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Free Trade Will Be the Dust Bowl of Our Time.

I'm optimistic. The little guy on the street knows that jobs are moving offshore. The party line has been free trade, in part because it helped among free countries during the Cold War.

Elections will be the little guy's means of expressing his frustration. It seems the conservatives ought to realize that leadership -- meaning a change of course -- is going to be required for them to stay in power. I hope they do in time.

The polls indicate a downturn in the current administration's popularity, but none of the MSM -- including FOX news -- is willing to admit that it isn't Iraq that's causing the frustration, it's trade. If Americans are frustrated over Iraq, it's because the war is being fought too gently, exposing our troops to excessive danger when a heavier hand might secure peace at less risk to them.

You know, theoretically there is NOTHING we do that the Third World cannot learn to do just as well--the only limitation is whether it can be done far away.

As the Third World economies grow, they will continue to learn to do those new things as well as we, but do them with cheaper labor.

Once almost everything is being done overseas, what will America produce to sell them?

Do not kid yourselves that America will be better at producing ideas. The Third World can learn to be just as creative--or do any of you believe their races are not as genetically intelligent as ours?.

The only hope we would have would be that as the Third World gets richer and richer from stealing America's business, that the Third World will become just as an expensive place to live as America, making Third World Workers more expensive to hire.

In the end, we will probably have a world where our cost of living will fall and that of the Third World rise, until both costs equalize, and the cost of labor across the world will be about the same..

But by then, we will have lost all industries except for such things as garbage collection.

What then?

For a few decades of cheap products we dismantle America's industries, while in the end it would cost no more to make most everything here anyway.

What's more, by helping the Third World industrialize, we create more competition for resources like building materials and energy, thereby driving up the price of materials.

The industrialization of the Third World will also add hugely to pollution, which eventually will lead to laws and treaties restricting everyone's freedom to use what they buy and to simply throw it away when it's no longer needed.

The higher cost of materials may actually offset to a great degree the lower price of cheap imports.