It was recently reported that noted Democratic strategist James Carville urged candidates to hammer Republicans on the issue of trade. This tactic is meant to put Republicans in a tough spot. We’re a nation, evidently, that has zero tolerance for Malaysian-made suits sold at reasonable prices.
Now, this might have been tactically advantageous for Dems if so many Republicans hadn’t already surrendered to their protectionist political impulses. There’s really not much to hammer them on.
It’s astonishing how many “free market” candidates I meet who are deeply haunted by mythological ogres who live to “outsource” and “ship jobs overseas” just to screw the Forgotten Man.
It’s such a crisis that last week the House passed the Currency Reform for Fair Trade Act — an expansion, I kid you not, of the Depression-instigating Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act. Or, more precisely, a de facto tax on the American consumer.
And guess what? Ninety-nine Republicans voted for it.
When Pat Buchanan appeared on Laura Ingraham’s radio show earlier this week and complained about “outsourcing” and the destruction of America’s industrial base, I was hardly surprised: after all, Buchanan’s protectionism is predictable, and marks the paleocon’s ideological overlap with leftists (though leftists will tell you that their concern is for the workers, while Buchanan’s concerns are part and parcel of his nativism and xenophobia).
What shocked me, though, was Ingraham’s agreement: for Ingraham, as for Buchanan, trade agreements are essentially licenses for unscrupulous countries to cheat the US (these countries don’t honor the agreements in important ways) and destroy US “self-sufficiency.”
Get rid of NAFTA, they argued. Make laws that punish companies for “outsourcing.”
No talk of the onerous regulations, union contracts, or high taxation that prompts companies to move operations overseas. Instead, all I heard was a drumbeat of populist fear mongering.
Continues Harsanyi:
If the newly chaste Republican Party believes free markets hold the answers for health care and for the auto industry and for job creation, then why, a skeptic might wonder, do they surrender to the statist position on free trade?
Well, the answer turns out to be rather simple. In a recent poll conducted by the Wall Street Journal, we learn that Americans have bought populist fears on trade. More than 50 percent of those polled claim that free-trade agreements have hurt the U.S.
That number is up from 46 percent three years ago and 32 percent in 1990. The polls found that 90 percent of Republicans agreed that “outsourcing” is one reason for our present economic dilemma.
No matter how many times history proves the protectionists wrong, they come back and scaremonger and demagogue us into believing trade is harmful. And admittedly, there are few more abstract and politically problematic positions to defend.
We’re losing manufacturing jobs. Scary stuff. Which candidate is going to explain to the voters that outsourcing has allowed the American workforce to trade up to better jobs, and allows companies to grow their businesses and expand their workforces?
Which candidate is going to point out that manufacturing jobs have declined in the past 20 years because there has been an incredible rise in the productivity of the American worker? The output at U.S. factories was 37 percent higher in 2009 than it was in 1993.
Higher productivity means a higher standard of living for most Americans. Unproductive jobs? We have that covered with the stimulus.
“Our philosophy has to be not how many protectionist measures can we put in place, but how do we invent new things to sell,” Rudy Giuliani once explained, near perfectly. “That’s the view of the future. What [protectionists] are trying to do is lock in the inadequacies of the past.”
Any Republican who votes for tariffs in the midst of a recession is locking in to the inadequacies of the past. And now that Bill Clinton’s Democratic Party is no longer around, once the right surrenders on trade, we’re going to be in a lot of trouble.
Harsanyi raises an important point here: how do we explain to people, in concrete terms, how free trade benefits us all?
I’d like to hear your suggestions. Or, if you agree with Buchanan and Ingraham and the host of GOP House members who are moving toward protectionism, I’d like to hear your reasoning.
Discuss.
All the arguments against free trade fail.
Even when we trade with countries that subsidize the industries that export goods. Just think about it for a moment: The taxpayers of, say, Japan, pay for us to get cars cheaper. Why would we not take a deal like that, and use the money we save for more productive uses?
When all else fails, impose economic sanctions on yourself.
Laura digs Buchanan, for reasons unfathomable.
Also, about 90-95% of the auto manufacturing jobs that left the Rust Belt shifted down to the Bible Belt, not Mexico.
So quitcher bellyachin.
No talk of the onerous regulations, union contracts, or high taxation that prompts companies to move operations overseas. Instead, all I heard was a drumbeat of populist fear mongering.
They’ve most likely taken this line of argument because NONE of them are in “business.” We sell batteries. Where do we buy them ? From china and mexico. They don’t make them in the US anymore.
You can thank the usual suspects. It wasn’t outsourced. The business was kicked out of the country.
(funny – a guy came into our store and strongly demanded that he wanted brand X because he wanted to Buy American … our salesman explained that NONE of them are made in America … so he bought our house brand.)
Why is a “trade deficit” so bad?
I think it was Walter Williams who beautifully stated the absurdity of the idea: “I have a ‘trade deficit’ with the grocery store, the gas station,….” None of those people are purchasing economic education from Williams. And his students have a “trade deficit” with him; unless they happen to work for that grocery store or any of the other places Williams spends his money, they aren’t selling him anything to balance what they’re buying from him.
I think that it simply needs to be explicitly pointed out that outsourcing is an effect, not a cause.
Shhhh. Don’t give them any ideas
like imposing special taxes on cars produced in right-to-work states to balance out the costs of doing business.I’m all for stopping the outsourcing of my job. Too bad my company is not. I’m getting too old for a company to want to invest in retraining me so it looks real grim should they finally outsource my job. Many other companies are doing the same thing, so finding a new job is difficult. Particularly if you actually LIKE what you are doing.
I understand the frustration of “outsourcing” jobs … call centers in India, etc.
But it isn’t all the fault of the businesses … it is the fault of a US Government that imposes the second highest corporate tax rate in the world.
Look at the ultra-Leftist Hollywood… where are they making their films? When was the last time Woody Allen made a film in New York City? When was the last time some major movie was made entirely in California?
If these Leftists don’t stay in town, why should anyone expect anyother business to?
Maybe Mikey Moore can do a documentary about how nobody makes documentaries in America any more.
Look at the ultra-Leftist Hollywood… where are they making their films? When was the last time Woody Allen made a film in New York City? When was the last time some major movie was made entirely in California?
Well, they’re making their movies in Michigan now. Because they get 42% of their production cost back. From Michigan taxpayers.
They make a movie at a 42% reduced cost and I get to subsidize it. Win/
WinLook, I have watched for years as the manufacturing base has left our nation. In some cases it was flat “kicked out” as Carin stated with batteries. In other cases, the number of necessary workers has decreased due to automation and greater effeciency in process engineering. But when you come right down to it the major causes are that as a nation we have the second highest corporate tax rate in the world, and in many industries you run the risk of being extorted by organized labor-with the blessing of the US government.
Because, you know, people that work on a production line making tennis shoes deserve to make as much as a doctor; because of the fairness…Of course, there are myriad examples, and I could easily go on.
Because they get 42% of their production cost back
http://www.michiganfilmoffice.org/For-Producers/Incentives/Default.aspx
any tax people in the audience that can deciper this?
“how do we explain to people, in concrete terms, how free trade benefits us all?”
Take ’em to Walmart, Target, or thier fave big-box store and compare the prices and features of entry level appliances, such as microwave ovens, dishwashers, food processors, TVs, etc, with thier inflation adjusted equivalents from 5 and 10 years ago.
Unless thier absolute idiots that ought to be pretty convincing.
It’s been a HUGE issue here in Michigan. Basically, they keep all their production cost receipts, and the state of Michigan writes them a check.
Perhaps Meya can explain the multiplier effect … you know, they hire a guy, who then buys shit at the store, Michigan get’s its 6% sales tax, turns around and gives the money back to Hollywood.
Explaining that free trade benefits everyone is like explaining that free love benefits everyone.
The United States is a free trade zone.
And there’s no such thing as “illegal (im/e)migration” within that zone, either.
Arguing against free trade is arguing that, say, New York shouldn’t have free trade and free movement with, for instance, Alabama.
Which people do.
Regards,
Ric
” ‘how do we explain to people, in concrete terms, how free trade benefits us all?’ ”
Bryan Caplan reduced comparative advantage into a solipsistic argument a few days ago, Boudreaux cites and adds his two bits. That might do the trick.
On the other hand, Russ Roberts explains that
These guys work the problem in print just about every other day.
Bob Reed
Oh heck, tell people to ask anyone over the age of 50 how they lived …
I was in a management seminar once and was called on to talk about comparing the changing expectations of workers … I remember talking about how people were less likely to toss stuff out and buy new — I used the example of darning socks.
You should have seen the blank stares … I stopped and said, “Um, how many of you don’t know what ‘darning a sock’ means?” Almost everyone under 30 raised their hands.
People darned socks because they were expensive. Women wore aprons because they wanted to protect their clothes, which were also expensive and they didn’t have a lot of them. Women sewed clothes for themselves and their family because ready made clothing was expensive …
Now you can go to the Port of Los Angeles and see huge shipping containers coming in, piggy backed on trains to go out to the rest of the county, put on trucks for local fulfillment centers, then distributed to TJMaxx’s, Macy’s, Marshall’s, etc, where one can buy a dozen socks in a bag for 1.5 minimum wage hours, where it one pair of socks = 1 working class hour wage 50 years ago.
any tax people in the audience that can deciper this?
It’s a 42% reimbursement for eligible expenses incurred in Michigan. Eligible expenses is basically anything they spend in Michigan for filmmaking. The rest is just a lot of quibbling over details.
I can see myself filming a post-apocalyptic action movie there. The scenery is already in place.
Excellent everyday examples Darleen. I especially like talking about item prices in average wage hours per item. It makes for a better comparison than inflation adjusted dollars.
In a follow-up post, commenting on a misleading commenter to Russ Roberts’ post The Logic of Trade, Boudreaux repairs an apparent damage done to Adam Smith through a selective quotation, by providing a fuller quote and context. A snippet therefrom (rtwt):
Dick Morris wrote how this would be one of three main attacks that would be used by the Democrats where ever they couldn’t find dirt on their opponent.
The defense he said to use,
is basically “Oh yeah, you’re one too”. And that is what they seem to be doing.
The ads in my district are all a back and forth about who is for shipping jobs overseas and who is cutting Social Security/Medicare and hurting seniors. I’ve written several times asking the Republican to just use the 1st term Dem’s votes for Obamacare etc. and to just tie him to Obama but the circus goes on. If it was me I’d use this in an ad.
So does Sean Hannity, for reasons equally unfathomable.
A big reason why I don’t listen to either of them anymore.
“I think it was Walter Williams who beautifully stated the absurdity of the idea: “I have a ‘trade deficit’ with the grocery store, the gas station,….” None of those people are purchasing economic education from Williams. ”
I’m an economic novice(I’m sure you’ve noticed), love W. Williams, but I don’t see how that’s not free trade. I mean, the grocery store sells a bag of beans to him for $10, which the store got from the supplier for $8, Williams got the $10 from his gig, which he traded for a bag of beans. What am I missing?
I find it frightening the right is ceding the issue. What they should be doing is violently(figuratively) making the case that there’s a strong correlation between taxing the rich, over regulation, and middle class jobs. I know they do already, but I’m talking about all of them getting in front of the camera as much as possible and pull no punches in denouncing Obama and his party for their class warfare crap, and nothing else. “JOBS!” should be used every sentence.
*sigh*
One of the main problems here is that the stupid, wrong, emotional versions of the arguments fit nicely on a bumper sticker, whereas the counter-arguments require logic and the ability to connect ideas together — and therefore come out verbose (comparatively).
You see the equivalent in the response to Jeff’s essays on language. The few people who make any attempt to address them at all skim until they find a bumper-sticker-worthy phrase, then start shrieking about that regardless of the context. Most of the people I meet can’t sit still for an exposition of comparative advantage, or for the pretty good evidence in favor of free trade — Hell, a lot of the people I meet are against extending the free trade agreement with Colombia despite the fact that Colombia already sells stuff to us free of tax, and the agreement on the table is to go the other way.
“I was told there would be no math” = suicide for a complex industrial economy, which cannot run on bumper stickers.
Regards,
Ric
Hannity and Ingraham nay mean well but they are both celebutards, and history is passing them by.
How about: Greedy
corporationsunions=outsourced jobsThe center — even the scabbed together pitifully inadequate thing it was — has not held.
No fucking surprise there, sad to say. More — and worse — to come.
BTW this is one of the reasons that, while I find the tea parties a hopeful sign, I’m not nearly so sanguine about them making a difference as some are.
Most of them seem to be just as invested as the leftoids are in what I think of as the populist version of the Manifesto, coming in two parts:
1) Everyone should have an easy job at high wages;
2) Anybody with the wherewithal to provide a good job is Rich, and must be slapped down in the name of Egalitarianism.
Put that baldly, the contradiction is evident. There are a lot of people around who approach the notion more subtly, though.
Regards,
Ric
William Galston, democrat, pitches his thoughts, weakly but notably nevertheless, imo, into the mix (collectivity).
Wow Ric,
I’d be interested in which tea-party statements/pronouncements you thnk correspond to the 2 contradictory manifesto points you listed. And I’m not being sarcastic nor defensive; you know I value your opinions, right?
Easy: People who believe that free trade with other countries is bad must also believe that trade with others for agricultural products is bad also. In other words, we should adopt the entire localvore philosophy if we believe trade in goods is bad.
the only place you can even get ephedra anymore is from overseas cause Meghan’s coward daddy banned it for Americans
“Even easier: people who believe free trade is good must also believe free immigration is good — it’s trade in the labor market.”
Of course dumb ass. Where the problem comes in is the concept of “legal”
Free trade good. Smuggling bad. No?
Immigration is good, meya. As are guest worker programs.
Illegal immigration is something else entirely. Which you know, but pretend to forget.
there’s no developed country what’s come closer to implementing free immigration of labor than our little one has and our little country is a failshit dirty socialist backwater
ecodude and moneyman, both “free trade” and “free immigration” are not singularly defined nor singularly operational. As long as the welfare state exists in the US, foreign emigration cannot be unchecked. If foreign governments collude with one/more of their own domestic industries to destroy foreign industries (ie dumping) then trade cannot be unchecked.
It is better to err on the side of liberty and free movement of capital and labor, but it doesn’t mean closing one’s eyes to unintended consequences.
/2 cents
Thank you Thomas D. Hannity and Laura I are the weakest link in the chain. They serve as lightening rods so that the real skunk works can proceed.
Meya – thank you for pointing out the free immigration is good and stupid things like H1B caps are shipping our best engineers and scientists out of the country back to their homelands, when they should be staying here (and most of them want to). We’re against free illegal immigration.
“Of course dumb ass. Where the problem comes in is the concept of “legal””
You mean, “protectionist.”
“Free trade good. Smuggling bad. No?”
What is there to smuggle if trade is free?
Free immigration is good money-meya; legal immigration that is. The demands of our economy and the need for immigrants to assimilate dictate limits on the amount our society can absorb per year. Within those limits all immigration is good.
After all, with respect to commerce and trade, goods would have to conform to our safety standards and consumer regulation; they’d have to assimilate. And folks who have plenty of widgets don’t need to buy even more of them, nor would they.
We’ve got plenty of organic labor on the sidelines right now.
plus there’s no immigration trading partner for us to trade with what will let us waltz into their country and start grabbing free shit
Yes. Laws are inherently “protectionist.”
Anarchy is the only means to freedom.
Now, who wants to help meya outlaw salt and trans fats?
Take ‘em to Walmart, Target, or thier fave big-box
Bob – they usually do not go there. Will lobby to keep those stores out of their neighbourhoods using the excuses of traffic and congestion and local enterprise to mask the fact that they don;t want poor brown folks coming through their gentrified upscale neighbourhoods to have their dollar go further.
Convenient meya, how you disregarded the analogies I included in the same comment you quoted from.
But my answer is the same. Trade goods sent to the US have to conform to saftey standards, no? And in the economics of commerce, excluding precious metal and gem hoarding and collectors, nobody buys more goods than they feel they require.
Like I said, there’s plenty of organic labor here on the sidelines, so as a society we seem pretty set when it comes to labor.
“What is there to smuggle if trade is free?”
Ah, are you making the argument that if trade is regulated, then it’s not free?
A letter from a Republican to Hispanics
Yes, Americans can “trade up to better jobs”. Except that not everyone who was qualified to turn a wrench is qualified to run a spreadsheet. What do you do with the excess?
The same thing applies to the immigration amounts we could support when half the country was growing food for the other half.
Paying a software engineer $50k a year in India means he lives like a king. In the US, not so much.
If we allow free trade and no one else does, why shouldn’t we stamp the word sucker on our foreheads? I guarantee that I can’t move to India nearly as easily as an Indian can move there (I’ve looked into it). So much for the free flow of goods and labor.
We can have the same relationship between India and the US as between New York and Alabama when we have the same governmental relationship, as part of the same country. Congratulations, Ric, from where I sit you’ve proposed a binary solution set: We’re either invading India or both the US and India are agreeing to be run by the UN. ;-)
Look, I have watched for years as the manufacturing base has left our nation. In some cases it was flat “kicked out” as Carin stated with batteries. In other cases, the number of necessary workers has decreased due to automation and greater effeciency in process engineering.
Jobs are not the proper measure of manufacturing output. For a multi-market case all there is that we can use is value of goods produced (within a specific industry we could perhaps talk units and leave prices out of it – though that neglects that “manufacturing” is not valuable in itself, but because it produces goods that are valuable).
Study (link points indirectly to PDF from Cato, meat on pg. 12 ff.) reveals, for instance, that US manufacturing output increased every year from 1948 to 2007, except for two recession years.
Something that is increasing every year is not leaving the nation, is it?
Manufacturing jobs are in decline, and that’s good – for the same reason it’s good that half the population no longer works on farms.
Evidently, moneymeya has no problem with the buying and selling of poor brown people.
Color me surprised.
“….no, no, it wasn’t trade that got him, ’twas balance that killed the beast”
Mr. Slart had a dog, once. He was a good dog.
– Seems like we all have a dawg now, in the WH.
Unlike some, I’m something of an absolutist on the matter of free trade. The problem with arguing in favor of free trade is that the minority who are damaged by it is easily identifiable, while the majority who benefit are diffuse and hard to identify. If cars are made in a foreign country and imported, auto workers lose their jobs. The entire society gets cheaper and/or better cars, but that’s a diffuse benefit. The auto workers are an easy to identify victim group who can get loud about it.
If all else were equal — that is, if it were simply a matter of the labor market — I’d be in favor of immigration with few or no limits as well. All else is not equal. Many immigrants are not coming to add to the labor force, they’re coming for the free money. That’s not remotely “free trade”, and any argument that it is is a flat lie.
Regards,
Ric
“And in economic news today, the Labor Department released its quarterly report showing that the recent downturn has resulted in massive increases in the inventory of poor brown people. Department analysts speculate that storage costs may increase to the point that the owners of this inventory will find it more cost-effective to simply send the excess stock to the landfill.”
Anyone surprised that moneymeya has no problem with treating brown people as commodities? Didn’t think so.
give me trade, lots of trade
and the starry skies above
don’t fence me in…
give me jobs, lots of jobs
and the cash flow that I love
don’t fence me in…
Let me buy lots of stuff at really cheap prices
Just as long as imbalance doesn’t cause us a crisis
HDTV’s , SUV’s, and football for the righteous
don’t fence me in
*wipes tear*
That was beautiful BBH.
“Manufacturing jobs are in decline, and that’s good – for the same reason it’s good that half the population no longer works on farms.”
Indeed – if we were all soil scratching peasants (except of a small, lordly elite like Nancy Pelosi, Senator Ma’am, et al) we’d have 100% employment!
And in 2011, so would the Democrats.
No one has addressed this point:
Again, this isn’t Lake Wobegon where everyone is above average. We have a large and growing group of people whose most valuable and marketable commodity is that they can walk into a voting booth and pull the lever. If there are enough of them they will be able to vote exactly the kind of entitlements we can’t sustain.
People are not goods and services.
I don’t dispute the economics of it. Free trade of services and labor is good…. but you have to go home at 5PM. The economics are right, but people are more than economic. Homo Economicus is a utopian pipe dream.
You say ‘whomever wants to come here, may.’ Billions of people will come – no really, I shit you not, maybe a cool billion, no hyperbole. Our population will quadruple, and most of them will be from somewhere else. They’ll apply for citizenship and vote. They’ll have the bodies to claim whole cities… 3 times more cities than we have. Worse than anglos to bretons. Never has anyone allowed that without at least fighting over it (and I mean physical warfare).
The standard of living is grossly different, as the culture. It’s THERMODYNAMICS. The system seeks equilibrium. Entropy increases. You un-close the system and everything will balance until the standard of living here is equal to the standard of living everywhere else. So long as any place is measurably better than any place else, it makes rational sense for the people living in the bad place to relocate to the better, until the two are equal.
We will be averaging the world. There’s more 3rd world than 1st.
It’s a naive, pie-in-the-sky fairy tale among some libertarian economic types (otherwise right-thinking) that this process will raise the whole world’s standard of living to ours and higher, rather than bring us down at all. There’s some magical property to liberal economic policy that it’s self-propogating. Like lefty faith in the inevitability of History on it’s march, things will progress.
For instance, there’s this belief that when we get all these near illiterate, oppressed, impoverished feudalists into the country, we’re going to assimilate them all and within a generation they’ll all be investing the quik-e-mart’s profits in a money management account (instead of say, instigating violent perpetual revolution against charismatic chieftan-figgures as a carthatic sacrifice to ward off the results of their own crippling fatalism, as they do in some places).
Firstly it’s wrong.
1.) Adam Smith died centuries ago. If all they had to do was be exposed to a better system in order to adopt it, natural-selection-of-ideas-style, why the hell haven’t they done so? Why do they have to come here to get magically assimilated, why can’t we send the ideas there? Nor even expand at our physical borders, for that matter?
It’s like an evangelical who believes anybody who doesn’t believe in the Gospel hasn’t really heard it yet, and they’ve just got to tell you some more.
As loathesome as it is to rationalists/humanists/’enlightenment’ ideologies, backward people persist in being wrong. Some darkness contains water – flames will not illuminate.
2.) If can assimilate anything why the hell can’t we assimilate ourselves? If we can assimilate anyone from any culture in a generation, why are we having problems with 6th generation european children being assimilated into Western culture?(And Europe is doing worse!) You think we can balance the whole world without being dragged down? We can’t even get our own country to adopt Modern ideas, at the moment we’re moving backward! (And for the record, our non-european immigrants are not fairing any better than the european ones. We GET the ones with liberal impulses, already assimilated to the ideas that inspired America, and within a generation we UNassimilate their children.)
maya thinks like a bureacrat.
Case in point, the focus of this thread:
How do we get our own culture to adopt more free trade policies rather than oppose them?
You can’t get the dude next door, nor your crazy liberal uncle, to adopt free trade policies, but you are so confident you’ll have no problem convincing 3 million … whatever, Yemeni’s?
Whereas Americans, due to being spoiled by the environment here in America itself apparently, cannot pay attention to more than a bumper sticker, the Yemeni would stop beating his wife long enough to read Mises, if only he was here where he had health insurance and MTV?
The political environment, the lack of opportunity, the lack of development… WHY that political environment, why no opportunities, why no development? The power of government emmanates from the people – even the power of tyrannies, it is because the people acquiesce.
Fierce revolutions are fought, and won or lost, in the range 10-20% of the population in active revolt. You get even a non-majority plurality of the people – 40%, willing to engage in active revolt and that government is toast.
Canada is Canada because it is full of Canadians, and Pakistan is Pakistan because it is full of Pakistanis. There’s nothing in the soil.
First, accept that there is an important truth contained within the innumerable faults of our opposition’s argument. A shrinking industrial base is a threat to America in numerous ways.
Let proponents of industry speak of ending taxation upon business and vastly reducing regulation instead. To protect an industrial base by edict is to guarantee its demise, history shows.
“Canada is Canada because it is full of Canadians, and Pakistan is Pakistan because it is full of Pakistanis.”
– And Berkeley is Berkeley because its full of ideologically brain dead Progressives. Meh.
The libertarian argument for free trade is: Americans are so ignorant that they’ll mistake shit for chocolate pudding.
Free trade is highly advantageous to the poor. Sure, some of the rich will get richer, and some of the poor will get poorer; but most of the rich will get poorer, and most of the poor will get richer. The playing field becomes much leveller, if the occasional bump is raised or hole dug out.
The dirty little secret of free trade is: Americans are filthy, obscenely rich. All of them: yes, the 14-year-old babymomma in the ghetto, the hillbilly on the highest peak of the Appalachians, the Indian dying of cirrhosis on the reservation, they’re richer than 80% of humanity today, and than 99% of humanity thoroughout history. You want to experience real poverty? Check out the slums of Mexico City, of Rio de Janeiro, of Lagos and Manila and Calcutta.
So those poor who are getting richer are Chinese and Indians (dot, not feather) and Filipinos and Mexicans. And those rich who are losing money hand over fist? Americans.
You know that “New World Order” that the real wingnuts are always whining about? This is it, and welcome to it.
Very interesting quote from Bastiat. Let’s see, Monsieur Bastiat was writing in the 1800s, in France. France was not a warm body democracy in the 1800s. Neither was the United States. Nothing I have seen in his writings addresses my point from #63:
I didn’t post the Bastiat passage to address any of your comments, SDN.
Jeff asked for other ways to express the positives of free trade. This is one of the classic arguments.
Didn’t see anything resembling that 63 in this thread, so . . . uncertainty ensues.
But, Ben’s dad Herb is said to have said:
According to Stanley Fisher though, he also said — as a corollary to this — that:
Are you at least willing to accept that an argument is only as good as its’ givens, and that when Bastiat was writing that, warm-body democracy wasn’t a given?
And sdferr, is it useful to encourage free trade when the result of that free trade is a growing body of citizens, with the vote, who can’t provide for themselves in any other way than selling that vote? That was the point of #63.
Here’s what I see for 63:
So what 63 are you seeing?
And just so I’m not leaving too much out, I think that this: “. . . when the result of that free trade is a growing body of citizens, with the vote, who can’t provide for themselves in any other way than selling that vote?” is nonsense.