You make an assumption that is not valid.
You apparently don’t understand competition and substitute the term Free Trade in it’s place. Free Trade becomes a bugaboo when competition is the reason for all you hold in disdain. China is held as the reason for the problems when all the pacific rim has grown by competing with America, Europe and Japan.
To think in terms of America Vs China is a gross misunderstanding. The whole world is involved.
There is probably the term Chicoms in your vocabulary when the term Chicaps better describes the change and development in China. There are people there, especially young people of the world. They want what others have and work, work hard, for it. They are competing for a better life.
Economics like Rush says, is not a zero sum game. There is not just one pie. Many additional pies can and are being created. You can’t see the pies in China or Singapore or Jakarta but they have been created by capital and work.
To understand today your view must encompass the world, the whole world. (I’ll concede Uruguay and maybe Burma and Chad and such). The rest of the world competes for a betterlife and more and more pie.
Excellent analysis Bert, and I would only add one little tiny quibble: which is that countries don’t compete as “one entity” on the world stage: individuals and companies compete, so a country’s competitiveness is very elusive to define. So not only is the whole world involved, but billions of entities are involved, not merely dozens or maybe hundreds.
This just makes it way too complicated for anyone to “manage” by way of central planning, and excessive taxation, be it tariffs or dometsic taxation, is a centrally planned way of picking winners and losers.
I understand that there is competition for trade with the rest of the world. I also understand that allowing China free access to our markets have destroyed many industries and made us much less competitive.
We need to protect our markets and put Americans back to work. And rebuild our industries. And then and only then am I concerned about competing on the world market.
At 23% unemployment and buying military goods from China, I'm simply not concerned about world competition.