What do you do if your trading partners steal all your technical and IP property? What do you do when your trading partners obtain the chip sets and technical secrets and stuff used by your military to make your ships, planes and tanks lethal? What do you do after you offshore all your steel and aluminum producing capacity to your next enemy? What do you do after you’ve completely gutted all your manufacturing capacity, then suffer another Pearl Harbor? Gonna rely on your trading partners (China, for example) to build your ships, planes. missiles, tanks, trucks, guns and right on down to your combat boots?
Wow.
That Beats the Heck out of my response of pretty much just anger.
Knowing what one wants to say and articulating it are two different things.
Thanks for doing the hard work.
How do supposed economic “geniuses” miss these VERY important points??
They scoff at those that aren’t “savvy” enough to understand their genius.
And all the while, China’s military grows and grows and grows as a result of $$ pouring in from the U.S.
We also need to take into account that they get more bang for their buck because they woefully underpay their military personnel.
The flip side is our military personnel are infinitely better warriors.
Doggone you’re smart Jim. Beautiful.
Arsenal of Democracy.
That once was common sense before libertarian true believers sold Americans on the idea that national security isn’t nearly as important as being able to buy everything in the world at the cheapest possible price, and screw national security or anything else that gets in the way.
Damn! that’s an excellent retort to ANY free trader argument.
Free traders recognize there can be no free trade of military tech. We also recognize that Trump is not really a Mercantilist - he is trying to use trade to leverage behavior changes by other countries. We also see a value in protecting food supply, which surprisingly wasn’t mentioned by anybody in the thread.
What I disagree with in your post is the concept of protecting manufacturing capacity. This is not a legitimate security threat. It is a poor excuse for implementing protectionist actions as it hurts America and it’s consumers.