He does seem very, um, prolific on this board…so, its possible he already HAS done such a thread sometime in the distant past. Myself, I’m curious as to where the cite he’ll be giving us will come from. I have a few private bets you see…
-XT
Perhaps BG would listen to someone like Paul Krugman, who likens the distrust that some intellectuals have to the idea of free trade (Comparative Advantage) to the way creationists view evolution.
Brilliant! I must have missed this one somehow. I was howling through part of it, though the nurse was giving me odd looks. Thanks John.
-XT
I’m very much a free market type of guy, and clearly economists agree that free trade is best for the economy, and I believe they are correct.
However, the economy is not the only thing a government has to worry about when forming its policy. It’s certainly possible that there are industries that are strategic for the government to ensure are strong. Industries so strategic that we as a collective are willing to protect them at the expense of other industries and the economy as a whole. It’s also possible that a fledgling industry needs government protection in order to give it time to develop into a world class competitive industry. Allowing the free market to reign can cause these industries to fail before having a chance to succeed.
Linking back to the evolution analogy… If a species is on the brink of extinction, or even just poorly populated, entirely through natural selection, it’s not clear to me that we should simply allow nature to take its course. We have the ability to think. We can review the situation intelligently, decide if that species is important in some unique way. We can take action that benefits us, even if that action causes a different result than natural selection. It’s not like cows are what they are due to natural selection, but is anyone going to complain that Bos Taurus was unfairly sheltered from its natural predators, and we should quit treating them special, just let them live or die based on their individual survival skill?
Well, that’s pretty far outside the scope of what we were discussing, and I would add that you’d have to look at these on a case by case basis. And I’m not sure if there are whole “industries” that need to be protected even if there are certain government activities that we don’t want to outsource-- like the programing of our ICBMs.
Governments are notoriously bad at picking future technologies, and there is a good reason for that. Legislators aren’t spending their own money, and they’re subject to political pressure. Funny how the future new technology always seems to be right there in the Congressman’s district! 
At any rate, do you believe that even a majority of economists would agree with you on that? I’m not talking about a large majority, but just a simple majority.
You lost me. A government wasn’t involved in making the decision to domesticate the cow, was it? Sure we have our brains to figure out what the next big thing is going to be… and that’s what capital markets are for.
The NAFTA and CAFTA trade pacts were supposed to include worker and environmental rules. The jobs were exported the rules were not. It made it immediately impossible for American workers to compete. It did hugely increase profits and management salaries and bonuses.
As always we seek short term profits at long term costs. These pacts will transform the US into something quite different. I do not like the trend. There are huge forces ,immigration included, that are eroding the wages of working people in America. It has only started and will get ugly.
Canada’s doing just fine under NAFTA. Are you going to argue that our labour and environmental laws are weaker than yours?
Palast’s book is my cite, as the wording should have made clear enough. I linked to that thread only because I had taken the trouble to transcribe lengthy passages from the book into the OP.
I ran this one back in 2005. The focus is narrower.