Free Republic

SNIPPET: "The navy will operate under the assumption that groups of provocateurs are aboard any future ships that try to break the Israel-imposed sea blockade on the Gaza Strip, Deputy Commander of the Navy Rear-Admiral Rani Ben-Yehuda told The Jerusalem Post on Monday."

The persistence of the U.S. trade deficit has led economists and politicians alike to revise some old beggar-thy-neighbor policies. One such update is that fixed-exchange-rate countries are unfair. Fixed exchange rates, it is being argued, are protectionist. But this is an old-school mercantilist view, even though it’s sadly bipartisan — both Senator Kerry and at least Treasury Secretary Snow share this view. The new mercantilists are also concerned with our dependency on foreign financing, and worry that foreign-debt holders could someday blackmail U.S. policy makers. The Wall Street Journal’s Greg Ip recently characterized this sentiment: “There is surely something...

Foreign outsourcing, or offshoring, is being blamed for job losses in the information technology (IT) sector. Announcements of jobs being moved to India and other low-wage countries have provoked criticism of "Benedict Arnold" CEOs and calls for governmental restrictions on the practice of outsourcing. But critics who scapegoat outsourcing are ignoring the realities of today's IT labor market. Contrary to the popular perception, foreign outsourcing is not to blame for the deep recession that struck the information technology industry beginning in early 2000. The IT recession began in March of that year when the dot.com and telecom bubbles burst, and...

Clarifications on the Case for Free Trade by Paul Craig Roberts [Posted January 10, 2004] Free trade has necessary conditions. Today these conditions are not met. This point has escaped Joe Salerno and George Reisman (both writing on Mises.org), as it has a vast number of other people. The case for free trade is based on David Ricardo’s principle of comparative advantage. Ricardo addressed the question how trade could take place between country A and country B (England and Portugal in his example) if country B was more efficient in the production of tradable goods (cloth and wine in his example) than...

The consequences of China's growth. THAT CHINA'S NATIONAL PEOPLE'S CONGRESS convened last week is not news, though it provided the occasion for prime minister Wen Jiabao's first address to the rubber-stamping body, a 90-minute affair which, quite predictably, was well received. That China released two dissidents, Wang Youcai and Phuntsog Nyidron, may be news, if it portends a greater sensitivity to pressure from international human rights advocates and even a slight loosening of the regime's grip on the political system. That Wen announced China will address the economic imbalances that threaten to turn its phenomenal growth into an equally phenomenal...

The Dallas Fed has an active economic education program, focusing on high school teachers of economics. Whenever I address a group of teachers, I invariably find myself extolling the virtues of Frédéric Bastiat as the greatest economic educator of all time. I tell them that if Bastiat isn't their patron saint, he should be. To increase familiarity with Bastiat, I asked my colleague, Bob Formaini, to write this short primer. — Bob McTeer President and Chief Executive Officer Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas Frédéric Bastiat: World-Class Economic EducatorCurrent policy debates are, with few exceptions, echoes of past intellectual disagreements....

At first glance, current macroeconomic indicators seem to support the suspicion that outsourcing is destroying jobs in the United States. The past two years have witnessed moderate growth and astonishing productivity gains, but overall job growth has been anemic. The total number of manufacturing jobs has declined for 43 consecutive months. Surely, many observers insist, this must be because the jobs created by the U.S. recovery are going to other countries. Morgan Stanley analyst Stephen Roach, for example, has pointed out that "this is the first business cycle since the advent of the Internet -- the enabler of a new...

Free Trade vs. Protectionism Economists of all schools recognize the value of free trade:  greater overall production.  This greater production is due to the freedom of each producer to specialize in that line where he or she has a natural advantage.  The natural advantage of each trading partner results from the differences among people and locations.  A major reason the U.S. economy is as productive as it is, is that there is a large geographic area of free trade (the U. S. Constitution wisely prohibits protectionist tariffs and quotas among the various states).Adam Smith enunciated the principle that it is...

When a presidential election year coincides with an uncertain economy, campaigning politicians invariably invoke an international economic issue as a dire threat to the well-being of Americans. Speechwriters denounce the chosen scapegoat, the media provides blanket coverage of the alleged threat, and legislators scurry to introduce supposed remedies. The cause of this year's commotion is offshore outsourcing -- the alleged migration of American jobs overseas. The depth of alarm was strikingly illustrated by the firestorm of reaction to recent testimony by N. Gregory Mankiw, the head of President George W. Bush's Council of Economic Advisers. No economist really disputed Mankiw's...

See also http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1094371/posts - why Free Trade is Good and http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1094309/posts Free Market, Outsourcing, Socialism flaws The fact that trade protection hurts the economy of the country that imposes it is one of the oldest but still most startling insights economics has to offer. The idea dates back to the origin of economic science itself. Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations, which gave birth to economics, already contained the argument for free trade: by specializing in production instead of producing everything, each nation would profit from free trade. In international economics it is the direct counterpart to the proposition that...

See also http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1094309/posts for Free Market, Outsourcing, and the shortcomings of Socialism .......................................... For more than two centuries, economists have steadfastly promoted free trade among nations as the best trade policy. Despite this intellectual barrage, many practical men and women of affairs continue to view the case for free trade skeptically, as an abstract argument made by ivory-tower economists with, at most, one foot on terra firma. Such people "know" that our vital industries must be protected from foreign competition. The divergence between economists' beliefs and those of (even well-educated) men and women on the street seems to arise in...

US to Promote Active, Comprehensive Trade Agenda in 2004 United States Trade Representative (Washington, DC) PRESS RELEASE March 2, 2004 Posted to the web March 2, 2004 Washington, DC Seeks competition for liberalization, U.S. trade representative says The Bush administration will continue in 2004 to build on its trade accomplishments by promoting an "active and comprehensive" trade liberalization agenda, the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) says. By pursuing multiple free trade initiatives, the United States is creating a "competition for liberalization" that provides leverage for greater openness in all negotiations, establishes models that can be used more broadly and gives free...

Great Britain As the Dutch were removing medieval restrictions on trade in the 16th century, England was beginning to open its market as well. In the early part of the century, usury laws were no longer enforced, restrictions on the export of unfinished cloth were relaxed, and certain differential duties were abolished. Enforcement of remaining trade restrictions was also generally reduced. The result, according to historian F. J. Fischer, was "one of the great free trade periods in modern English history."14 Unfortunately, the initial era of free trade was short-lived. By the latter half of the 16th century trade restrictions...

Concern surrounding the need to address the issue of disparities and to turn trade into a tool for furthering development is not exclusive to the FTAA. Such concern can in fact be found in other realms, since the widespread economic opening processes have failed to automatically bring about the conditions needed to overcome the problems of backwardness, inequality, and poverty that beset so many countries around the world. At the multilateral level, both the United Nations System of Organizations and the World Trade Organization (WTO) have shown a growing interest in tackling the issue. As far as the United Nations...

<p>Trade is a "moral issue," declares Senator John Edwards. The Democratic Presidential candidate is in high dudgeon that "bad trade agreements," by which he means those signed by Bill Clinton, are stealing jobs away from American workers.</p> <p>It should be no surprise by now that his main competitor, Senator John Kerry, has responded by saying, "Me too." Just as Mr. Kerry parroted the rhetoric of Howard Dean on Iraq, the man who voted for Nafta now claims there is no difference between him and Mr. Edwards on trade. This scion of a Boston Brahmin family that made its fortune from the China trade is now accusing "Benedict Arnold companies and CEOs" of exporting American jobs.</p>

FOR most politicians - Democratic or Republican - the issue of outsourcing jobs to faraway countries is a no-brainer: It's bad for the United States economy and it's even worse for their careers, especially in an election year when the work force has just lost more than two million jobs. So it is unsurprising that politicians of both parties ripped into N. Gregory Mankiw, chairman of the president's Council of Economic Advisers, when his annual economic report on Tuesday made precisely the opposite point: that if services like software programming can be done more cheaply in India, it makes sense...

An unfortunate consequence of learning Bastiat's "Broken Window Fallacy" is the accompanying frustration of seeing this age old economic fallacy reappear ad nauseam. One of the latest, and indeed most vocal rock throwers, is the United States manufacturing sector. Those with even a cursory knowledge of current affairs should be able to recite the recent plight of the manufacturers: Since January of 2001, 2.7 million "well paying manufacturing jobs" have been lost. Free trade with global competitors is putting American manufacturers at a competitive disadvantage. If manufacturing continues to be exported to "third-world countries," America will place itself in grave...

Controversial writer Johan Norberg champions globalization as the best hope for the developing world. If there is any moral certainty underpinning today’s anti-globalization movement, it’s that desperate actions -- from sometimes violent street demonstrations to public crop burnings to dressing up as giant sea turtles -- are needed to protect the traditions, forests, and human rights of the Third World against the rapacious greed of the First. The anti-globo left has little doubt that anyone who favors international free trade, open markets, and the cultural mongrelization they foster must be a greedy corporate bastard hellbent on plundering the world’s poor...

NewsMax.com One Reporter's Opinion : ... and NAFTA-wards? George Putnam Friday, Dec. 12, 2003 It is this reporter's opinion that we should have listened to Sir James Goldsmith, former member of the British Parliament and internationally recognized economist, when he warned us of the North American Free Trade Agreement, better known as NAFTA, and the New World Order. Sir James, speaking before our own Senate Commerce Committee hearings on Nov. 15, 1994, stated that NAFTA, GATT and the New World Order were "the most destructive proposal presented to the American people." He based his statement on the experience of Europe:...

For education and discussion only. Not for commercial use. WASHINGTON (AP) - Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan has challenged the "conventional wisdom" that China's manipulation of its currency provides a huge advantage against U.S. companies that has cost thousands of American jobs. "The story on trade and jobs, in my judgment, is a bit more complex, especially with respect to China, than this strain of conventional wisdom would lead one to believe," Greenspan said in remarks prepared for the World Affairs Council of Greater Dallas. America's besieged manufacturing sector, which has suffered 40 straight months of jobs losses, has been...