The Economics of Progress

Washington Post ^ | February 20, 2004; | George F. Will

[Kavi]

It is difficult to say something perfectly, precisely false. But House Speaker Dennis Hastert did when participating in the bipartisan piling-on against the president’s economic adviser, who imprudently said something sensible. John Kerry and John Edwards, who are not speaking under oath and who know that economic illiteracy has never been a disqualification for high office, have led the scrum against the chairman of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers, N. Gregory Mankiw, who said the arguments for free trade apply to trade in services as well as manufactured goods. But the prize for the pithiest nonsense went to Hastert: “An economy suffers when jobs disappear.”

[TopQuark]

George Will: always makes sense.

[Asclepius]

Hastert's ideal economy, where jobs do not disappear, existed almost everywhere for almost everyone through almost all of human history. In, say, 12th-century France, the ox behind which a man plowed a field changed, but otherwise the plowman was doing what generations of his ancestors had done and what generations of his descendants were to do. Those were the good old days, before economic growth.

Willie Green, call your office.

[Willie Green]

As long as the American jobs going offshore were blue-collar jobs, the political issue did not attain the heat it has now that white-collar job losses frighten a more articulate, assertive social class

Looks like George Will forgot all about Ross Perot and "The Giant Sucking Sound".