On the Question of Free Trade (look who also loved free trade, the enemy of capitalism, Marx)

www.marxists.org ^ | 9 January 1848

[1rudeboy]

Only off by a factor of five. Say can you get someone to elaborate how an enemy of the free market by the name of Karl Marx is in favor of the free market? Thanks in advance.

[Toddsterpatriot]

Only off by a factor of five.

Reminds me of superiorslots. Why are all these protectionists so bad at math? Even the MBAs and the math majors. LOL!

[1rudeboy]

I'm mystified. I am atrocious at mathematics . . . tried to do some simple algebra (converting cubic meters to Btu's) and almost broke my brain. But this kind of stuff is simply crazy. Find someone making stuff up and they disappear themselves only to return elsewhere with the same BS. (And my favorite corollary occurs when somebody pulls a number out of his butt, gets hammered for it, disappears, and then one of his fellow-travellers uses it the next day claiming "I saw it, the data is out there, look it up yourself.")

[Toddsterpatriot]

Find someone making stuff up and they disappear themselves only to return elsewhere with the same BS.

I had a guy claiming gold outperformed Altria in 2005. Then he claimed gold had increased by 267% in the last 5 years. Algebra is one thing, but some people can't even do percentages. I think I straightened him out, finally.

My favorite is still the people who claim all WalMart products are from China. I miss old superiorslots.

[1rudeboy]

For obvious reasons, I prefer canards advanced by deliberate misuse of language. I remember one editorial (could've been by Pat--I wish I had saved it) that, when skimmed, appeared to suggest that the U.S. is assuming the "export profile of a developing nation." Remember?

A close reading indicated that the writer was arguing that growth in exports of chemicals and raw materials was rising more rapidly than the growth in exports of "manufactured" goods.(for lack of a better term).

I remember remarking to myself that the sentence was deliberately constructed to obscure its true meaning (have I mentioned that I wish I had saved it?). Lo and behold, almost every thread concerning trade and economics for the next few months had somebody that claiming we're joining the "Third World" because we don't export anything of value.

[Toddsterpatriot]

I remember, all we export is food and raw materials. Which is bad. Then someone else claimed that we imported too much food and that was bad too. It's difficult to keep track of all the bad things happening to our economy, which keeps growing at ~4% a year.

[1rudeboy]

Bttt until I figure out where to save this.

[darkangel82]

Algebra and geometry are definitely communist conspiracies.

[Mase]

Good-paying jobs -- whether in computers, health care or basic industries, such as energy and machinery -- increasingly require a strong grasp of math and science and sophisticated technological skills.

We don't need Alan Greenspan to tell us that those who are more motivated and better educated will earn more than those who are not.

Japan and Europe -- where income disparities are not so large -- and even developing countries such as China, India and Russia are producing many times the engineers and technicians produced in American universities, they note.

Did Greenspan happen to mention which country he'd like to switch our economy with? It's the same alarmist BS I've heard said about our country since the 70's. Which of these countries would you want to change places with?

Moreover, for the nearly one-third of Americans who rent but would like to own homes, spiraling house prices have worsened the pinch they feel from stagnant wages.

I see the liberal think tank they quote offers no proof for their assertions.

"Despite a widespread sense that real estate has never been more expensive, families in the vast majority of the country can still buy a house for a smaller share of their income than they could have a generation ago."

"A sharp fall in mortgage rates since the early 1980's, a decline in mortgage fees and a rise in incomes have more than made up for rising house prices in almost every place outside of New York, Washington, Miami and along the coast in California."

"Nationwide, a family earning the median income - the exact middle of all incomes - would have to spend 22 percent of its pretax pay this year on mortgage payments to buy the median-priced house, according to an analysis by Moody's Economy.com, a research company.

The share has increased since 1998, when it hit a low of 17 percent before house prices began rising sharply in many places. Although the overall level has reached its highest point since 1989, it remains well below the levels of the early 1980's, when it topped 30 percent."

Twenty Years Later, Buying a House Is Less of a Bite

The rest of the article offer some good news, some bad news, but not much detail as to how they obtained their information. Let's look at some additional facts:

• Another reason that workers today have made substantially greater economic gains than the wage data may suggest is that more Americans than ever derive income and wealth not purely from labor, but from ownership. Between 1980 and 2005 the share of Americans who are workers/stock owners has doubled from 25% to 52%. Since 1980, shareholder wealth has increased by about $15 trillion. Those wealth gains used to be hoarded by the wealthy, but thanks to innovations like 401(k) plans and IRAs, the wealth gains from the American bull market have been further democratized and the dividends have been spread more widely to middle-class America.

  The Wages of Prosperity

• In 1969, 51 percent of individuals in families were middle class. By 1993, that share had declined to 40 percent. The decline in the middle class was primarily the result of growth in the share of individuals in upper class families. By 1993, one-third more individuals in families had incomes more than 40 percent above the U.S. median than in 1969. It was also true, however, that many individuals in lower class families in 1993 had higher real income than individuals in middle class families had in 1969, because sizeadjusted U.S. median real family income grew by more than 20 percent between 1969 and 1993. Thus, despite the fact that these individuals were no longer part of the middle class, they and their families had greater access to goods and services than some middle class individuals and their families had in 1969. This is one reason why the continued rise in per capita consumption is a better barometer of real economic wellbeing.

  Middle Class: More American Families Gain than Fall Behind

• National Review contributor Don Luskin noted that the number of returns reporting incomes between $25,000 and $100,000 grew rapidly from 2000 to 2002, while the number earning higher or lower incomes (including capital gains) diminished. By this measure, the middle class was expanding rather than shrinking.

• Any unchanging definition of "the middle class" can always be shown to vanish over the years, of course, simply because more people are making more money. The percentage of U.S. households with a real income higher than $50,000 rose from 24.9 in 1967 to 44.1 percent in 2003.

  Middle Class Mania

  Real per capita consumption is a better measure of rising incomes and has increased at an average annual rate of 2.3% during the past 30 years in the US.

  Do you really believe that the middle plays no role in driving our consistent growth in real per capita consumption?

[hedgetrimmer]

And that is why modern marxists, such as castro and chavez hate free trade.

This is a lie. Hugo Chavez has set up his own "free trade" zone, the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas, or ALBA, that will work to his advantage. If he hated "free trade" he wouldn't have created ALBA

[hedgetrimmer]

Marx, therefore, is not a "Free Trader". He is simply someone who advocated the exchange of surplus wealth, where applicable, in order to prop up his fantasies of international brotherhood.

Not unlike the forgiving of debt to the "Highly Indebted Poor Countries " by the G8 and the "trade cacpacity building" and the "aid-with-trade" of the WTO, headed by french socialist, Pascal Lamy.

[hedgetrimmer]

And what are you?

[Mase]

$51 trillion net worth sounds impressive, till you subtract the $40 trillion national debt.

Do you understand how to calculate net worth? Do you understand the difference between household debt and the national debt? Do you understand the difference between external debt and unfunded liabilities?

You should call DeVry University and demand your money back.

[Mase]

The simple fact is that the average wage earner is earning less.

Then how has real per capita consumption risen at an average annual rate of 2.3% over the past 30 years?

If wealth is being added to or maintained, its because both spouses are now working.

Your chart measure the difference between 1950 and today. What kind of opportunities were available for women in the job market back then vs. the past 20 years? .

Note that while the income growth has stagnated from 1979 to 2003..

Since your linked article a previous post quoted Alan Greenspan at length, let's look at what he had to say recently about wages.

"Moreover, real earnings of the average worker have continued to rise. Over the past century, per capita real income has risen at an average rate of more than 2 percent per year, declining notably only during the Great Depression of the 1930s and immediately following World War II. Incomes trended higher whether we had a trade deficit or a trade surplus and whether international outsourcing was large or small."

"Productivity in the United States has increased generation after generation, creating ever-rising standards of living. This trend has persisted whether our competitive advantage came from the development of more efficient technologies in agriculture, textiles, and steel, or, more recently, from the design and fabrication of microprocessors and the harnessing of the human genome. Our knowledge-based skills in a business environment, supported by a rule of law, have enabled our workforce to create ever-greater value added--irrespective of what goods and services we have chosen to produce at home and what and how much we have chosen to import."

"The fact that, over the years, more than 94 percent of the workforce has been employed, on average, indicates that U.S. workers apparently have been sufficiently skilled and motivated to learn the new tasks that enable them to earn, on average, an ever-rising real wage."

Source

Are you going to come back and defend this nonsense from the Grandfather Economic Report or not?

[1rudeboy]

If you re-read my reply #21, you should say I dislike Marxist rhetoric. [hoot]

[Toddsterpatriot]

You should call DeVry University and demand your money back.

Ouch!

[1rudeboy]

Less on ALBA here.

[hedgetrimmer]

No, here

[1rudeboy]

Maybe the two of you can have a conversation about what constitutes Marxist rhetoric?

[hedgetrimmer]

The "free traders" depend on Marxist rhetoric.

It "poor countries" vs "rich countries" with them.