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To: Joe Bonforte
I get a kick out of these smug people that have a job and no sympathy for the ones that are being displaced. Answer me this, if low wages are good for a country, way are places like India, Pakistan and Vietnam such $hit holes. When you get your wish and we have destroyed the middle class, who are you going to sell your talents to?
167 posted on 07/19/2003 6:21:01 AM PDT by calvo
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To: calvo
"I get a kick out of these smug people that have a job and no sympathy for the ones that are being displaced. Answer me this, if low wages are good for a country, way are places like India, Pakistan and Vietnam such $hit holes. When you get your wish and we have destroyed the middle class, who are you going to sell your talents to?"

I'd like to say I get a kick out of people who are so abysmally ignorant of basic economics, but I don't. And unfortunately, the line stretches all the way from you up to Ross Perot and Patrick Buchanan.

I've been through this whole territory before, and in the unlikely event that you actually care about facts instead of rhetoric, you can check out this thread in which I talked about the fact that globalization in the form of NAFTA has generated good effects for our economy instead of the bad ones Perot and Buchanan predicted.

As far as your claim about India, et.al. being $hit holes, you've got things quite mixed up. Low wages there are just a symptom. They all have suffered through lousy governments for decades. Corruption, shaky property rights, government subsidy of all kinds of stupid things, etc. This has mired them in bad economic conditions, and that lead to low wages.

Instead, you should be looking for a country that has had a free, open, globalized economy for a few decades and nevertheless is an awful place to live. I can't think of one. Does that not suggest that globalization is a good thing?

Finally, I always have sympathy for folks without jobs. In fact, I'd say I have more sympathy than you, since I support polices that have been demonstrated historically to lead to more employment. Sure, we could have a protectionist economy, with lots of rules that protected people's jobs. Then we'd be Europe, who oddly enough in spite of their rules, unions, and laws have much higher unemployment than us.

171 posted on 07/20/2003 7:43:18 AM PDT by Joe Bonforte
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