $1m.
And yet you've just thrown $1tn worth of your own citizens out of work. That is a net loss as far as I'm concerned- because the purpose of the economy is not to gather material wealth, it's to provide your citizens with a living. Anything that can be made here should be made here, as close to the consumer as possible, to provide the most people possible with jobs. Same with India and China- they should be creating their OWN economy instead of parasiting onto us.
And where is this evidence of a falling standard of living in the US?
The falling value of the dollar and the widening gap between the rich and the poor (especially since the rich don't act like citizens, but that's another argument).
Because standard indices don't agree with your characteriziation.
The "standard indices" have been fakes since the Reagan Administration started monkeying with the equations. They can not be trusted.
TFA doesn't say anything along these lines, and its not a viewpoint that is bourne out by the statistics.
A second world nation is now innovating. If you can't understand the implication of that, it's little wonder you believe the economists when they actively lie to you.
Citizens as a whole, or specific citizens? Because in this era of free trade, prosperity and unemployement are pretty much lower than they've ever been.
During WWII, unemployment was zero. I sumbit the same should be for the GWOT. But right now, you can't trust numbers coming out of the Department of Labor- they've been ordered to move unemployed people to "disabled" status to keep the numbers low and the apparent prosperity high.
Because the standard of living to which Americans are accustomed is largely dependent on our being at the top. How long do you think we can get away with using 1/4 the world's energy when we don't have the intellectual, economic, and military capability to back it up?
If we started energy farming, we could essentially replace that 1/4th of the world's energy entirely with domestic production, and then all we'd need to do is close the borders.
Are you trolling? The EU now has the largest economy in the world. Their GDP growth rate is generally lower than ours, but in the last few years has been nipping at our heels certain quarters.
If you like it so much, why don't you move back there? Europe sucks- it's a horrid place to live.
The Euro is very strong, and is looking increasingly attractive as a replacement for dollars in the international investment market.
Good, then maybe we could get back to American dollars for Americans Only.
They've still got a long way to go in terms of technological competitiveness (in most respects, American research is still the best in the world), but that's the kind of thing that doesn't last forever.
Maybe when they upgrade their sewer systems they'll be better off...but right now I wouldn't drink the water there.
Even if we don't slow down, your children might live in a world where the EU has replaced the US as top dog. If we do, they might even live in a world where China and the EU have both overshadowed the US.
As long as they don't come here, that would be fine with me. Maybe then they'll have an immigration problem instead of us.
What research backs this up?
30 years worth of trade deficits. That and the whole mess of international communism that is the WTO. Economics is simpler when it is small scale- and more human when you know who you are buying from personally (and can punch them in the nose if they cheat you).
That's nationalism, not patriotism. There's a big difference.
Not much of one in this situation- I'm talking about making sacrifices so that your neighbors can be more free.
You're talking about harm to a small group of people offset against the benefit to a larger group of people.
Actually, other way around- I'm saying that free trade benefits a small group of people to the detriment of the larger group of people.
Consider the fact that with American farmers exporting cheap milk around the world, people in countries that aren't amenable to raising large numbers of cattle can now increase their consumption of milk.
And exactly what countries do you think aren't amenable to raising lare numbers of cattle? I'll give you a hint- anyplace that has a climate temperate enough for human beings is temperate enough for cattle.
Wheras thousands of local dairy farmers in one place may lose jobs, potentially millions of children in other places may improve a critical part of their diet.
Wouldn't it be better just to export the cows, thus providing potentially millions of the parents of those children with jobs?
Your argument is illogical. Free trade promotes industrialization
Correct
and economic development.
Incorrect. Industrialization and economic development are not always linked, and the correlation is sometimes negative.
Economic development discourages rapid population growth.
No, it doesn't. At least, not always. Industrialization discourages rapid population growth it is true, but that's mainly due to polution and less time for family.
It's easy to see why. If you're a subsistence farmer, having more children is beneficial, because children can work on the farm and increase production. If you consider a country where most of the population is engaged in subsistence farming, then you can see the reasons for rapid population growth. On the other hand, if you work on a factory or in a service job, having more children is a liability. They can't contribute to your production, and you have to feed, cloathe, and care for them.
True, but that's industrialization- not economic development.
Ending international trade would have the effect of creating more farmers, not just in developing nations, but in developed nations. That would cause birth rates to increase world-wide.
Also not entirely correct- international trade is not the only reason for industrialization, and industrialization by itself creates less need for farmers, because we can use less labor intensive methods to create the same output.
Estimates of carrying capacity vary from below one billion to over 20 billion. Estimating carrying capacity is not an exact science. I refuse to use some arbitrary date as the day when we began to be fucked. Besides, carrying capacity varies widely with technological development and human attitude, which is not fixed from situation to situation.
In this case they're using natural resource generation vs natural resource usage- which is right now at about 130% of resource generation. Yes, technology can change that somewhat- but there are some very hard limits.
Actually, if you look at American economic propsperity, it's highly correlated with the breaking down of trade barriers.
True, but up until 1960 or so, the method of doing so was by creating new States and Protected Territories- that is, by subverting new lands to American Law. This worked well because it insured that the minimum wage would be a federal minimum regardless of where you were- the Philipines, Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands, Hawaii, the Lower 48, or Alaska. It's when we started breaking down trade barriers *without* exporting our labor and industry regulations that we started having trade deficits- and since 1976 we haven't had a single trade surplus.
That free trade makes you wealthier overall is something that almost nobody who knows what they're talking about (economists) disagrees with.
I personally think the last 30 years have pretty much proven that economists don't know what they're talking about with respect to free trade.
It's been blatently evident for literally hundreds of years in the history of Europe.
No it hasn't- pretty much all wealth generation in the first world is protected by regulations and tariffs of various sorts. Without regulation you can't even form a corporation.
The concerns that are brought up regarding free trade are better targetted at social policy. Now, a lot of pro-protectionists don't like talking about social policy, because they see it as a hand-out. But the truth of the matter is that protectionism is just another hand-out. If our consumers pay several times as much for a product just to keep Americans employed, how is that different from just buying the product more cheaply and contributing the difference to job-retraining programs? Either way, society is burdened with the welfare of a particular worker, it's just that in the latter case, there is no pretense about it.
Here's the difference: Human dignity. If the extra price is hidden, the worker feels useful. If the extra price is just charity, the worker feels worthless.
However, that doesn't change the fact that the real numbers show that America has been tossing away approximately 10% of it's gross domestic product in trade imbalances for the past 30 years of so-called "breaking down trade barriers". Either free trade simply does not work, or the imbalance wouldn't have appeared. The data proves the economists wrong. Pretending to ignore the falling standard of living in the United States doesn't help either.
Ok, I'll answer this backwards:
Don't get things wrong. The US still has the most solid and fastest growing (in absolute terms) economy in the world. It'll take a lot of unseat us from first place. But, if we can't adapt to changing conditions, then decades from now we may look on in envy as we are relegated to "middle of the road" status.
RTFA- we're already being regulated to middle of the road status. This shouldn't worry us very much, as long as our internal economy stays strong. It's when our internal economy is linked to the outside, through foreign trade, that we need to worry. What does it matter if we're the fastest or slowest growing economy, as long as OUR citizens still have jobs and are able to raise their families?
It's a system that works (albiet suboptimally in terms of generating new wealth), as long as our competitors, namely Europe, don't free up their economies. As the EU gets stronger, our only options are to follow suit, or be left behind anyway.
Why should we care what they do? Also, the EU isn't going to be anybody's competitor economically soon- they waste too much time with vacations and spend too much on socialized health care. Our real competitors are in the second world- India and China- and soon to be in the third world as Africa and S. America start investing in infrastructure.
However, if access to OUR market is protected, there still isn't any problem. It's only when we open up our market to outside competition, that a problem exists.
We've been over our carrying capacity since October 9.
And yes, we need to reduce population. The fairest way to do so would be to end international trade.
Well, keep in mind that IANAEconomist but it's not that it's suddenly flawed, it's always been flawed. The flaw is that it creates artificial imbalances which cannot be perpetuated indefinitely.
And where is our evidence for that? If the artificial *balances* have been balanced enough to work for generations, what makes them *unbalanced* now?
There are two reasons for this. One is simply that differentials are where the greatest energy exists. You can see this principle of nature at work everywhere you look. Energy has the property that it affects things, which I realize is an understatement but is part of the logical flow of this conversation... But anyway, what I mean by this is that there will constantly be forces working against it, so that it takes a great deal of effort to maintain it. That effort typically takes the form of regulation - but one of the effects of regulation is that it always creates imbalances of its own, which leads to more regulation. It's a self-perpetuating system, which is why trying to change the system from within is typically fruitless. Just in order to enter the system, you become a part of it. The other reason is that if we really did successfully wall ourselves in, then the rest of the world would just find a way to function without us. This is pretty much what's happening now - e.g. China's currency is no longer based on ours.
This to me is a good thing- each culture needs to learn to function within the budget of their own natural resources, that is, without us. Trade should be limited, and then only between surplusses so that you don't harm those within your culture merely for profit.
So basically, it was a doomed system from the beginning - this doesn't mean it wasn't useful then, it allowed us unparalleled economic growth. But it should have been abandoned when it was no longer useful and started to work against us, and it was not discarded only because certain individuals in power could profit from the status quo.
But the real point is that it WAS working for us- protectionism was working for quite a large number of generations. Insisting that it suddenly wasn't working is quite a shock to the system.
The attitude that you can get everything you want without helping others is a ridiculous one. The more you have, and the less others have, the more motivated they are to take away what you have. If you help yourself by helping others, then there is little reason for them to try to deprive you of anything. This has never been proven on a global scale because it has never been tried on a global scale.
Why not just be satisfied with what you NEED rather than what you WANT, and limit your population to fit within the carrying capacity of your territory?
From my perspective- any time a company chooses to go multinational it is indeed offshoring. I'm of the old opinion that people should be patriotic instead of profit minded.
However, free trade also creates jobs, especially in my home state of Wisconsin. With tariffs and other protections removed that make offsourcing and exporting possible, our dairy industry now sells a great deal overseas. This is especially true for the smaller farmers - they didn't have the infrastructure the corporate farms did to effectively deal with trade barriers; now, they have a market to sell to that they didn't before.
This seems to me to be a huge negative from a few different angles.
1. Energy usage- is it really a good thing to be selling parishable dairy products a half a world away at all, essentially creating huge multinational corporations, where millions of local dairies served before and created a fresher product for the mere reason that it didn't have to travel hundreds or thousands of miles to get to you?
2. If we're selling dairy overseas, what is happening to local dairies overseas? Are they losing their market to US Government subsidised dairy products?
3. And what happens to those overseas dairy farmers? Do they end up coming here to compete with us for land and resources (by coming here illegally, as the Oxacan Chicano Indians did when the same thing happened in Mexico) or by committing suicide (as farmers in India are doing)?
None of this seems very positive to me.
So the problem isn't the free market, it's two things: First, it's not really a free market; and second, the fact that we had even less free trade for a long, long time means that there will be a period of settling out that, yes, will likely be disastrous for the US. Our economy is based on trade not being Free, because it has been that way for generations. The longer a flawed system is perpetuated, the longer it takes to correct the situation.
Good point, first of all. But secondly- if a system has worked for generations, why is it suddenly flawed now? And if it's not really flawed, why "fix" a working system?
You think I'm on the Democratic side. I'm not.
Democrats in DC perhaps were stunned by Americans voting "Truth to Power" and were too scared of their own shadows to take on Ronald Reagan's legislative agenda - but they still had control of the House and could have stopped it.
More along the lines of- they saw the stupidity of it, and set a trap that they could then milk for the next four years by giving out fund raising dinners consisting of hot dogs, ketchup, and potato chips with small milk cartons. The Democrats aren't some holy group- they'll take a political gift from the Republicans *even if it hurts schoolchildren* and then use it for their partisan politics. In other words- they had no real political reason to *oppose* this bit of stupidity until after the fact- much like they knew that going to war in Iraq for a second time would be bad, but all except for one or two of them went ahead and voted to give W the power to do so anyway- thus buying themselves four years, and counting, of getting votes by "opposing" the war in public speeches, the very war they voted for.
I have read "The Ancient Art of War", the message I got from the text was that force should be used intelligenly and sparingly. The classic senario of Sun Tzu is the story of the 100 conqubines and the greedy emporer. "Sinking to the enemy's moral level" is in my mind the basic point where we differ and is NOT advocated by Sun Tzu's teachings.
Should force be used intelligently and sparingly? YES! But understanding one's enemy is neccessary to the intelligent use of force; and to truly understand one's enemy, you must become that enemy.
Ever hear of a thing called the cold war?
Yes- and look at how we won that one: by totally destroying our own middle class and ending up with an economic system that looks surprisingly like the Soviet Communist Model (where you have basically a two-class economic system of winners and losers). The only difference is that we call our party members, stock brokers.
Complete anhilation of an opposing civilization is in fact very rare, just as rare as complete harmony between the two. The "reality" you speak of lies somewhere between the two extremes.
True. But that's more a matter of technology than anything else.
BTW: Your final point depends on your definition of winning.
In this case, I'd be satisfied with mere survival. In fact, if it wasn't for the other side's genocidal prechings from the mosques, I wouldn't be preaching genocide now.
Which *might* give us an option, if it wasn't for the martyr effect. It would be hard to do- would have to be one heck of a covert op- but what if we abandoned our "separation of church and state" and adopted a more moderate form of Islam as our state religion? Then we also could open up missionary mosques in other nations- preaching a more moderate form of Islam- and making sure the preachers in other mosques do *not* enjoy physical protection from Allah, making their deaths look like accidents. Eventually, only our mosques would have leaders- taking over the religion.
I think the rest of the conversation is over; we understand each other's position well, but I wanted to respond to this:
Do you use X10? In part I want the challenge but I also love travelling and would like to access the home system while away, say be able to turn ac or heating on before arriving home when I've been gone for weeks or months. Or check the webcams and what have you for security. Or even to check the status of the electrical system, I want to build off the grid and have a hybrid electrical power generation system, with solar and wind gennies charging a battery bank.
I use a combination of X10, A10, and more traditional wired alarm. When the alarm goes off, it triggers a universal module, which notified Homeseer, and sends an e-mail to my cell phone. Right now the web portion of the system is down due to being on an old Win98 machine that doesn't like my DHCP server, that will change next spring when I get the money to buy the newer version of Homeseer (that runs on XP) and a USB interface to the X10 system (currently running on serial, which is why it's still on a Win98 system). If I had to do it all over again, I'd probably use Linux and Mr. House instead, but I've got several hours of VBS programming on my Homeseer system, so I'm reluctant to change.
Which, if you think about it, public school lunches (and now BREAKFASTS) are! It's not the rich kids (who can afford to go off campus to McDonalds or whereever and spend $10 a day on lunch) who would eat that slop.
If salsa is hand prepared at all (I'm not at all willing to discuss factory-made salsas) then it's got about as much nutrition as a chef salad. In fact, that's what salsa in Mexican Spanish *means*- Salad. Using it as a condiment or worse yet a dip (didn't anybody tell the Texans that dips are supposed to be thick enough to stick to the chip?!?!?!?!?) is way more modern.
Yes I do, I don't want my id stolen or my credit messed with. Maybe you haven't been paying attention but I have been watching how people have their credit worthiness destroyed by those who have stolen their id.
Got news for you- all they have to do is simply invent an SSN. All of the credit reporting agencies now know those are non-unique. As for stolen ID, if they want to do that all they need to do is work for a business that does credit applications.
The way things are today all you need is someone's snn to do this. People can easily get credit cards and loans with someone else's snn, unless their credit isn't good to begin with.
Which is also a good way to defend yourself against identity theft- keep your credit score *below* 555 and deal in cash instead of sinful credit.
And if it is bad they aren't as able to get credit for say a mortage. If they are able to get one then they will pay more for the loan as loan points and interest on the load is partially determined by credit worthiness. The better a person's FICA credit score is the less they pay on loans.
True- which should tell you not to buy on loans.
But once their credit is messed up by someone stealing their id it takes years and years to get it straightened out as well as a lot of money. Innocent people have even been arrested because someone stole and used their id. I try to keep as much info about me private as possible so as to not make it any easier for someone to steal my id. I used to markout and rip up or burn credit card offers and everything else that gave someone else the possibility of gaining access to my credit but I plan on getting a paper shredder instead.
Hint- if you're getting credit card offers, you're too late already- they send out credit card offers based on the information FICA sells.
Agreed, it cuts both ways and I wouldn't want to work for anyone who would look for info with these tactics. However some don't know what they do online is there permanently and that employers look for it, and not everyone may have a choice. Who knows, I may end up without a choice myself. I'm on disability and haven't worked in years but I want to start working as soon as I can, but I won't have much of a choice as to what I'll be able to do.
Look at the name- the correct way around this is to work for the government. Find a job that your disability doesn't impair, and then apply for a boss who has other cares than the bottom line.
No abortions that I know of are done in a public place. Most happen on private property, which is no different than say a mall. The mall is private property and the owners can ask or requeast that you leave the property and if you don't they can have the police forcibly remove you or arrest you if you resist. Simply a public place is a place that is owned by the public, which usually means the government.
Actually, if a business is open to the public, then what happens there is public information, like it or not. Like I said before, this is reality vs the law- the law is in fantasy land on this one.
Though I don't like it and it's short sighted for the near term it's more profitable for insurance to do this, their expenses are lower. However if they think about the long term then they'll realize that baby may become a paying client and pay more than what insurance paid.
And that baby is just as likely to become a paying client of the competition. That's the entire problem with profit margin economics, aka capitalism. It's also the reason why FICA scores are so screwed up as to be rather useless.
Yea, Larry Elison, ceo of Oracle, years ago said there is no privacy. Obviously it's in his interest to say that as he leads a database company and if someone wants to save electronic communications and have them easily searchable then they need a database. There is privacy but only as much as a person is willing to work to keep their privacy and stay ho
Also note that I blame the Reagan administration, not Reagan personally, for this; it was Congress that gave the original orders and Reagan Political Appointees that came up with the actual stupid recomendation (and defense thereof).