Posted on 08/13/2020 6:42:19 AM PDT by GarthVader
“Free Trade” isn’t. Low tariffs combined with high taxes on domestic labor is not Free Trade. It’s Subsidized Outsourcing, subsidized destruction of our industrial base and our national character. We tax domestic manufacturing in order to pay unemployment and welfare to those who lose their jobs to foreign competition. This is an evil positive feedback loop that has been crushing our working classes since the 70s. Our core cities are turning into uncivilized war zones and our college campuses into communist indoctrination centers.
But at least we are subsidizing a rising fascist superpower with a terrible environmental record.
(Excerpt) Read more at greenandfree.org ...
Free trade isn’t free. It costs folks like you and me.
Free trade costs a buck of fiiiiive.
No really, who actually thinks there was ever free trade anyway? There are always tariffs and taxes.
Throw in with that massive imbalances of labor costs and other market forces, and you can always point to inequities. But on the flip side, in a perfect world, given a long enough time line, differences in markets and standards of living should equalize. Unfortunately, this typically takes generations to occur, and there are always other cheap markets to exploit.
Tariffs work for all the other countries, so why is it bad for our country?
Note the lack of comments on this page.
The Fwee Twade Twaddle is still strong in the minds of the people on FR.
This is the same conclusion I came to years ago: lowering tariffs on developing countries while maintaining ridiculously high tax rates on your own country was insane - it literally hands all the price advantage to the foreign country. THEY don’t pay US income taxes, WE do.
Why would anyone in their right mind do that?
They wouldn’t. That people who implemented that crap knew it would happen. They wanted it to be that way - to break the Unions, to drive Americans down to the same wage and working conditions as China or India.
The middlemen - the “Globalist” corporations - would profit heavily because their income is booked in tax havens - Ireland, for example. The tax holiday Trump rammed through brought trillions back to the US. But it’s only temporary.
As the article mentions, it was assumed that eventually everyone’s economies would level out. But the Chinese figured out a way around that: intentionally hold down the value of their currency. The normal mechanism is to allow currency appreciation to normalize trade. They defeated that to maintain their advantage. As the article correctly says, it’s a fascist country: not a true “Communist” country. It has mixed state/private ownership with state intervention to prop up favored industries.
So the current American situation is utterly nuts. It’s a gun pointed at our own heads. A national excise tax is the most sensible thing, because it not only taxes foreign products at the same rate, but does not penalize income. You’re free to spend or save what you earn, no penalty.
Trump understands all this. Anyone in a competitive economy would. So you have to ask...why was it like this?
Answer: because people who DON’T like Americans or America did it to us.
The Bush family said it was to “reduce tensions with China and others” who were our enemies by allowing them to develop and trade with us. That’s nice, but it’s a political, not an economic goal. And in the end, one that backfired: the Chinese are far more of threat now then when they were a run down country of screeching Kamala’s screwing each other.
We have started down the road to recovery. But until we repeal the idiotic 19th century revenge taxes - put in place by the Socialist Democrats of the 1920s, in the 1930s - and replace them with sensible excise taxes that both protect production here as well as fund government, we will still have the same problems, and be on a slow boat to economic destruction.
You are on the money.
There is one other factor: containing communism. The U.S. took the hit to keep trade going between the remaining free countries after WWII to make communism less appealing in war devastated Europe.
Today, the policy subsidizes “communist” China.
Your simple argument works for the data driven.
For those with degrees in crafting theories and narratives, it takes more to persuade. This includes think tankers, university professors, bow tie wearing Never Trump pundits, and high level bureaucrats.
1) Yes, at least in theory, free trade evens out all the markets, so for example brings up wages in the wage havens like China. This is something we would normally view as a good thing. OTOH, it also evens out by lowering US worker wages, and the argument can be made, by a percentage larger than those workers are saving when they buy less expensive foreign made goods. Shouldn’t we care about that first and Chinese wages later, if at all? Not only that, but the increase on the Chinese side may very well accrue to the government-industrial entities rather than to the people, which is not only of no use, it actually poses a threat to the same Americans who saw their jobs go overseas. So they’re paying with lower wages to be made politically and militarily vulnerable. I’ll pass, thanks.
2) Many markets are critical infrastructure for national defense. Even if on purely economic basis free trade looks desirable, if the cost is making your nation vulnerable, you can’t do it.
3) People talk about “free trade” as if that’s what we’ve had until Trump started in on Gyyyna. That’s not really the case. The status quo ante (and in general, not just with China) was more like a one-sided trade war where one side was firing every weapon they had with profligate abandon while the opponent was in a perpetual cease-fire. At some times in some scenarios, true free trade gives a better outcome than protectionism, but protectionism is better than one-sided trade war where one of the sides doesn’t bother to engage.
Your third point is what the article is about. Low tariffs when coupled with a welfare state and an income tax constitute subsidized outsourcing.
Only if all sides do the same thing does it even out.
THEN, once we limit subsidized outsourcing to poor countries we want to support, we can ask the question: do we want to penalize outsourcing in order to ensure national defense, higher wage rates, etc.
The other side is claiming to adhere to an idealized baseline. Their claim is wrong.
No such thing as Free Trade.
High taxes, regulations and environmental costs all should be added to imports, period. It would make EU and Canada have little impact taxes with massive taxes for CHina.
Free Trade” isn’t. Low tariffs combined with high taxes on domestic labor is not Free Trade. It’s Subsidized Outsourcing.
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Exactly.
Free Republic isn’t free -— they have censorship rules just like FB and Google
Sorry, but it actually is. It’s just that literally nobody practices it, or has.
The problem is that the equilibrium standard of living is a weighted average of the countries involved: and we are both the most expensive and least-populated compared to Chy-na.
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