Posted on 03/26/2016 12:17:19 PM PDT by iowamark
The FedEx founder and CEO reflects on how deregulation and opening markets have wrought astonishing changes and prosperity over 50 years.
During our years at Yale, the world was a different place. Foreign travel was exotic, expensive and rare among the population as a whole. While some young Americans had been abroad, by far most Americans had not—and those who did go abroad most likely traveled by sea rather than air. In the early 1960s, flying over the oceans was mainly for the affluent.
Long-distance telephone calls were expensive, international calls prohibitively so. From furniture to TVs and appliances, and especially automobiles, American brands dominated consumer spending in this country. We had just a glimpse of the world to come with the proliferating iconic Volkswagen Beetles and the amazingly small Sony portable transistor radios.
These imported products in the U.S. represented a global political vision that pre-dated World War II. In the early 1930s, President Roosevelt and Secretary of State Cordell Hull believed in liberalized trade as a path to world peace and cooperation. With strong administration support, Congress in 1934 passed the Trade Agreement Act, which allowed Hull to negotiate reciprocal trade treaties with numerous countries, lowering tariffs and stimulating trade...
History shows that trade made easy, affordable and fast—political obstacles notwithstanding—always begets more trade, more jobs, more prosperity. From clipper ships to the computer age, despite economic cycles, conflict and shifting demographics, humans have demonstrated an innate desire to travel and trade. Given this, the future is unlikely to diverge from the arc of the past.
(Excerpt) Read more at wsj.com ...
Ah, there was no Republican like FDR!
Seriously, our country grew and expanded the most when the majority of the federal government was funded by tariffs.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tariffs_in_United_States_history
All of that “regulation” he says needed to be removed was put there starting in the 1920-30s.
And we still rode horses.
The world still rode horses and trains. Planes and cars came before tariffs were largely removed. So did radios.
So?
We had just a glimpse of the world to come with the proliferating iconic Volkswagen Beetles and the amazingly small Sony portable transistor radios …Danke und/soshite Arigatou. No mention of American-made equivalents to those.
(I)n general, the protective system of our day is conservative, while the free trade system is destructive. It breaks up old nationalities and pushes the antagonism of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie to the extreme point. In a word, the free trade system hastens the social revolution. It is in this revolutionary sense alone, gentlemen, that I vote in favor of free trade.Lessons of history are no use if learned too late.
— Karl Marx
Permit free trade between all nations regardless of Communist affiliation and regardless of whether or not items could be used for war.
— Communist Goal No. 4 for the USA
All we had to do to get all those riches was to give up Jesus in public places.
Good trade?
Don’t worry, maybe a protectionist will chance by this thread and argue that free trade leads to social revolution, as Marx argued.
But those days are gone.
Driving down American wages to Vietnam or Pakistan levels isn’t going to make American Great.
No matter how much ink the Wall Street Journal & others of their ilk uses.
What is corporatism?
...socialism for the bourgeois. It has the outward form of capitalism in that it preserves private ownership and private management, but with a crucial difference: as under socialism, government guarantees the flow of material goods, which under true capitalism it does not.
In classical capitalism, what has been called the “night-watchman” state, government’s role in the economy is simply to prevent force or fraud from disrupting the autonomous operation of the free market. The market is trusted to provide.
Under corporatism, it is not, instead being systematically manipulated to deliver goods to political constituencies. This now includes basically everyone from the economic elite to ordinary consumers.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1036236/posts
Another out of touch elitist about to get Trumped.
It’s bad enough that Marx created the false dilemma thereof. Then again, he created other false dilemmas, such as since the family experiences problems, then instead of solving the problems, get rid of the family. And so on.
I have no problems with trade. I have problems with regulations.
As I see it, a tax is a penalty. Don’t you? Penalties depress that activity.
To be fair, society believes some level of penalty is needed to fund government.
Why depress income? It seems to make more sense to depress foreign products and incentivize our country’s businesses and inventors. Products they sell or make will still be sold elsewhere, as we will still import from elsewhere and still produce many things in China.
By outsourcing so much, we’ve lost critical knowledge and skills that are no longer needed, as our citizens didn’t get jobs doing engineering work in China or India—we helped pay for their citizens to get educated, instead. This is not necessarily unfair, but it creates a hole, here. We have to count on those engineers to retrain themselves as a service sector employee (which is where an amazing number of educated people now work).
For years, twice the number of STEM students graduate as can find jobs. I’m cool with that, but if we reduced our regulations and taxes and shifted some tax to dis-incentivizing imports, we would very likely see our neighbors become rather more gainfully employed.
I believe most of the years tariffs were in place, it maxed out at 20%. I would be similarly fine if other countries did the same with our products. This would curb such huge amounts of offshoring to China, but still allow us to benefit from cheap Chinese goods and have those goods fund our government, while US goods would fund it less.
We used to be like CHINA, now china is how we used to be (in regards to trade).
If we reduces internal regulations and relaxed internal taxes on corporations we too could become a net EXPORTER and be great again...
What you will find there is Bernie's nearly universal agreement with the majority of opinions expressed here on FR on the subject of Trade Policy. That's amazing to me but just read some of it and you will see that most of you will agree with what good old Bernie is telling us. And this is not Broken Clock Agreement. This is near Universal Agreement.
But not me. I'm for Free Trade. Me, Milton Friedman and few other Freepers who, unlike Bernie Sanders, actually know what they are talking about.
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