Posted on 07/28/2003 6:36:40 PM PDT by RaceBannon
"Of all forms of tyranny the least attractive and the most vulgar is the tyranny of mere wealth, the tyranny of plutocracy."
~ Theodore Roosevelt
Pretty smug comment. Work for the government do we?
That's closer, and you get points for marking the difference between free trade and free markets.
I fear that one day we won't be able to make anything in this country and this will leave us defenseless against a China. It takes a long time to make weapons of today. I just don't trust the Chicoms. This is one reason we need to throw this free trade out the window.
When the yuan eventually stands on its own in the global currency markets, the result will not be pretty.
FYI, the last notable country to do this kind of thing was Japan, back in the 1980s. Look at all the complaints about China on this thread, and compare them to all those 1980s doomsday predictions about Japan owning the entire world. Notice the similarity? Does anyone talk about Japan anymore?
I'll see you in the checkout line. Have my fries ready; I'll want to super-size.
BS. In the case in question, the company spent the $75,000 to upgrade their system because they were able to realize a savings of $125,000 (I'm guessing at these numbers, BTW) in their business with the new system in place. Nobody with an IQ over 40 is going to spend $200,000 for a system upgrade to realize a savings of $125,000.
A few years ago, my daughter's bf made big bucks at 21 yrs old. After 9/11, the company he worked for lost their prison contracts, and laid off everyone but family. It took him 2 yrs to find something that pays 10 bucks less an hour. He went door to door to every sleazy business looking for under the table work while he faxed hundreds of resumes.
The attitude some employers have is that everyone is expendable.
The following excerpted paragraphs are from the following link.
The Bear's Lair:Free Trade Mirage
Nineteenth century Britain in 1846 adopted a purist free trade approach, abolishing nearly all tariffs on foreign goods and imposing only minimal non-tariff restrictions on the movement of goods and labor. The result was that within fifty years Britain had lost the world economic lead she enjoyed in 1846, to the thoroughly protectionist powers of the U.S. and Germany. In theory, the U.S. and Germany would have benefited from maintaining free trade with Britain. In practice, their tariff walls and other restrictions allowed them to build up industries that were able to earn higher returns and thereby undertake larger investments than Britain's, which was exposed to the full blast of the global free market.
In agriculture, Britain abandoned agricultural protectionism, believing that the benefit of marginally cheaper food for the working classes outweighed the costs of depressed returns on agricultural investment. It worked fine for a couple of decades -- until refrigerated transportation of meat and the opening of the U.S. railroad network brought competition that devastated the British agricultural economy, destroyed the social system that had served Britain so well, and left Britain within weeks of starvation in two world wars. Unilateral free trade proved to be like unilateral disarmament -- suicidal in the long run.
In today's world, the dirty secret about free trade is that trade is freest where the comparative advantage disparity is least. Agriculture is protected throughout the OECD, even though the workforce employed therein is now relatively small, because the comparative advantage of the Third World in agricultural products is huge. Textiles are protected by the multi-fiber agreement, because in such a labor intensive industry Third World producers would quickly drive U.S. and European workers out of a job if trade was freed. Automobile sales into the U.S. are free from Western Europe but subject to quotas from Japan and South Korea because Western European automobile producers are not particularly price-competitive with domestic ones. The U.S. signs free trade agreements with Chile and Singapore, but not Brazil or India, because the disruption caused by allowing Chile and Singapore free access to U.S. markets is minor. Immigration into the U.S. and the EU is freer for "refugees" lacking skills and able to carry out menial tasks than for highly skilled technicians, who might force down professional-class wage levels.
I'm a man of my times, and will act according to the conditions of the day - I feel no particular constraint by political or secular philosophies of two centuries previous.
Here the insured population is only 32%, all the rest count on government programs for their medical care --- when the numbers already on government programs gets that high there becomes even more support for welfare programs and nationalized healthcare. This seems to be the real goal of the free traders, get so many dependent on the government there will be resistence to total Socialism.
The China based business model is flawed. The worse things get there the better for our corporations. If there is labor problems, thats ok, it just means we can pay them a little bit less than last year...
Ask yourself how much you would charge for your services if you were in the business of mowing lawns. Then ask yourself how much you would pay someone else to mow your own lawn. Then do the same for any number of other tasks that are done largely by immigrants these days.
In any given case, the difference between the two numbers (and this figure is usually very large) represents your "credibility gap" when it comes to complaining about the impact of immigrant labor.
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