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Posted on 04/03/2004 11:51:50 AM PST by Willie Green
For education and discussion only. Not for commercial use.
They are calling it “the jobs issue.” For 43 straight months, manufacturing jobs have disappeared. One in six has vanished since Bush took his oath. Now Americans are alarmed over reports of the outsourcing of white-collar jobs. It is an issue on which the presidential election could turn.
And what has been the response of the candidates? Kerry is denouncing executives who move plants overseas as “Benedict Arnold CEOs,” and Bush is echoing his father´s rants against “isolationism and protectionism.”
“Some politicians in Washington want to build a wall around the country and to isolate America from the rest of the world,” said Bush in Ohio. “The old policy of economic isolationism is a recipe for economic disaster. America has moved beyond that tired defeatist mindset ...”
Both candidates and both parties seem clueless about what is going on and what to do about it. For Bush Republicans and Kerry Democrats both backed NAFTA, GATT, the WTO, and MFN for China.
There is this difference, however. Republicans are principled free traders, while the Democratic Party, as a wag put it a while ago, is simply a gathering of warring tribes that have come together in the anticipation of common plunder.
Democrats worship power. They will do what they must to get it. Thus they have begun to drop the free-trade mantra and play to the populism of the people. And they have tapped into the public mood. USA Today cites a University of Maryland poll that reveals that, “among Americans making more than $100,000 a year, support for actively promoting free trade collapsed from 57 percent to less than half that, 28 percent.” This is the first time this has happened.
If President Bush is going to spend eight months as a traveling salesman for free trade and a crusader against “protectionism,” as his father did, he is inviting the same result his father got.
An opportunist is to be preferred to an ideologue who will not entertain the idea he may be wrong and that the philosophy in which he was schooled and devoutly believes may be irrelevant to the new era. Like companies that continue to make products no one wants to buy anymore, parties that persist in policies that are visibly failing—like LBJ in Vietnam—end up being abandoned.
If the GOP persists in this free-trade fanaticism, it is courting suicide. For the policy is not working in the eyes of the people. And if Republicans insist the returns from global free trade—a disintegrating dollar and a merchandise trade deficit of $550 billion a year and rising—are good for America, folks are going to conclude that Republicans are too out of it to govern.
Given that the GOP today controls both Houses of Congress and the White House, this may sound alarmist. Yet GOP dominance today does not approach what it was in the 1920s under Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover, before the wipeout.
If the GOP does not offer ideas to halt the de-industrialization of America and the hemorrhaging of blue- and white-collar jobs, it is going to wind up on a landfill.
The problem with the columnists and think-tank scribblers who make up the intelligentsia of the GOP is not that they believe in free markets but that they worship them. They believe that if NAFTA, GATT, the WTO, and MFN for China mean production goes overseas, the market is telling us where production ought to be. And the voice of the market is to be obeyed, because that is the voice of their god.
When Reagan, a devout free trader, saw the U.S. auto industry sinking, he did not let ideology interfere with a rescue. He imposed quotas on imported Japanese cars and saved Detroit, though he was denounced for apostasy and heresy.
Free-trade Republicans are like militant Christian Scientists who prefer to let patients die rather than call in a doctor—which is fine, as long as you´re not the patient.
Americans believe that the interests of U.S. workers and their families come ahead of what may be good or best for the Global Economy. For years they have seen industrial jobs disappear. Now white-collar jobs are being outsourced. They want to know what Bush and the Republicans are going to do about it.
If the president´s answer is to echo his father and denounce opponents as “isolationists and protectionists,” he risks ending up like his father, a one-term president.
Indeed, if the issue is jobs, Republicans ought to be thrown out. For not only are they not creating them, they have no idea how to stop exporting them. In their hearts, some of them think it a good thing. They are like the doctors of old who sincerely believed bleeding the patient was the way to get rid of the disease because that is what their textbooks and wise men told them.
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For you individually? Any solution for you may indeed be tough. There are certainly losers in the creative destruction fueled by free trade.
But the alternative is far worse. Shutting down free trade means fewer jobs created in new industries, higher prices for the goods we buy, lower growth so that we all suffer from stagnant economies...
Are you asking for the whole country to pay the price for your misfortune? That's not an attitude I associate with Americans. That sounds very European, and in fact, they have all the symptoms I just described above. Yeah, their existing jobs are protected all right. At a cost of an economy that is danger of meltdown.
Same story with Japan. They had all kinds of rules protecting domestic industries, and ran a huge trade surplus selling to America, et. al., through the 1970s and 1980s. They were the poster child for "managed trade". After three decades of such protectionism, their economy collapsed and still hasn't recovered.
So you have do better than anecdotes or sob stories to attack free trade. The absolute best predictor of the economic health of a society is how open its trading system is with the rest of the world.
I understand that this is hard to take when you're the one losing a job. But there's nothing that guarantees anyone a job doing a certain task at a certain rate of pay, and there never has been in a free country. If you have the blood of the American spirit in you, you face the adversity and overcome it with your own individual solution, instead of whining about it.
Right! How dare someone equate buying what I want from whomever I want to buy it to "freedom". Everyone knows what freedom is - the right to go to the polls and vote for one of two clowns to run our lives for the next four years.
I know it was foolish on his part, but he took it very personally. He loved Boeing, and was far more loyal to them than they were to him and his fellow loyal co-workers. Unfortunately the stress took its toll, and he had two strokes. He is now incapable of being retrained for anything. Of course we shouldn't worry about that. The main thing is the global economy and the fact that it's more important that Boeing make a profit and the execs get their obscene salaries thanks to the cheap Chinese labor. Right?
The corporations that export jobs,and create massive pollution want you to believe something wonderful is happening when we exchange skilled machinists' positions for janiorial and fast-food "opportunities"; and they bestow lavish rewards on any of the "conservative foundations" corrupt enough to slide their message-like a spoiled onion- into a "sandwich" of genuinely conservative and/or patriotic thought.
I've been conservative longer than most of you have been alive,and have learned to despise these "hitchhikers" .
It's tough to imagine that you could type that without bursting out in laughter.
Sarcasm is just lost on some people. So I guess I'll have to just have to say it in simple terms.
Any math student will tell you that it's useful to look at extreme cases to gain better understanding of the behavior of a system. The extreme anti-free-trade case is that every family (or individual) makes everything for themselves. That is obvious nonsense.
So at what point does it become unwise to limit trade? The level of a neighborhood? A community? A county? A state? A nation?
Well, the best evidence is "never", at least if your goal is economic growth and the most freedom for your citizens. Every time you step up a level in your trade, comparitive advantage kicks in to make both societies better off economically. There are no known long-term exceptions to this.
If instead your goal is to "protect" certain jobs and citizens at the expense of others, then, yep, you will be anti-free-trade. You will also be anti-freedom, in fact, since you must limit the freedom for certain citizens or residents to give your special favors to others.
Yes, but it is abundantly clear from your rant that you do not.
You mean the same Governor Locke who just gave Boeing a gift of seventeen BILLION so they could build a training center for new (foreign) workers (why else do they need a training center for a mere 1200 employees when they have thousands of former employees locally already trained but laid off? Also it's to build a new dock to unload parts coming in from all around the world?
Why did Governor Lock lie about the secret Boeing giveaway and Evergreen Freedom Foundation have to sue to get the details (and STILL hasn't gotten them all)?
I grant you that Locke is a disaster of a governor, but Boeing ceased to be the old Boeing that everyone knew and loved, when they merged with Rockwell and Stonecipher took over. He has systematically destroyed this once great company. It was he who systematically dismanteled Boeing and is outsourcing everything as fast as he can. Boeing will soon be an "assembly only" operation, assembling parts made in China, Russia, Italy, South Africa and God knows where.
Has this paid off for Stonecipher? Yes. His salary is obscene. Has it paid off for the stockholders? No. Our Boeing stock is still at less than I paid for it.
I directly attribute my husband's two strokes to his layoff. My husband always supported FAIR Trade, but never Free Trade. Free Trade is subsidizing America's demise.
Free-trade Republicans are like militant Christian Scientists who prefer to let patients die rather than call in a doctor—which is fine, as long as you´re not the patient.
And then this:
They are like the doctors of old who sincerely believed bleeding the patient was the way to get rid of the disease because that is what their textbooks and wise men told them.
Not really the way to make friends and influence people. Do ya think?
Sheesh.
5.56mm
When you reference the "collapse" of Japan, you seem to ignore two rather significant points: 1) Japan has a zillion or so in cash reserves--we beg them to buy Treasuries every week. and
2) Japan's economic somnabulence is directly related to the fact that the Japanese HAVE NO CHILDREN to speak of. There's only ONE activity over there right now: saving for retirement. There'll be no children to take care of Ma and Pa later.
But I suppose demographics aren't real important to Free Traders, because the worship of Capital occupies your minds.
Let's be fair . . . what's yours, a belief that the government should regulate the market?
This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.~ William Shakespeare, Hamlet, act I, scene iii
The problem with the columnists and think-tank scribblers who make up the intelligentsia of the GOP is not that they believe in free markets but that they worship them. They believe that if NAFTA, GATT, the WTO, and MFN for China mean production goes overseas, the market is telling us where production ought to be. And the voice of the market is to be obeyed, because that is the voice of their god.Rudyard J. Kipling, 1919:
As I pass through my incarnations in every age and race,
I Make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market-Place.
Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch.
They denied that the moon was Stilton, they denied she was even Dutch.
They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings.
So we worshipped the Gods of the Market who promised these beautiful things.[...]
In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peters to pay for collective Paul;
But though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said "If you don't work you die."Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew,
And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true,
That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four --
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man --
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began --
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt fool's bandaged finger goes wobbling back to the Fire;And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins,
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!
Has anyone ever actually gotten that retraining? And what were they retrained for?
I'm sure I'll get some hatemail from the "true believers",but while they are trashing me,perhaps they'd like to explain to to the nice lady how "free trade" ( Why don't we just call it Freebooting and be done with it ?) is going to put food on her table.
We do a lot of (usually well-deserved) trashing of Democrats around here, but sometimes a Democrat is a Republican who got laid off last week.
5.56mm
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