Posted on 05/09/2009 12:47:21 PM PDT by Cringing Negativism Network
Yesterday I happened upon a post by a fellow FReeper. In retrospect, I am sorry for responding rudely to their post - and I hope they happen upon this apology.
The post was presenting their heartfelt opinion that American industry and our system itself must be allowed to come apart so that something better can replace it.
It was a Rand-ian position. The system is becoming oppressive, therefore we must weaken it.
"American" companies have fired millions upon millions of working Americans. Demolished entire segments of what was once the world's most magnificent manufacturing powerhouse - America. And sent those very exellent jobs, capabilities and knowhow to of all people:
Communists.
All those former Reagan Democrat auto workers. Pickup-driving. Deer hunting. NRA member union auto workers. Were fired.
They naturally, became bitter. Blamed those who sent their jobs overseas (arguably Republicans for the most part) - and the size of the Democrat party voter base increased with each factory closed.
In fact, every American job which is outsourced - becomes a new Democrat party voter.
Yet. On this board, countless times each day rants of abject hatred toward those darn union workers - who were once mostly Republicans, are hurled with abandon.
Certainly the unions themselves are pawns, owned and operated by the socialists and democrats. But the individual workers who once built cars, and manufactured things - were patriotic, flag waving Reagan democrats.
Well. They're all unemployed now, and they voted for Obama. The unions now increasingly are becoming a bunch of bureaucrats and service workers - a hugely democrat demographic. And the power of the democrat party grows by the day.
Yet. The GOP continues to advocate we *further* destroy our industry, and continue to fire every American possible.
Is this someone's idea of a winning message???
"you're fired, vote for us".
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AMERICA FIRST!
True free trade doesn’t need the ruling authority of the WTO and it doesn’t need NAFTA or any of the other alphabet treaties.
Other nations traded with us before and they’ll trade with us after.
Free trade is not fair. Fair trade promotes freedom.
Free trad creates jobs.
Protectionism creates recessions depressions and global war.
Reagan did not protect industries. Japan did not surpass America economically. People said thiscsqme stuff in the 1980s.
You really do have a tough job. I couldn’t say some of the things you do and keep a straight face.
I bet I sleep better, though.
The results for the BDS stress tests are in:
You failed.
Citizens are warned to invest their comments with you on a cautionay basis.
You are low on argument assets and high on ad hominem.
Reagan’s tariff on japanese imports over 500cc actually created jobs. The Japenese started building here to get around the import tariff.
They just come screaming off the page -- it's hard not to notice.
Those so-called trade treaties were not passed through congress without the voters imput. They were all railroaded through congress with the usual arm twisting and dark of night tactics. Many legislators did not even read the bills. Sound familiar? Isn’t that what has been happening these past six months?
This has been the way of doing business in Washington for a long time. We rubes just didn’t know it. We were fed a steady diet of flag waving and “conservative values”, “free enterprise”, family values etc. This is just the Republican mirror image of what happens on the Democrat side...”We feel your pain.”, “We’re for the little guy.”, compassion, etc. The Democrat voters are fools, we are fools. Politicians lie. Our challenge is to discern who is trustworthy and who is just blowing smoke.
Businesses move over seas to escape crushing taxes, union thugs and crippling regulations.
Clinton created the trade agreements with China that turned it into a World commerce giant.
I fail to see how me being able to buy Best Foods mayonnaise in Moscow hurts American workers. That's my idea of "globalism" that works. Or do you just not understand the terms you throw around?
You are so Wong.
Ronald Reagan’s policies pass the common sense test. He did not try to destroy foreign competition but he did not give away the store either as Michael Reagan said. Wish we had more common sense leaders like that in Washington.
His tariffs were very specifically targeted for exactly that reason. He used a carrot or stick approach but gently and our competition responded to it.
Deb do you really think that a Buick, or a Jeep sold in Beijing helps America in any way?
A Buick or Jeep sold in Beijing, is by Chinese law required to be made in China, by Chinese workers.
On Chinese factories.
China gets it. We’re fools. And the GOP is right at the front of the fools parade - playing with the band and holding a big fools banner which reads:
“Free trade helps everyone”.
If it’s so great, how come we’re broke? And increasingly unemployed?
And losing elections?
Q. Why doesn’t GOP leadership reach out to Conservative Democrats rather then liberal moderates?
A. Because liberal moderates also believe in exporting American jobs, factories, and dollars.
So what definition of “free trade” are we using here?
Yes business moves over seas to escape crushing taxes, greedy unions etc., but there is also greed involved many times as well. We don’t like to use the word greed and we know that the left always throws that in our faces (as if leftists can’t be greedy) but greed it there and has always been a destructive impulse in people. Remember that the church has always included greed as one of the seven deadly sins. This was many centuries before Marxism.
The greedy bast@rds in our party give Republicans a bad name. These are usually the people who say that the party has to change and become more like the Democrats, in other words we should be a party of greed and no moral principles. That is what the Dems have become, they would sell their own grandmothers for a block of votes. Slaughter babies for profit - no problem. Stab our military in the back to appease commie “anti war” nuts -why not if it gets you votes. Do we want to be like that?
Simple version:
“America gives away everything which is great about America for free to people who consider us an enemy. We then spend all our money to import what we used to make, so we’ll be de-industrialized, unemployed, incapable and broke at the end of the process”.
That’s pretty much it.
One obvious perspective is the design of battleship !? It has these things called watertight compartments which prevent the entire ship from sinking if just one compartment is ruptured. The globalist have taken the bulkheads out and put all of is one ship. One ship where there is no legitimate gov. just appointed so called representatives. Duh.
You know something? You have become tiresome and really aren't worth gong back and forth with. I'm going over to the "Talking Cat" thread.
I read something that said that the special interests were against free trade when it hurt them and for free trade when it benefitted them. We haven’t had free enterprise for a long time, what we have had is monoploy cronyism. The people with the big bucks and the high powered lobbyists have gotten their way most of the time. Washington has been the best little wh@re house on the Potomac for a long time.
The big business interests realized that they could make more money by sending jobs to poor countries. When you look at the illegal immigrant problem it is the cheap labor coming in to the country to do the jobs that cannot be imported out. Two sides of the same coin.
BINGO! RINOS and liberals are both elitists.
Or you could put your head in the sand.
That’s what an ostrich would do.
You can also blame much of illegal immigration on NAFTA.
Mexican farmers couldn’t grow food as cheaply as American factory farms with their government subsidies, so the starving Mexican farmers came here to find work.
This quote from Michael Reagan really shows how stupid he, and others that believe this quote, are. This is not what happened in the motorcycle industry.
The Japanese motorcycles could not compete against American motorcycles at first. It is because Japanese motorcycles were originally designed for the lower speed, lower distance use in Japan. Taking those motorcycles onto American highways resulted in them always being broken down.
One Japanese executive would let off steam, due to the company’s constant failures to break into the American motorcycle market, by riding his little Japanese motorcycle offroad into the hills around LA. Other japanese executives joined him. Onlookers began asking where they could buy those cute little Japanese motorcycles so they, too, could ride off road. The execs mail ordered them to those people but as more and more people asked, a lightbulb went off in their head. Instead of trying to take on American motorcycles head on, could there be a new market here for offroad smaller motorcycles?
After much persuasion, eventually the Japanese companies sold their small motorcycles for offroad purposes. The smaller size and breaking down constantly were not seen as a problem to Americans since these motorcycles were used offroad.
Harley Davidson and the other big motorcycle companies ignored these new Japanese offroad motorcycles. After all, they were small, were offroad. Why should they be worried? Well, the japanese motorcycle did not stay small or remain offroad. Over time, it got better. They got faster. They eventually got to the point where they were competing head on with American motorcycles.
Harley Davidson and the other American motorcycles did the natural response: flight. They ceded the simpler and lower cost motorcycles to the Japanese and focused on the bigger motorcycles where all the money and prestige were. But the Japanese kept following. If it were not for the unique counter culture brand of the ‘harley’ and all, the American motorcycles would have been completely wiped out.
This process I just described is called ‘disruption’ which has been outlined by a Harvard business school professor, Clayton Christenson, who noticed this pattern when studying computer disk companies. We see this pattern occur in the computer industry so much because it is so fast changing. However, disruption is why the railroads died to automobiles and airplanes, why the telephone killed the telegram, and why so many Japanese companies rode the wave of computer technology to great success (Sony being a huge example). But they’ve lost focus so many of those same Japanese companies are in decline (like Sony).
We no longer live in the Industrial Age. In the Industrial Age, people did not need to know how to create a financial system for themselves since they were working for someone else. In the Agricultural Age, it was far different. Even the farmer ran his own place with business like precision.
The vast changes occurring in civilization now, due to computers and such, are demanding that you create your own financial system. The Industrial Age is over. You cannot simply ‘work hard’ and expect results.
Just as farmers were out of place in an Industrial Era since they couldn’t read (and became bitter Democrats), the workers of today are just as out of place in the Silicon Era because they do not know how to read finances (so I expect them to become bitter Democrats).
All the political rhetoric you hear everywhere is just that, rhetoric. A farmer spewing talking points of either side never helped him. The farmer thinking some politician helped him with a tariff never actually helped him. What did help the farmer was when he learned to read so he could get an Industrial Era job.
The only thing that stands between us and financial doom is our own financial education... all the stuff that public schools and colleges do not teach. People can either choose to learn the financial stuff or become bitter and expect politicians to save them.
It’s your choice.
What people fail to realize is that freedom means some people will accumulate great wealth (Bill Gates,Trump) and some people will live in double wides. The difference between a Democratic Republic and all other forms of government is, it also creates a middle class.
Like I said, I'm going to the talking cat thread. Bye
“If it were not for the unique counter culture brand of the ‘harley’ and all, the American motorcycles would have been completely wiped out.”
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Indeed. The moral being:
Buy American.
Why dose this remind me of a Bernie Madoff ponzi scheme? Maybe because both Madoff and the “free traders” get all the loot up front and let the others get nothing. That is all this “free trade” stuff is all about, a group of sharp insiders gaming the system while the rest of the country goes down the tubes. This has to be stopped right now.
I hope the Republicans become the party of American jobs. The Republicans should be for fair trade and they should point out that NAFTA and the China trade happened on Clinton’s watch. But it is really sad that many Republicans have been for cheap labor.
So as more and more IT workers of the Silicon Era have their jobs outsourced to low wage countries, are they going to become “bitter Democrats” too?
You know, it’s clear a (lot) of Republicans see what’s going on. Many are increasingly disillusioned by what’s happening.
My own revulsion toward President Bush (43) who I voted for and supported - began when he used the term “vigilante” to describe.
Me.
I think a whole lot of Republicans are adhering bitterly to “free trade” because they’ve been told it’s what conservatives should do.
Never mind whether it’s a good idea.
Increasingly the evidence is all around us, it’s not a good idea at all.
The time is ripe for some Republican with a pair to stand up in front of America and proclaim loudly and without hesitation that the “free trade” emperor isn’t actually wearing anything.
That will be the first beginnings, of a GOP resurgency.
And an American resurgency.
Time is short though. Someone needs to wake the heck up.
Not the dictionary one, that's for sure.
You notice how protectionists won't acknowledge that NAFTA was Reagan's idea, or that he kick-started the talks that led to the creation of the WTO?
http://www.websters-online-dictionary.org/definition/protect
“Verb
1. Shield from danger, injury, destruction, or damage”
Sign me up.
LOL—I thought you would look up “free” first.
Ronald Reagan didn’t sign NAFTA. You like Clinton’s version, I take it.
Hah. That’s actually pretty funny.
Good ‘un.
But Buy American anyway.
Just because it, so irritates the slave labor set.
I must admit, the notion that we should ignore his public pronouncements about the value of economic liberty and getting the government off of our backs because his ideas came to fruition before he left office is a real hoot.
I buy American. What irritates me is that you want me to pay more for the American I buy.
Yeah I pay lots of attention to noobtards who say how stupid Michael Reagan is.
Of course I want you to pay more. After all, it says so right on that straw man you’re holding up.
Oh wait. You’re not holding it up! Who is that?
That’s an illegally low-paid undocumented laborer, you have holding it. Poor guy.
Looks like you don’t feed him.
As for Michael Reagan and Harley Davidson, so what? All presidents impose tariffs on one product or another, at one time or another. That doesn't make them advocates of Smoot-Hawley II.
How is your desire to raise my taxes a “strawman?” Seriously . . . you need to come up with a better response than “strawman.” In your language, does “strawman” mean “I can’t think of an intelligent response, so I’ll try to bluff my way out of it?”
OK how about this approach, since you seem stuck.
China’s market is not open.
China’s market is in fact quite closed - to everything China is capable of making. Only those things which they cannot (yet) make and exclude also.
America’s market is open.
Which country, owes a trillion dollars, to which?
Which country, is growing and has a massive world-class manufacturing base?
Hint: Better start learning to speak Mandarin.
Nice post.
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