>> The Saudis just recently crashed the price of crude oil with the goal of putting American frackers out of business. The attempt failed but only after it almost destroyed the emerging American fracking industry and forced many frackers into bankruptcy <<
It was a foolish Saudi policy, and it failed. So the classic principles of economics win again.
>> perhaps the days of predatory trade practices are not as remote as you seem to suggest <<
Oh, there will always be fools around the world — fools who will believe that “predatory pricing” is a good strategy. But whatever gains they might make will be temporary at best.
>> It is impossible for American companies to compete with Chinese manufacturing companies intentionally structured and chartered to sell products at a loss <<
To the extent that they are doing such, they are hurting themselves, while they are helping the customers who buy the output of the companies you mention.
But in terms of our “trade deficit” with China, it doesn’t necessarily matter. Even if China followed strict free-market policies, with a rational tax system, they’d still produce a gazillion items that we’d want to buy from them rather than from domestic producers. It’s called “compartive advantage.” No theorem in all of economics — or indeed of all social science — has been more rigously analyzed in terms of pure logic, nor has any such theorem been more thouroughly tested with empirical, real-world data.
Anyway, if you don’t understand the principles and logic of comparative advantage, it’s not my job to teach you. But I think you’d benefit from reviewing your textbook from Economics 201-202, plus a rereading of the works of Adam Smith, David Ricardo and Thomas Sowell.
>> While basic and fundamental economic principles have not changed, the parameters and calculus of the economic analysis has changed radically due to the huge and rapid economic transformations we have seen in the world economy <<
Nice words. Pat Buchanan could not have phrased this erroneous declaration more eloquently.
But I’ll take my economics lessons from the likes of Alfred Marshall, Milton Friedman, Tom Sowell and Walter Williams, rather than from Friedric Engles, Ross Perot, the DNC and the AFL-CIO
Echoing what Hawthorn is saying, economic laws of supply and demand, like the laws of gravity, do not change because our politics, or technology, or “what we believe” changes. Certain unchangeable laws remain regardless of what people might choose to believe.
Unfortunately, to the degree economies come under the iron hand of globalist politics and banking, to that degree the world will suffer greatly from these world organizations who, like the socialists and communists, continually ignore and violate basic economic reality, leading to shortages and starvation - all needlessly.
A sovereign nation, like the U.S. does not have to knuckle under political globalist insanity (make sure you distinguish the voluntary cooperation of the free market and free trade which creates wealth from political globalism which creates poverty). To the degree the U.S. economy remains free from government intervention and meddling, to that degree, America will thrive even when the world goes dark under political globalism.