Protectionism far from patriotic

Faced with the prospect of reciprocal policies that would punish U.S. exporters, President Bush recently backed away from the steel tariffs he had imposed earlier. Of course, abandoning that protectionism led to attacks from those who were being protected at others' expense, dressed up as patriotism and sovereignty arguments, as when United Steelworkers of America President Leo Gerard called it the "latest in a long line of WTO [World Trade Organization] decisions undercutting America." Those arguments are bogus.

For instance, Thomas Paine, the fiery orator of our revolution, argued that free trade was deducible from the principles "on which government ought to be erected,"

During enactment of The First Federal Revenue Law, James Madison declared that Congress must "remedy the evil" of "the deficiency in our Treasury." He argued that "[a] national revenue must be obtained," but not in a way "oppressive to our constituents." He then proposed that the House adopt legislation, virtually identical to the unimplemented Confederation tariff, imposing a five-percent tariff on all imports...
A single, uniform tariff, he insisted, was consistent with the principles of free trade.

Making protectionism even worse is that its transfer of wealth from American consumers to American producers is a negative- sum game.

This erroneous and irrational statement fully discredits the author of this article.
He schizophrenicly assumes that Americans can be consumers without being producers. And he totally ignores that it is in the value-added, goods-producing sectors of our economy that wealth is created.

And as has been pointed out to you, value-added is essentially an accounting concept, not an economic concept.

And your blatant dishonesty destroys your own credibility.

WEALTH: The net ownership of material possessions and productive resources. In other words, the difference between physical and financial assets that you own and the liabilities that you owe. Wealth includes all of the tangible consumer stuff that you possess, like cars, houses, clothes, jewelry, etc.; any financial assets, like stocks, bonds, bank accounts, that you lay claim to; and your ownership of resources, including labor, capital, and natural resources. Of course, you must deduct any debts you owe.
VALUE ADDED: The increase in the value of a good at each stage of the production process. The value that's being increased is specifically the ability of a good to satisfy wants and needs either directly as a consumption good or indirectly as a capital good. A good that provides greater satisfaction has greater value. In essence, the whole purpose of production is to transform raw materials and natural resources that have relatively little value into goods and services that have greater value.
SERVICE: An activity that provides direct satisfaction of wants and needs without the production of a tangible product or good. Examples include information, entertainment, and education. This term good should be contrasted with the term good, which involves the satisfaction of wants and needs with tangible items. You're likely to see the plural combination of these two into a single phrase, "goods and services," to indicate the wide assortment of economic production from the economy's scarce resources.

Wealth is created only by engaging in value-added activities. By the same token, Service sector activities do not create wealth, they merely transfer, redistribute and eventually dissipate wealth as consumption. Thus, as value-added activities move offshore and the U.S. labor force shifts to the Service Sector, wealth is dissipated, not created. And the U.S. standard of living declines as a result.

Wealth is created only by engaging in value-added activities.

If you're defining "value-added activities" to mean goods production you're wrong. If by that you mean by producing things which have a value, then services have a value. There is no economics textbook that says only goods production adds to total wealth. This is your own concoction. Find me one that says that.

You're trying to use your definition of "value-added" to prove that only goods production is a value-added activity. Here's some general definitions of value-added:

value added: A measure of output. Value added by an organization or industry is, in principle:
revenue - non-labor costs of inputs
where revenue can be imagined to be price*quantity, and costs are usually described by capital (structures, equipment, land), materials, energy, and purchased services.
Treatment of taxes and subsidies can be nontrivial.
Value-added is a measure of output which is potentially comparable across countries and economic structures.

Glossary of Research Economics

www.econterms.com

Value added The value of output minus the value of all intermediate inputs, representing therefore the contribution of, and payments to, primary factors of production.

Deardorff's Glossary of International Economics

The definition you yourself posted says:

In essence, the whole purpose of production is to transform raw materials and natural resources that have relatively little value into goods and services that have greater value.

Your whole theory turns on your sentence above, which is just a way of saying "only goods production creates wealth", but you try to use the term "value-added" as a way of proving that. Hence your whole argument turns on your misuse of the term "value-added", and you're just playing with words.

You're theory is mathematically retarded, since manufactured goods all wear out over time and eventually have a value of zero. Therefore, goods consumption also represents a dissipation of wealth. Manufactured goods account for a tiny percentage of the total amount of accumulated wealth in the world. Most of it is intangible like stocks and bonds. Real estate is another major component of wealth, which is not manufactured. If your theory was correct, then the amount of accumulated wealth and the total outstanding value of manufactured goods would be the same number, or at least the increase in total wealth between two points in time would be equal to the total increase in the value of all manufactured goods made between those two points. Neither of those is true.

And your blatant dishonesty destroys your own credibility.

I'm sick of your accusing anyone who disagrees with your simple minded "logic" of dishonesty. If anyone's dishonest it's you with your word games.

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