Posted on 10/10/2016 4:05:47 AM PDT by expat_panama
For those who ever find themselves questioning the good of free trade, arguably the best cure for such a lapse of reason is a quick read of Henry Hazlitt’s Economics In One Lesson. In it Hazlitt wrote that “What is harmful or disastrous to an individual must be equally harmful or disastrous to the collection of individuals that make up a nation.”
Hazlitt’s powerful quote will cure Keynesians of just about everything they believe, including the horrid idea that war is good for the economy. As for conservatives who occasionally find themselves swimming in a protectionist direction, the Hazlitt quote is a cure-all. And it will perhaps save them from an op-ed similar to the one recently penned by Information Technology and Innovation Foundation president Robert Atkinson in National Review. In it he concluded that the merits of free trade are increasingly only known to ivory-tower based establishmentarians...
...Atkinson’s first error in an article filled with them was that he forgot that an economy is just a collection of people...
...industry critics’ claim that cutting prices wouldn’t affect R&D spending...
...At the end of the day, returns are determined by products’ future earnings, which depend crucially on price.
As a result, expectations around future prices drive investments for the same reason you would not put down $500,000 to build a house in a rapidly declining neighborhood if you hoped to sell your house for a profit one day. You have to be locked into your Ivory Tower without a key to believe that the venture capital and private equity firms who fund medical R&D do not care about future profitability in the same way. Because that’s pretty much all they care about, pricing drives R&D spending and not vice versa.
(Excerpt) Read more at forbes.com ...
What you said is so obvious but so few seem to understand this basic economic reality.
There is an aspect to “free trade” that I think is ignored. While borders “open to the flow of capital” is in ways a good thing the “little guy” gets trampled. Joe Six Pack can’t move his labor across borders overnight. Joe can’t pay his mortgage to a different bank each month. I hope you see what I am getting at here.
I don’t pretend to know what the answer is but I do know pretending a problem does not exist is what libtards do.
It does not take intelligence to understand a nation that has a GDP that is overwhelmingly service industry is as fragile as can be. A puff can shatter it.
Free trade among nations with equivalent laws and governmental structures may indeed be good for all, but “free” trade as instituted in the late 20th century is not innately “good” for all.
There is no such thing as free trade in the modern world. Our “free” trade agreements are negotiated and signed by politicians and executed by bureaucrats. I would love to have real free trade, but what the politicians, bureaucrats and media call free trade is anything but. It is trade controlled and manipulated for the benefit of Wall Street and the globalists masquerading as “free.”
The crux of the matter is defining “free.”. Our agreements are a joke, our negotiators incompetent or worse.
Thank you. THIS.
What these people keep bringing up is a straw man; and the straw man is a lie.
There’s a YUGE difference in being against free trade and being against getting screwed.
China’s deliberate devaluation on the Yuan is NOT free trade. Expecting the USA to take all your dumped items with prices lowered artificially with government aid while setting up hundreds of road blocks on American goods—or even outright restrictions—is NOT FREE TRADE!
Given that, you’d think these so-called Free Traders would be against those kinds of practices, no?
But not a peep for all these many years...
Forbes & Co. have had 30 years to sell that idea to the American public.
The verdict is in. NO SALE!!!
There is no Free Trade, anywhere, among any countries. What we have now are arrangements for corporations, not people.
Why does TSA want to know the amount of goods you brought back when traveling abroad, especially to a country that has a 'free trade' agreement with us? Corporations and all levels of government want their cut.
Posting articles from The Onion?
The problem is that cheap chinese products help us maintain our standard of living. if we get aggressive, all the stuff we buy will cost more. Having said all that, I agree something must be done to level the playing field. Is it to late?
The terminology confuses me.
What is the difference between free trade and fair trade?
Not when it gives up sovereignty—then it is not good. And that’s what these recent omnibus deals have been doing, with TPP and a potential Euro deal aiming to take that even further.
That's a political question. We don't use those buzz words in business, all we say is that import tax hikes take money away that we'd planned to use for hiring new workers.
We need to understand that if the president suddenly abrogates NAFTA then Canada/U.S. commerce takes a hit.
At some point another country or region of the globe will become the “new China”, and cheap stuff will get made there, instead.
The good side is, yes, cheap stuff is great for consumers—they don’t have to pay so much.
The bad side is what happens to the standard of living of a country that has/is bleeding jobs?
With a $20 TRILLION dollar debt (and rising), and a participatory rate of workers (re: TAXPAYERS) shrinking rapidly to historic levels, how can anyone who is jobless welcome a lifetime of government benefits when that very government is teetering on a financial debacle?
In other words, assistance would be gone in a serious government financial crisis. Just look at what happens when Congress and Obama feuded over the budget and created (him more than them) as government shutdown.
Cheap stuff bought elsewhere still has to be bought. If you have no job, no government assistance or help, then you have no money to buy cheap stuff.
About half the U.S. has had some college and the other half hasn't. The college half makes twice as much money as the other 50%. None of this matters much for politics as both candidates are pushing for more tariff 'protection'. From what I see import tax hikes will be a question for next year.
Unless you don’t make economic sense. Then it kind of sucks. But it’s gonna suck for those people one way or the other.
American import taxes or another nation's import taxes?
If another country, with a large, middle class makes a myriad of things we buy and let in without import taxes, while applying all kinds of import taxes (in any other name--hindering that import of American goods), then is that not also going to take money away from hiring US workers?
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