That’s kind of sad, John, and beneath you. If you are that blinkered of a free marketeer, there’s really no point in discussing it further, is there? Any argument against absolutely unrestricted free trade you think of as having no economic validity at all.
Better unemployment benefits isn’t managing the transition. I’d rather subsidize an industry’s retooling.
No, I am not suggesting we withdraw from the WTO. I’m suggesting we put a short term tariff on those incoming goods. By the time they finish wrangling over the violation, the tariff gets lifted and we get our wrists slapped, and the WTO gets to talk about how it made the US comply. 
Nope. I am under no illusion that any boss has paid me more than the minimum—more than the minimum it would get for me to stay. Or to be happy and not be looking for another job. In what world is this not true for everyone?
“The literature analysing the economics of free trade is extremely rich with extensive work having been done on the theoretical and empirical effects. Though it creates winners and losers, the broad consensus among members of the economics profession in the U.S. is that free trade is a large and unambiguous net gain for society.”
Emphasis added.
I’ve quoted that from the wikipedia page on free trade a number of times here. It is sourced, although you have to sign up to be able to view it. Now, if you don’t like the comparison to ID, then I’ll happily offer you climate change denial as an alternative.
So what, Joe’s fifteen years of experience in widget assembly are somehow NOT an investment of his time and energy that’s he’s chosen to make available to your business proposition? When a lot of guys like you talk, it seems like you don’t think anything BUT the money is important, and there’s the persistent apparent belief that factory jobs are “easy” and that physical labor is worth less than intellectual labor, even precision physical labor.
Again, I hold up my current workplace as an ideal. We have an employee stock ownership plan. I voluntarily contribute over and above the default to it, because I agree with our owners (I’m technically “management”, as my job title has “Director” in front of it) that the company’s best interests lie in making the employees part of a team with management. The gap between what the owners make and the highest paid employees is literally less than 10%. Profits are shared out among all the employees as bonuses rather than kept by the owners. As a result and in exchange, we have had under ten employees quit the job in the company’s fifteen year history (even in the face of pay cuts to survive the recession), and we’ve muscled our way to be a respected player in a field where there are several companies 2-3 orders of magnitude larger than us trying to keep us out.
Adversarial relationships between management and workers are, in my experience, unproductive. If you treat your workers right they won’t bother to unionize. If you manage with open books and give bonuses in flush times, they’ll take pay cuts in rough times. If you encourage employee stock ownership, they’ll join you in investing capital and stick with your business even when a superficially better offer comes up.
But I mean, whatever. You go on union busting and paying “as little as you can get away with”. If you’re in one specific scientific field, your lunch will belong to my employer in the next ten years, I guarantee it. 
Over what frame of time? And what society? It may be a net benefit over the long haul for world productivity, but at the same time cost the US because the benefits all go to developing countries and our standard of living drops.
I am sure everybody in this thread knows there is a law against using union dues of public employees in political campaigns. They have to get donations from them.
The time frame is irrelevant, the “society” is the US, and even if it were a good thing to do (which it isn’t) no government is nimble enough to micromanage trade at the level you are suggesting. That’s just nonsense.
If you have a cite that there is a consensus among Economists on that point, bring it. This is something that there simply isn’t significant disagreement among people who actually study this for a living.
Creationists and climate change deniers are routinely scoffed at on this MB. There is no significant difference between that and the ignorance shown by protectionists when it comes to free trade.
Ah, so you’re all for the best bang for the long term, even if the short term cost is substantial. No compromise between the two.
If you’re going to make statements like the above, I’d appreciate cites that show some backup that in the specific case of the US and in a term short enough so that it isn’t pie in the sky theory.
From the wiki entry on free trade:
“Free trade creates winners and losers, but theory and empirical evidence show that the size of the winnings from free trade are larger than the losses.”
In the context of the real world, you need to show me that given the realities of countries managing their economies for competitive purpose and incomplete compliance with free trade for the same reasons, that the US would net benefit in a reasonable amount of time from it.
You haven’t made your case and your language is changing to assertions based on theory. In order to make it, you have to show specifically that the US would be in the “winners” side. Cheaper widgets doesn’t do me a lot of good if I’m making less money. It just lets me tread water.
Do you know what the term “empirical evidence” means?
Bull again. India and China protect their workers. When India started taking our engineering jobs ,I checked out working there. They informed me .I could not take an Indian workers job. If I came with a startup company that was going to hire Indians I was welcome.
The people we compete with are ass deep in protectionism against American products. The Japanese protected their auto industry from the Americans by adding on a huge tariff. The Indians and Chinese prevent us from competing on an even basis there.
Free Trade is a mantra that is mouthed by corporate shills who are making huge profits off it. It does not exist outside the US. It is time we thought of American workers.
That’s what I’ve been trying to convince you of in all those immigration threads. Sounds like something finally sank in. 
I’m in agreement with the facts unlike some liberals, however I do understand that we are not still like other nations regarding the levels of safety nets to continue in a path that will justify that net benefit.
First, some items like unemployment will need to be expanded to not have time limits if a job was lost thanks to free trade.
Second, it was yesterday that we needed universal health care and not have it dependent on one having a job.
Third, we have to consider making secondary education more affordable for the people affected.
IMHO we are becoming like other developed nations with similar levels of unemployment due to the constant changes in the job market; yes, overall the effects are not as bad compared to the benefits one gets from free trade, but for the ones affected there is very little to show in the way on dealing with the bad effects of free trade.
As I see the current crop of Republicans demonizing every proponent of those ideas, I understand where liberals that attempt to minimize the good effects of free trade are coming from: from the fact that many, if not all, Republicans are also active in stopping any expansions on welfare, health care and education.
Heh gonz and GIGO might have a counterpoint there, then: if we want the American worker to believe we have their best interests at heart when we limit immigration, we have to offer them enough government services and high enough wages that protecting them is actually worthwhile.
I know very well what empirical evidence means.
The real trick is deciding what conclusions the empirical evidence supports. I grant that in some big picture sense over some indefinite length of time, free trade, when fully implemented, will be better for everyone.
The devil is in the details.
Just keep immigration to a point where it doesn’t cause an over-supply of workers, and the rest will take care of itself. Particularly if you keep out illegals, who drive down wages. A particular job is worth $X. An over-supply of workers drives down X to some artificial value. When there isn’t an oversupply, workers have more power. They can demand higher wages.
Even business should support that idea. I don’t have a cite, but my recollection is that embedded into the cost of each GM car sold was/is hundreds of dollars of health care costs. It would be far better for competing internationally if the cost of health care was removed from the cost of goods (like it is for most industrialized nations) to make our products more cost-competitive.
The problem is that businesses like their employees tied to them via the healthcare umbilical cord.
Which is one of the ways they deliberately circumvent the libertarians’ vaunted “just go get another job then” retort.
Our unemployment system does need a major overhaul - it was set up to deal with minor recessions and frictional unemployment when an occasional firm went bankrupt and left the workers on the outs. Not wholesale structural unemployment for when the entire economy shifts sectors like ours did from manufacturing to service, nor jobless recoveries that are becoming the norm rather than the exception.
A Kurzarbeit policy would reduce partial layoffs, and for those who are laid off should be given the opportunity to enter retraining programs using either grants or zero-interest loans.
Agree completely with universal health care. At the least, the unemployed should have the opportunity to partake in Medicaid which could offer a very basic health plan with premiums deducted from their payments.
Free trade requires a strong social net to support it. The faster the economy will go through shifts and develop new technologies, the more support individuals need to keep up, especially if prevailing wages are only enough to survive on and do not allow personal investments in education.
Free tertiary education is also becoming prevalent. Those countries which have done so are seeing the payoff of that investment and will be far more competitive than those countries which do not.
And yet you complained about that quote I gave because it was just theory.
The devil is in trying to game the system by “managing” it. When economists start telling us to implement protectionist measures, I’ll be right there with you. But now, the overwhelming consensus is that we shouldn’t do that.
When biologists tell me how evolution works, I listen. When climate scientists tell me how climate change is happening, I listen. And when economists tell me how free trade works, I listen to them, too. You can choose to ignore them, but you can’t ignore the way the world actually works.