How quickly one forgets the soup lines of the 1930's and the misery that was Victorian England. Also all those who worked for, and were owned by, the "company" while digging coal out of the hills of West Virginia, Kentucky, and other places in Appalachia. And these weren't even under pure free market conditions.
The ONLY thing that got us out of the Great Depression was the massive deficit spending that FDR initiated on behalf of World War II. Just about every economist of every political stripe credits GOVERNMENT intervention on ending the Great Depression. It wasn't the free market that was paying for all those tanks, ships and planes.
My point is this: either extreme, communisim (central planning) or totally free markets are both undesirable. As you correctly noted, free-er than normal markets, like those in China, do allow for a tiny increase in liberty, when you're not locked in the factory during your eighty-hour work week. However, there is still CONSIDERABLE control exerted by the Chinese government, they just don't try to control everything anymore, just simple, unimportant things like politics and religion.
But the reverse is also true. You cannot have a truly "free" market without near anarchy. No controls means no controls. If you have well disciplined population that can maintain itself, fine. But as recent current events deomonstrate, that type of self-control simply does not exist, at least not anymore. Just look what happened to New Orleans within 24 hrs. of Katrina!!!
Lord help the man who lives at the mercy of the FREE MARKET. The reason we don't have one, is because we once did, and no one liked it--with the exception of a few rich folks who had the morals and ethics of the devil himself.
Just look at how the people cried for Uncle Sam to save them after Katrina struck New Orleans a glancing blow. Everyone cries to be free, until it's time to pick-up the check...then they can't have too much "help" from the government.
As some in this thread have been pointing out, free markets work very well in theory; in "controlled" environments; but once they collide with human nature, those benefits dry up very quickly. That's why human beings have always had governments of some type, and often very authoritiarian ones....because more often then not, they couldn't trust the guy standing next to them.
. . . uh, if you say so. That is a whole can of worms in itself and I'm not going to comment further than saying I disagree.
Look, in very simple terms, I object to protective, selective taxes on any particular products that I may want to import. If I'm an aerospace manufacturer, it personally hurts me to have a 30% steel tariff. I do not want to support a domestic steel industry that is so outrageously inefficient that even the gargantuan American advantage in capital and technology cannot allow it to be competitive. The tariff arbitrarily increases my steel material costs by 30% than what I could otherwise get. All of the tax money raised is non-productive and most of it is wasted on illegitimate government programs.
An industry that requires a tariff is pathetic indeed. It's like a marathon runner asking for a headstart against a paraplegic. I don't care how cheap Mexicans work. Technology amplifies the productive potential of a skilled worker thousands of times. In order words, you can have a thousand or a million slave labor packing coal on their backs from place to place, but I couldn't care less, because I have a damn railroad, with an engineer, conductor, and mechanics. The skilled workers who aren't necessary to meet the profitable demand of a product are gainfully employed in the production of other, often new products.
This is why capitalism raises all boats and why the working poor of America live better than the nobility of Europe did 500 years. Capitalism allows, nay, demands the efficient and profitable deployment of technology and innovation. When people are economically free to trade and are protected by the Rule of Law, this we call capitalism and population numbers multiply until people just don't even care to have any more kids. When a select and powerful group of men have a monopoly on force and use it to control the economic liberty of people, this we call socialism, and populations shrink from famine and mass murder.
It is outright absurd that I am defending free markets on Free Republic! Back to your regularly scheduled program of tariffs illegitimately protecting favored workers.
America, through her history as a free and prosperous nation, has gained the lead, by an unbelievable margin, in capital accumulation and technological know-how. This know-how means the skill, education, and innovation to maximize the production of the individual American worker.
We have here an illiterate, uneducated, and unskilled foreigner who does not even speak English, and who works in a factory in a foreign country with a sub-standard infrastructure and legal system. If he is able to outproduce an American manufacturer, than that slothful manufacturer does not deserve to stay in business because he is not competitive -- wasteful and inefficient and worse, unproductive -- and he sure has hell does not deserve a subsidy in the form of a tax on my trade with his better competition. Hell no!
I for one recognize the gigantic advantage I gain simply by living in America and having access to enormous capital, knowledge, and the world's finest legal system. This is available to every single penniless American with nothing going for him but a sound mind and good health. If you're born into privilege of any sort you have that much more of a headstart. If you're so pathetic that you cannot use this to make something of yourself in America of all places than you merit no more or less than to be replaced by the foreigner who is productive despite his inferior circumstances. I view idleness as a sin and stupidity as a worse sin. I will strive with all of my might to succeed and the worst failure which is possible for me is to wind up with merely providing adequately for me and mine. You only impede my success by obstacles to free trade, and prolong your own failure.
As Americans, our rightful place is at the forefront of production, but only because we have earned it by being first and being most successful. As the rest of the world catches on, we continue improving. It's a race to the top, and we have a 200-year headstart that has made some folks complacent.
Gentlemen, this is the important point I want you to take away from all this: 50 and 100 years ago, American factory workers sure as hell did not have the opportunity for massage therapy. Today they do, because they are individually more productive. The marginal ones lobby for tariffs. The real wages of productive individuals (not a stagnant industry refusing to change) rise in proportion to their productivity. This is eminently obvious when you think of labor as a commodity in a market. They rise because each individual's labor is more valuable as he becomes more productive. The marginal workers, the ones who aren't as productive, are laid off and they persue other productive employment.
Angel Mills decided to persue massage therapy. Good on her. Shame on you for suggesting that instead the price of leather should increase 30% and the leather industry should stagnate until it's incompetent even at a 30% advantage.