Posted on 03/13/2016 9:33:18 AM PDT by impimp
Free trade is again under attack, despite having been, for over a century, the basis of America's wealth. Some groups in the United States blame free trade for the loss of manufacturing jobs, while others blame it for exposing some U.S. producers to foreign competition.
Free trade, however, is good for America, and for a very simple reason: It allows American workers to specialize in goods and services that they produce more efficiently than the rest of the world and then to exchange them for goods and services that other countries produce at higher quality and lower cost.
Specialization and free trade allow the U.S. to become more competitive and innovative. Innovation constantly provides new technologies that allow Americans to produce more, cure more diseases, pollute less, improve education, and choose from a greater range of investment opportunities. The resulting economic growth generates better-paying jobs, higher standards of living, and a greater appreciation of the benefits of living in a peaceful society.
New technologies bring about change, which, as U.S. economic history shows, benefits society as a whole. In the process, however, some sectors suffer until they can adapt to the new changes and begin to benefit from them. Today, Americans are experiencing some of that "suffering" because new technologies are challenging old methods of production.
This change is especially visible in the manufacturing sector, just as it was in the agricultural sector 100 years ago. But in the same way that it adapted then to a new, more industry-based society, America will adapt again to a new, more knowledge-based society.
(Excerpt) Read more at heritage.org ...
Heritage does not like Trump and has made that obvious.
“Did I lose $100 when I bought my groceries the other day? Of course not. I got groceries for money.”
Talk about a dumb argument.
It depends on how closed the system you are in. If it is local (inside country) you are correct.
However, when you buy something from overseas, the money and the job goes overseas.
You have what you purchased of course, but no one in this country has the job and no one in this country collects the money for producing the product. You are funding employment in another country. You have just displaced an American worker.
American businesses will never be able to compete with the slave labor wages overseas.
If what you suggested were implemented tomorrow, the people overseas would still not have any money to purchase our goods.
I remember someone told Rush that, and he made an idiot of himself trying to disprove it. He used Mexico as an example. The Mexicans do not have disposable income for our products.
You offer no solutions and fail to address the core issues.
The central issue in the trade issue is the interference of the federal government that has forced the cost of doing business so high in America, that other countries are now a more favorable location for those businesses. It isn’t the businesses fault and it isn’t the foreign country’s fault, it is the fault of the federal government in imposing the things I listed.
The cost of doing business in America is the core issue in our economy and will be reversed only by repealing these bone-headed federal government policies and getting the feds out of the way.
It is THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT that is robbing Americans of jobs and opportunities.
Yes...I am an advocate for an open borders trade policy. Many Freepers agree with me.
Tough talk from you. Name one free trader who was hanged in 1776. The silence is deafening. Your rhetoric is empty.
He’s got the game rigged so he makes money off of it.
He doesn’t care who else goes broke.
Exactly. Our free trade theorists here don't actually know much about free trade theory. Free market economists state a few conditions for a free market to exist:
None of these conditions come close to existing in the managed trade in the world as it is today. Unilaterally removing our adjustments to the efforts of others to tip the balance in their favor just tips the balance in their favor further. And, we forget we have US participants who are just as guilty of manipulating the market as do foreign partners. Why? Because that is where the money is.
Trump has said he believes in the free market and also believes that the trade deals the US government makes on behalf of the American people are disasters. He has also said that he would counter Chinese import tariffs with our own import tariffs.
My hope is that Trump actually realizes that a trade war would be bad for us, and that his advocacy for tariffs will just be a negotiating stance as President. The risk is that our trading partners would fight back with their own tariffs, and a trade war could spiral out of control.
In any case, I haven’t decided what I’ll do in November if Trump gets the nomination (I might go third party). That depends on what happens between then and now.
“It is THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT that is robbing Americans of jobs and opportunities.”
I suppose people like you are helpless when it comes to what is now called free trade. Your read something and it is made to seem that the only thing to do is to lower taxes, remove regulations that strangle industry, etc. That is not why all these companies are moving to Mexico. It is cheap labor.
The United States built the greatest economic engine in world history using protective tariffs. It only makes sense when the world is not on an equal footing.
Of course get the Federal government out of the way, but that is just part of the problem.
Before the Civil War, Northern industrialists worried about the South building factories and running them using slave labor. Their fear was the main cause of the Civil War. It was these industrialists who initiated the Underground Railroad.
Now the industrialists are reversing the tactics, and moving factories out of the United States to foreign countries to take advantage of low wages. Ford is moving to Mexico because they will play only three dollars per hour.
In case you haven’t noticed, these companies are NOT, I repeat are NOT, lobbying Congress to get out of their business, they are lobbying Congress to impose MORE “free” trade so they can continue de-industrializing the United States.
If they were at all concerned about your government issues, they would bring to bear pressure on Congress to change it. They are not doing so.
If all regulations were removed, they would still have to pay a living wage, and they don’t want to. Taxes? Taxes are ALWAYS passed on to the consumer.
So, while Jim016's fault is a mind that swings on an either this or that hinge, your fault is that your mind does not swing at all. Problem - must be libtards. Surely not crony capitalist rats infesting K-street and eating us out of house and home. No things got this way through complex adjustments year by year until the American people cannot take it any more. There is no single cause and no single solution. Declaring we believe in free trade won't make free trade happen. Too many people on our side of the table are getting too rich preventing it from happening.
Yes, exactly, and when you see them lined up in the halls of congress and the drinking saloons on capitol hill and K-street you will understand the magnitude of the challenge.
Maybe you're thinking of the French Revolution. This didn't happen in the American Revolution. The French Revolution was the first left-wing revolution, and it led to the Terror.
I am unalterably opposed to Communism and to any government interference in the economy. By the way, Goldwater and Reagan were free-traders.
You won't persuade people to vote your way by threatening your political opponents with death by vigilante mobs.
WE. ARE. IN. A. TRADE. WAR. NOW.
Our exports to almost every country on earth are subject to heavy tariffs now. What kind of idiots do you think we are?
Prices at wal mart are not low. They reductions in labor costs are passed on to the stock holders, not the consumer.
Proposed solutions should actually help, not just be feel-good measures that sound good but in fact make things worse, like the usual liberal approach.
Every time a tariff is put into place, the number of jobs lost in the US economy as a whole is greater than the number of jobs saved in whatever industries are being protected. And, even if you look just at the jobs saved, the dollar cost paid per job saved is huge.
If you’re for protectionism, you’re for central planning of the economy by the government, because that’s what protectionism is. Central planning is communism or socialism, and it never ends well.
Every tariff in place hurts both sides. Yes, both we and the other countries would be even better off if both sides got rid of their tariffs.
But even if other countries don’t get rid of their tariffs, we will benefit by not having tariffs of our own.
They funded the entire Federal budget with tariffs. LOL. Some argument....
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