The difference will be that people will work. Without the majority of people working, the only way you can distribute goods and services is through communism.
You know, all that "to each according to his needs" stuff.
Well, guess what -- even with a tariff in place on imported goods and services, the only way to distribute goods and services is through communism . . .
Apocryphal story from the Great Depression . . .
A high-profile diplomat from the Soviet Union visited New York in the 1930s. He was met at Idlewild Airport (now JFK International Airport) by New York City mayor Fiorello LaGuardia and an entourage of city dignitaries. While leaving the airport in the back of a car with the mayor, he noticed a large group of men shoveling snow on one of the airport runways.
"Why are these men shoveling snow here?" he asked through an interpreter, "I would have thought that here in the U.S. you would do things in a more automated fashion."
LaGuardia told him that the unemployment rate in New York was very high during the Depression, and proudly pointed out that the city had been able to provide 2,000 jobs for men at the airport by having them shovel snow instead of using snow plows.
"That's interesting," the Russian answered, "But if you were to give them all spoons instead of shovels, you could probably hire 100,000 more."
. . .
During the Clinton administration, the employment picture in the U.S. was particularly bright because hi-tech companies were investing a lot of resources to upgrade their technological capabilities and enhance their productivity. Many jobs these days are moving to India and the Philippines precisely because the technological impediments to this job shift have been removed over the last ten years.
I don't know what the answer is when it comes to keeping Americans employed, but in one respect the incessant complaints about outsourcing border on the absurd. For some people, their approach to this issue is the equivalent of a government official who celebrates the dramatic decline in his state's unemployment rate when 10,000 people are hired to build a 12-lane freeway across the land but then expresses alarm over the "devastating environmental conseqeunces" when people actually go out and start driving on it.
Or, how about this angle?
There is an inherent inequality in a "free trade" system where one nation is heavily regulated, and the other is not. The only way to make it "fair", then, is to impose the same regulations worldwide. Hey, presto! World socialism.