[central_va]

What do you call someone that won't even acknowledge that the way the USA has off shored and conducted trade actually has created losers as well as some winners? In your mind nobody has lost at all in the globalization that has taken place. I know you too well.

So prove me wrong, so who has lost in the last 30 years due to Free Trade and globalization and off shoring for the cheapest labor rates possible and no tariff protections? Anyone?

[ConservativeMind]

Imagine if a country allowed businesses to import all needed labor at a fraction of what that country had required to have a decent living, then told its own replaced citizens to live broke, on welfare, with family, to turn to crime, or move to India and Mexico to take jobs the imported labor wouldn't even do for those wages? All of this while continuing to migrate jobs to India, Mexico, and Vietnam? And increasing regulations that only sped up offshoring of more jobs?

What would you have? Effectively, the US as it now stands.

[riverdawg]

Of course trade creates losers as well as winners. Nothing I have written says otherwise. In a world with trade, compared with a world without trade (autarky), the gains of the winners exceed the losses of the losers. This leads to an opportunity for the winners to compensate the losers for their losses. Now, this compensation most often does not occur in the real world. This is a failure of the political system, and of policymakers’ creativity, not a failure of trade itself. Workers displaced via trade in the textile or automobile industries, for example, could receive compensation in the form of retraining and relocation assistance and maybe extended unemployment compensation. In my opinion , the latter should take the form of an upfront, lump-sum payment rather than a weekly check for a fixed period of time.