Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article

To: hedgetrimmer

Wrong on all counts.

Our government was NOT created "to protect individual rights" - although that was ONE of the underlying principles of its organization. It was created to to ensure our mutual security.

"Free trade has made unwilling individuals sacrifice their livlihoods" is a socialist utterance If I ever heard one. Nobody at any time in the history of our nation has ever asserted that any individual had a "right" to any given livlihood. Such an assertion is absurd for two reasons.

First it is beyond the power of the government to ensure, except by robbing other unwilling citizens to pay for work they otherwise would not buy. Second, it is incompatible with the purposes of ensuring the GENERAL welfare, which requires that government consider foremost the aggregate effects of its policies.

So, far from being "utterly incongruent with the responsibilities of the federal government and violates the spirit of the US Constitution", free trade, such as it exists (and it most assuredly does not) is entirey consistent with, and in furtherance of, the express purposes and intentions of our Constitution.


347 posted on 03/11/2006 7:13:00 PM PST by John Valentine
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 328 | View Replies ]


To: John Valentine
Our government was NOT created "to protect individual rights"

Only if you're not an American.

Ensure mutual security?
"Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety"

"Free trade has made unwilling individuals sacrifice their livelihoods" is a socialist utterance If I ever heard one.

How old are you? I am curious to know as many people just getting out of high school seem to have no concept of the rights of individual liberty. Far from being socialist, the idea that ones individual liberty is protected by all goes back to our founding. However, the "free traders" have turned this upside down, saying individuals must give up their liberty so that whole sectors of our domestic economy can be traded away so that our USTR can broker trade agreements. Don't you see that this is wrong? A true American doesn't make individuals unwillingly pay a price for the whole society. That is the socialist concept and that is a mechanism of "free trade".

First it is beyond the power of the government to ensure, except by robbing other unwilling citizens to pay for work they otherwise would not buy.

So now the government must ensure that "free traders" can use slave labor via "free trade" agreements because that is the only labor they are willing to pay for? Because the US taxpayer through the federal government IS paying for this, and undermining their own future at the same time. Once you get a government guarantee to protect slave labor as a means of producing our goods, as in our "free trade" agreements with China, India, Viet Nam and so forth do, it is only a matter of time before slave labor becomes the norm once again in the United States.

Second, it is incompatible with the purposes of ensuring the GENERAL welfare,

So preserving individual rights DOESN'T promote the general welfare of the country? How so, if the government is predicated on protecting individual rights, how can denying them to our citizens promote the general welfare?

free trade, such as it exists (and it most assuredly does not) is entirey consistent with, and in furtherance of, the express purposes and intentions of our Constitution.

Really? Is that why our founders decided that TARIFFS were a constitutional way to fund the federal government? We all know that income tax was created so that the "free traders" could put the burden of paying for the government on wage earners and thus allowing them to eliminate constitutional funding of the government and give them leeway to enact "free trade" policies.

I am afraid everything you have said is wrong on all counts.
350 posted on 03/11/2006 8:45:39 PM PST by hedgetrimmer ("I'm a millionaire thanks to the WTO and "free trade" system--Hu Jintao top 10 worst dictators)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 347 | View Replies ]

Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article


FreeRepublic, LLC, PO BOX 9771, FRESNO, CA 93794
FreeRepublic.com is powered by software copyright 2000-2008 John Robinson