"With the demise of Big Blue as a PC manufacturer, I think even the Cato-ists and Von Mises-blindered dogmatists have to concede that something is seriously amiss in their theories."
No, this only confirms the free trade theories. "Big Blue" has demonstrated their total misunderstanding of the PC market from it's inception to today. Remember the "Peanut"? Now, "Big Blue" can focus their captital and talent on other uses that they understand. By focusing on their other products, they have the opportunity to increase their productivity and generate more wealth.
The "Fair Trade" folks would instead have enacted tariffs to protect "Big Blue" and artifically raise consumer costs introducing inefficienies in the market and reducing wealth for all.
IBM is not reorganizing itself in a helpful way. It is the kind of reorganization more consistent with going out of business altogether. The securities market clearly thinks so.
We should already be getting richer as a country. We are not. We are hemmorhaging wealth in a one-way street to China along with the productive capacity, capacity, engineering, and skills. All that is mounting up on our side is IOU's, Checks drawn on blue sky, and continually confounded and dashed hopes of "buying" a piece of the Chinese "market." It will never happen.
Why? Because the Chinese government intends to make sure that nothing that happens actually benefits U.S. industry. Nothing. This whole excercise is an attempt to bring a huge "wrecking ball" to the U.S. economy...and never let it get back up again as an industrial threat to communism.