i heard that...
Posted on 11/11/2012 8:40:25 AM PST by Cringing Negativism Network
We are currently caught in a national debate which in my opinion misses the very (most) important aspect.
We are currently debating between conservatives, and liberals.
Conservatives are determined to maximise profits.
Liberals are determined to maximise unions.
Both of those are wrong goals. What we need as a nation, are maximum profits which benefit America.
America is what is not looked at.
America.
Well we have retired the shuttle, but do not have a replacement.
Meanwhile China is busy as can be, building. New space ships. A brand new carrier. And about 3/4 of what Americans buy.
We need to bring back American jobs.
What I am saying is we do not need a book. We need to do it, to make it, and to keep it.
In other words, have the government decide who can get hired and from whom we are allowed to buy and to whom we are allowed to sell.
And I heard “conservatives” believed in economic freedom.
We are in decline becaus we are running a restrictive plate on the air intake of the motor of the world.
If you were going to start a business what would you make? How would you deal with licensing, zoning, environmental, labor, supply, logistics, finance, engineering, and healthcare laws. Not just the aspects, but the laws that deal with those aspects.
I think you’re right about not needing a book. There are a lot of books in the way of actual progress.
As to china, we are and always will be in competition with the rest of the world. (until we fail). We need to put distance between them and us, capability wise, militarily and economically. Not fall enough for them to think they have a chance at challenging us on the world stage. Remember it’s the debt game their playing, and we’re playing right into their hands.
Complete nonsense...A men's shirt that costs 10 cents to produce in China or Indonesia still sells for 20 bucks at JC Penney's...
A snowblower produced in China this year costs more than last year's American made model...
And then the jobs are gone from America...
your crusade should not be for more government regulation - your crusade should be for people to have the courage of their convictions and stop buying imported goods
The same shirt made in the us costs $45. Now in clothing yourself you can no longer afford steak. I hope you like chicken. Or ramen noodles.
That Chinese snowblower may be a higher quality model or in higher demand.
Microeconomic examples to disprove macroeconomic principals.
Notcool, you do not determine what the market will bear. You would only screw up the information inherent in the pricing system.
Why do I feel like Milton Friedman on the Phil Donahue show? That’s also way before my time.
I like profits! Are you a commie?
What do you want to do? Send in the Gestapo and arrest business owners that have overseas operations?
Why don’t we make doing business easier for business owners in the US by cutting taxes and regulation, thwarting 0-care, and opening up the energy sector?
No, that’s a bad idea I guess because your statist hero zero will not approve.
When economic patriotism is as important as military patriotism, it’s amazing how many put money before country and advocate trading the country down the recession drain for a fleeting buck. What a generation, their children are dying for the American flag in wars while their allegiance is to the greenback. God help us.
i heard that...
Economies fund militaries. Militaries protect economies. They cannot exist without each other. They are of equal importance.
“Trade with the PRC isn’t “free trade.” They pillage our intellectual property, use currency arbitrage to maintain their trade advantage and flout product standards. This isn’t “free trade.”
Don’t they also place quite high tariffs on things we export to them?
The PRC does place import tariffs on products they want to keep out of their nation to subsidize their businesses.
For example: Cars. I think their tariff is 22% added onto the import price of a car made in the US, shipped into the PRC. That was of earlier this year, I haven’t kept up on what, if anything, the PRC did to their tariffs on cars this last half of 2012.
Here’s a table of PRC import tariffs on various consumer goods:
This is yet another reason why I find the “free trade” conservatives to be engaging in mental masturbation. BTW, this is a repeat of the same deal with got with the Japanese in the 80’s. The Japs had ferocious import controls which stifled US exports to Japan, at the same time we were losing domestic markets to Japanese goods.
The so-called “free trade” conservatives are stupid enough that they didn’t learn anything the first time, but this time they wanted to repeat their stupidity with a communist nation who will use their trade surplus with the US (as well as intellectual theft) to build up their military - something which the Japanese were not allowed to do.
There is nothing wrong with free trade, unless you are, as are we, a country ruined by over taxation, unions, EPA type bureaucracies that have gone mad and a congress that know absolutely nothing about economics 101 and how it is to make a living on the street.
Not only do we suffer from all of the above, but out government tries to use trade as a means to make love rather than as a means to make money.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urSe86zpLI4&feature=youtube_gdata_player
Milton Friedman on free trade vs protectionism
Today there is great disparity of wages between countries. In countries with high wages for labor, doing away with most tariffs and other trade restrictions cannot be justified by its effect on the quality of life of all the masses, as Adam Smith had done . Those who call up Smith's Lessee Fare arguments abuse his justification. Lower wages were precluded by subsistence wages in Smith's day. In our country there is room for wage cuts. To get around this Milton Freedman and other conservative economists argue {hereafter I will just use Freedman to stand for their ilk} that wage cuts the flight of unskilled production jobs will encouraging the masses to obtain better education so that they may obtain higher paying skilled employment.
What seems to have escaped Milty's mind is that we already have millions of higher educated folks who can not find jobs...We tried Milton's ideas and they don't work...
Sure, tariffs will cause higher prices but more that that, they will give us back our jobs...At which time, the forces of what the market will bear will control the costs...
I'm no fan of Milton Freedman and he's part of the reason this Country's in the financial mess it is in...
you know more than friedman?
Milton Friedman’s ideas are now pretty well discredited, given that he thought that only monetary stimulus was necessary to avoid recessions or depressions. The problem with Friedman’s arguments about “free markets” is that “free markets” depend on an objective store of value in which to negotiate trade.
When you have wholesale currency manipulation by central banks as you have today, you don’t have that any more. The entire playing field is tilted one way or another. The Japanese, for example, interfere with the value of the yen vs. the dollar when the yen grows stronger than about 83 yen to a USD. Their BOJ waded into the currency markets to weaken the yen three times in 2011 alone. That was done specifically to maintain the viability of their exports to the US. Friedman didn’t account for this - he just assumed and wished for floating currencies.
Well, economists are famous for such assumptions in their theories. And usually, those assumptions are where their theories wash up on the rocks of reality.
When you have currency pegs, as you have between China and the US, all of Friedman’s theories on trade simply go out the window. His base assumptions are null and void. The PRC pegs their currency to the US dollar to maintain a trade advantage of being able to undercut US producer prices. If the yuan were floated against the US dollar, it would be nowhere near as advantageous to export production to the PRC.
But putting aside his ideas on trade, Friedman’s big theory on which his rep as an economist depends is his theory of monetarism. His central argument was that increases in the money supply increased production and employment.
Well, since 2003, we’ve seen the money supply go upwards like a homesick angel. And the GDP of the US hasn’t responded as Friedman’s theories would indicate - the expansion of the money supply was plowed into surplus housing, inflated housing value, which was bound up in a whole lot of fraudulent financial instruments. Ergo, Friedman’s monetarism (of which, I should NB, Greenspan was an ardent follower) is simply wrong. Increasing the money supply does not lead to an increase in production or employment (or wages), especially when financial rent-seekers have developed schemes to capture the increase in money supply for themselves.
Here’s a nice little chart:
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/M2
M2 isn’t the most complete picture of the money supply; the Fed grew so concerned at how outlandish the M3 chart (the most complete measure of the money supply) looked that they ceased publishing it in 2006. So let’s just use the M2 charge. Notice the growth of M2 in the 1990’s. Then reckon on how much growth the US had in the 1990’s — pretty good, overall.
Now look at the growth of M2 in the ‘00’s. And think about how much growth we have not had vs. the 90’s for that huge increase in M2. Friedman’s theory is done for right there.
Now, look at the growth in the money supply in the last four years vs. our economic growth. Here is where Friedman’s theory of monetarism is not only dead, facts have driven a wooden stake through it’s chest, shot a revolver’s worth of silver bullets into it’s brain, then buried it in a steel casket. There’s no way to argue that Friedman’s theories are still valid when you look at the tepid to nearly non-existent economic growth since 2008 and the absurd, wild increase in the US money supply since then.
Now, on the subject of economists:
Nearly all economists are found to be wrong, once the world’s actual facts migrate outside the limited datasets which have been used to create and “test” their economic theories. And for modern economists, their datasets date from mostly post-WWII (in the US, 1947 was when the large economics datasets really start), and then limited amounts of data post-WWI. The reason why so many economists refused to believe we were in a housing bubble in 2005/6/7 was that the modern econ datasets included no data from a debt deflation - ie, the Great Depression, or the Long Depression of the 1870’s to 1880’s.
I’ve read far more economics (especially since 2005) than most people here on FR. As a result, I’ve come to the conclusion that, regardless of political outlook (be it left or right), most economists, and especially 20th century economists, are frauds with PhD’s. They’re never called to account when they’re wrong, being cloistered in academic environments, sucking on the public teat, they suffer almost no ill effects for being wrong, and unlike the private sector businessman, it is very rare that they ever even had any skin in the game based on their theories. The fastest way to lose money in today’s economy or markets is to hew to the siren song of some dead economist.
The single best use for economists would be as slave labor in a gold mine we use to prop up the US dollar with some hard assets as rapidly as we can. I’m thinking of an American version of Kolyma. Put it in Alaska, there’s plenty of gold, cold and mosquitoes there.
The facts don’t comport with the outcomes predicted by Friedman’s theories.
That means he was wrong.
It isn’t how much any of us “knows” vs. Friedman. It’s the facts as they exist today that prove him wrong, much as the stabilizing temperatures around the world for the last 14+ years are rapidly disproving the AGW hysterics’ theories.
Reality trumps theory. Or, to quote Yogi Berra: “The difference between theory and reality is that in theory, there’s no difference.”
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