That’s the same thing. And when your neighboring countries aren’t playing that game, you punish your citizens with a higher cost of living.
A strong manufacturing base doesn’t do any good if you can’t export because your prices are too high.
It’s a world economy. You can choose to participate in it and possibly prosper (not a guarantee) or build a wall around your country and stagnate.
Big deal. Since when is it a leading goal of government to reduce the cost of living at the expense of any other policy priority?
Let’s just think of things that increase the cost of living: clean drinking water laws, child labor laws, public educational sytems, and national defense, among many, many other things. I think the overwhelming number of people in the US wouldn’t complain one whit (except for libertarians, of course) that their consumption costs a little bit more because their urge to buy things is being balanced with other worthy goals.
So, it isn’t punishment for people to pay a little more for stuff in order to do good. To not do that would be unconscionable.
This has been a common refrain amongst progressives for over 100 years. I would like to hear the evidence for such a statement. Even among staunch free traders an assumed necessity for anti trust legislation is present.
Only in a really tiny country like Monaco or Grenada. If you are Denmark you have a population to consume your own goods. Goods will cost more, but the nation benefits.
There is plenty of rhetoric about how there’s only the choice between free trade and isolationism but that’s just not so. Trade policy can be used as a scalpel and not just a hack saw. We can trade freely with other advanced nations with environmental and occupational regulations and the like while imposing tariffs elsewhere to eliminate the incentive to take advantage of unregulated production.
Not true at all; more than once (including on this board) I’ve been told that monopolies and other forms of coercive capitalism only exist because of government regulations, and that all government regulations should be removed. The Free Market will (somehow) solve all problems.
But are you punishing your people by not letting them by iPads, and cellphones made in China. Of course not, those things didn’t exist or were barely used 10 years ago. A lot of the goods are luxury goods. Sure there are some goods that are made in China that are useful to poorer people but a lot is cheap junk no one needs anyway.
I’m against free trade because it’s a sucker’s play in a world where your trading partners can adopt mercantilist economic policies that steal away any gains you might have made with free trade.
In America, a bunch of influential plutocrats realized that they could increase their profits if they could more easily tap into foreign labor markets. They got a bunch of economists to speak on their behalf because the tidy little models of the economists showed how efficient things would be if trade barriers were eliminated. Countries like China just smiled and went along with it, knowing that their rock-bottom labor costs would give them a huge advantage, and that once they had the business they could stop observing the disadvantageous rules that the economists said needed to be in place for the whole thing to work. So the NYT can run an article about Apple with commentators wagging their fingers at America because the Chinese manufacturer was able to build a specialized plant just for Apple before they even had a contract, while completely failing to mention the obvious Chinese government subsidies that made that possible.
And just to be clear, I’m not angry at China. China saw all this as a way to act in its national self interest. People in America and Europe have to demonstrate in the streets to get their governments to act in their economic interests.
Ok maybe you could provide an example where monopolies were, at the same time, harmful and not aided by government.
That’s a trick question. A business can’t even exist without a government. Since there’s no businesses that exist without government, any example I’ll bring up you’ll point out the existence of government and use that to claim that any problems are all the fault of the government. Standard libertarian rhetorical trick; they demand impossible conditions be met before they’ll admit that government is not the problem.
Don’t forget, Der Trihs, that some monopolies granted by government can be perfectly acceptable to various free marketeers, too, like copyright and patent monopolies. So even when the government “interferes” there, it’s just doing its job, making the burden not just impossible, but doubly impossible.
Unfortunately there are trade offs in life. Fewer pollution controls lead to more jobs but more pollution. As the Wester countries have gotten richer we have changed our values so that we think fewer jobs is an acceptable trade off for less pollution. In China they have 500 million people living on less than 2 dollars a day. If they think they need jobs more than a clean environment, what qualifies you to say that they are wrong and those 500 million people living in grinding poverty need to suck it up and take one for the team?
So you’re not even going to try? I’m sure you have all kinds of hatred for monopolies. Let’s hear an example of one their abuses.
This is the most reasonable, effective and all around best thing the US could do, for the benefit of both China/the developing world and the US. In economic terms it makes perfect sense.
Of course it will never fly because it looks like we’re giving OUR SHIT to THOSE FUCKERS.
Internet Explorer.
(Sorry I had to scare everyone like that, but when push comes to shove, damn straight I’m going to throw down.)
I’m posting this using Firefox.
Some monopoly.
The antitrust suit fell apart 10 years ago and Explorer is still a piece of crap. It’s the insult that keeps giving… to fewer and fewer people.
This simply means America completes its transition from an industrial economy to a postindustrial economy faster.Yes it hurts in many areas but the future jobs will on the whole be better paying and far more white-collar.And the Chinese people benefits from tremendous industrialization-while the sweatshops are often bad by our standards they are far better than jobs before as John Mace pointed out. I’m amused as I’ve said before that protectionism the hallmarks of ultra-conservative Republicans like Robert Taft as opposed to the free-trade advocates like Keynes and Cordell Hull (FDR’s Secretary of State) is now a hallmark of the left due to the guild-like tribalism of many unions.
Monopolies in the real world are seldom total.
Hardly; what’s actually been happening is people are losing better paying jobs and being forced to take worse ones to survive. Worse paying, worse condition, worse treatment.
And far fewer. But that’s just great for the top 25% or whatever. The rest can try to scrape by by selling them haircuts I guess. Yes, let us rush into this brave new world!
Good thing they have such an equitable society. I’d hate to think a few at the top had their fingers in everyone’s rice bowl. Sing the praises of Communism, Comrade!
It couldn’t be that circumstances have changed over the decades and people on the left actually have paid attention to how free trade has degraded the middle class. Wait, by “tribalism” did you mean actually caring what happens to your fellows?
In this case it’s not even close.
But since we’re on that subject, how on earth does free trade result in monopolies? Is everyone forgetting that the “robber baron” archetype was created a hell of a long time before free trade deals?
Big companies LOVE trade barriers. Free trade agreements have as many opponents among the big companies as they do proponents, because trade barriers create business conditions that some big companies will evolve to exploit. The lowering of trade barriers often means a company will have to face competition they never did before. I’m sure the Big Three would just love to have had more time to not compete with Toyota, Honda and Nissan, so they could have continued foisting shitty cars onto the U.S. market.