Posted on 08/11/2025 10:05:05 AM PDT by whyilovetexas111
Agree completely. It’s amazing that the ideas and opinions of President Reagan are now considered “marxist” by some on this conservative site.
What drove out manufacturing was pure greed and global labor arbitrage.
Adam Smith also wrote another book, which he considered even more important called “The Theory of Moral Sentiments”.
Amazing a thread about how the USA can’t produce drones and free traitors push their evil agenda.
Reagan would have reversed his position if alive today.
And guess what - we have one of those.
“”What drove out manufacturing was pure greed and global labor arbitrage.””
No, your accusation of greed is, instead, essentially the red line of profit, which the left has made impossible for most corporations to achieve due to their regulations and their demands for high labor pay.
But you can blame the corporations (like leftists do) and apologize or make excuses for the rabid, Marxist leftist Democrats’ role in driving manufacturing out of America .... here on a Conservative forum if you think it’s cool.
You are bat sh1t crazy, without a doubt.
I’m sure my great-grandma (born 1890’s) thought airplanes were impossible, not to mention people landing on the moon.
No one left the USA and moved their manufacturing to make a profit. They moved to increase their profit margins.
People argue with me about that and I tell them to give it a couple years. I have been wrong on many things but not on this issue.
Surely with modern CNC equipment, tooling and dies can be made with extreme efficiency. Additionally, plastic injection molding has come a long way.
.
“When Congress passed the Smoot-Hawley tariff in 1930, we were told that it would protect America from foreign competition and save jobs in this country—the same line we hear today.”
At the time the USA was a net exporter.
Though you didn't cite the source of your quote, which would be interesting if you did, it was interesting to use a search engine for find:
"If a country nowadays accepts Free Trade, it will certainly not do so to please the socialists. It will do so because Free trade has become a necessity for the industrial capitalists. But if it should reject Free Trade and stick to Protection, in order to cheat the socialists out of the expected social catastrophe, that will not hurt the prospects of socialism in the least. Protection is a plan for artificially manufacturing manufacturers, and therefore also a plan for artificially manufacturing wage laborers. You cannot breed the one without breeding the other.Free trade is a phrase without much meaning, on either side of the political divide. So is "protectionism." The devil is so often in the details."The wage laborer everywhere follows in the footsteps of the manufacturer; he is like the 'gloomy care' of Horace, that sits behind the rider, and that he cannot shake off wherever he go. You cannot escape fate; in other words, you cannot escape the necessary consequences of your own actions. A system of production based upon the exploitation of wage labor, in which wealth increases in proportion to the number of laborers employed and exploited, such a system is bound to increase the class of wage laborers, that is to say, the class which is fated one day to destroy the system itself. In the meantime, there is no help for it: you must go on developing the capitalist system, you must accelerate the production, accumulation, and centralization of capitalist wealth, and, along with it, the production of a revolutionary class of laborers. Whether you try the Protectionist or the Free Trade will make no difference in the end, and hardly any in the length of the respite left to you until the day when that end will come. For long before that day will protection have become an unbearable shackle to any country aspiring, with a chance of success, to hold its own in the world market."
Last paragraphs of Engels' "On the Question of Free Trade" from the Marx-Engels Works 1888.
Source: On the Question of Free Trade Marxists.org, n. d.
It is a simple fact that labor rates are wildly different, nation to nation, and bloc to bloc. Therefore absolutely "free trade" is simply nuts. But protectionism is a cumbersome beast, not so easily tamed.
For this one can find gasoline at $7+ a gallon in upscale San Francisco, and 1/100th of that in far-flung places (where I wouldn't want to be). Not that I want to be in San Francisco either.
See: Gasoline prices, liter, 04-Aug-2025 Global Petrol Prices, n.d.
Ditto with all else. So "free trade" is actually a misnomer, as is "parity" in labor rates and the like. We must be involved in some form(s) of protectionism for our own sense and survival.
One point to Engels' quote above is that socialists "expected social catastrophe." That was to be their ticket into power. And so, the modern West is saddled now with some hybrid of socialism in the social welfare systems.
Rather than posit an opposition between "free trade" and "protectionism," positing and considering freedom from excessive, invasive and expensive government is a fine alternative stream of thought. But for all the above, nations and borders are important, for without them chaos would further rule the world.
I did not say any of that. I did say, "I'm most assuredly 'ideological' and conservative."
The observation about the site and its web pages posted on this forum said, "...we publish all ideas and analyses–we are not a ‘conservative’ or ‘progressive’ website."
Are we to be interested in "all ideas and analyses?"
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