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No, the physical laws of the universe don’t have exceptions. That’s why physicists and engineers call them ‘laws.’

People who claim they can violate or make an exception to these have a very high burden of proof to make such claims, and they have had no success in making such claims when the burden of proof is applied. There was a recent claim from Europe that they had shoved some particles through their accelerator faster than the speed of light... and then they re-checked the results. Nope, the law is still the speed limit.

This is where economics and economists run into fraud - they call their loose statistical relationships “laws” - as in “Says Law,” etc, trying to make their mathematical pursuits have the credibility of physical laws as we have in physics and engineering.

But for those who apply real rigor in their math, the pablum being peddled by economists is not law, there’s no inviolate fundamental cause and effect, it’s nothing like F=ma. All economists have are just loose statistical relationships that hold true... until they don’t. Until the 1970’s, we had economists arguing that you couldn’t have inflation unless you had low unemployment. Then the Carter years came along and disproved that idea - we had runaway inflation and climbing unemployment. A whole lot of economists looked pretty silly - but in a few years, people were listening to their dumb nostrums again.

In 2008, we had trade collapsing around the world..... without any change in trade policy anywhere. This put to lie the “conventional wisdom” that the Smoot-Hawley Act caused (or even worsened) the Great Depression: we had collapsing economies, collapsing trade and no trade restrictions.

What’s more, the “free trade” agenda is now resulting in competitive currency devaluations and ZIRP’s among more than one central bank as everyone pushes their currencies lower in value for trade advantage and ends up in liquidity traps. Savers and thrifty people the world over are being punished for their thrift - a really stupid policy to pursue, no matter where it is done. If we want to point to the ultimate evidence that Friedman was wrong, all we need to do is look at the money supply (as I noted earlier) and then look at the velocity of money (which is also recorded by the Fed):

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/M2V?cid=32242

So while the money supply is increasing rather substantially, the actual GDP creation has been going down - meaning that Friedman’s theories have broken down. It isn’t that we’re not seeing an increase in economic activity, the big issue is that we’re seeing a negative correlation between an increase in the money supply and economic activity. Point, set, match; game over for Milton. Keynes’ theories also are blown out of the water - everyone here has seen the graph(s) out of the Obama administration projecting where unemployment would be with and without his stupid $800B “stimulus” plan - and how unemployment has stayed well above the projection line for over 2 years now. That projection was made on Keynesian-based economics.

What markets did we lose in the 80’s? Consumer electronics. Before 1980, we had companies that made TV’s, stereos, radios, etc in the US. By the end of the 80’s, there were almost no US consumer electronics companies left. The Japanese moved their production into the US to end-run our trade policy and siphoned the cash flow back home.

Another industry lost in the 80’s was DRAM - to Japan. DRAM used to be a very profitable business, then the Japanese started dumping DRAM into the US market in the early 80’s. The DRAM industry employed a lot of people in those days, and represented 10’s of billions in revenues to US companies.

People seem to have very short memories: in the 50’s, when the Republicans actually had a rep as representing the “little guy,” the GOP was backing tariffs and bucking trade liberalization. Eisenhower was seeking to get tariffs cut, but the House Republicans were fighting cuts to tariffs. By the late 50’s, Eisenhower was getting some power to make cuts, but the Democrats were now the ones putting on the brakes. In that period of time, the US standard of living was pretty darn good - a single wage earner could support a family, buy a house and a car with little debt, medical care and education were very affordable compared to today. Immigration was also restricted, which resulted in a good labor market for workers in the US, with stable to increasing wages. Taxation took a relatively small bite out of the paycheck compared to today. In other words, our economy worked.

“Free trade” ‘conservatives’ forget in all this is that the Constitution calls for tariffs to be a source of tax revenue for the federal government, and gave Congress the power to levy import tariffs (Article I, Section 8, Clause 1). In other words, the Founding Fathers thought import tariffs important enough to put into the Constitution. When the Constitution was written, there was no income tax, but there were tariffs. Under the system where we had significant tariffs, the standard of living went up pretty reliably over time, and our national debt was under control most of the time (with the possible exception of the Civil War and WWII). Since leaving the last vestige of the gold standard in ‘73 and liberalizing trade since the 80’s, our debt has exploded from about 38% of GDP to over 100% of GDP (as of this point in time).

Unfortunately for “free trade” conservatives, they have no evidence to back up their theories. All they can do is point with a quavering finger at all the cheap crap at Walmart and say “You’d raise prices on this?! How dare you!” when I can point to a time when a single wage earner could support a family of four, education was resulting in good employment opportunities, increasing wages ... and we had tariffs. In terms of who has something that would appeal to voters, my perspective wins. Yes, people would give up cheap crap at Walmart to be able to have the sort of financial stability we enjoyed in the 50’s and early 60’s. Anyone who claims otherwise is simply delusional - and after this election, I’d ask “So, how’s that free trade policy working at the polls?”

If the GOP wants to win elections, they have to start selling ideas that people want to buy. No one with any economic common sense or perspective on what’s been going on in the US in the last 20 years is buying the “free trade” bumper-sticker dogma talk any more. Too many sectors of the US economy have been extirpated by the “free trade” agenda - offshored, never to come back. We had economists and eggheads of all stripes telling us since the 90’s that US citizens should climb the food chain upwards - don’t expect to do the “scut work” jobs any more, people should “get an education and move higher in the value chain.”

Well, since a very large cohort of college graduates can no longer get jobs upon graduation, (even people with new law degrees are experiencing high rates of unemployment), the other old bromide of economists (”Education is the path upwards... blah, blah, blah”) is also being proven false.

Listening to “free trade” advocates today is like listening to a pilot who is flying by theory: He’s telling us that we’re not in a stall, so there’s no problem. While that might be true, and there’s laminar airflow over the wing and Bernoulli’s equations are still holding up very nicely... the theoretical pilot seems to be ignoring that very large chunk of rock growing alarmingly large in the cockpit window... something called a “mountain,” I’m told...