Increased welfare spending because we can’t let those that had their jobs exported starve. Increased social stress causing safety concerns because there are no jobs and some feel that crime is their only option. There is no principle that stands alone. Every action causes other things to take place. Pay $1 less for a t-shirt and then pay $1 more in taxes. Enrich the Chinese. I guess those are the sort of decisions that should have been discussed.
E except the business owners, no one owns a job
No one had their job exported
No principle stands alone, okay. But the principles that go with free trade, and which used to form part of the common American culture, are no more. The answer to losing jobs was not welfarism, and by right shouldn’t be. But we’ve had criminals, maniacs, and just plain wrongheaded people in charge for nearly a century. They replaced old ethics, politics, and economics with new, much worse, ones. And theirs don’t work. Only ours ever cranked the engine of growth. Theirs feeds upon it.
Now, that’s too simplistic, for we always had our Hamiltons and Lincolns, and it was always impossible to tweeze apart the market from mere politics. But up to the 1890s we had very basic agreement about man’s place in the order of the universe and politics’ place in the order of mankind. Then a new way took over. And you plop free trade into the midst of it, which is only right. It is amidst socialism. But get this: when the two oppose eachother you choose socialism. Why?!? Why not let this one area, at least, be governed properly? We have so little.