Why trade barriers are bad ideas - comparative advantage explained by J. Bradford DeLong, a liberal economics prof at Berkeley who knows his stuff:
j-bradford-delong.net
I can find you sources that prove it with mathematics, if you're interested.
The funny thing about intuition is how often it's wrong. I've been reading an article in New Yorker about SUVs that points out that you're actually far more likely to be injured in an accident in an SUV than a minivan, but that's not the way it "feels."
Similarly, if we buy cheap goods from China, it "feels" like we're losing American jobs overseas. Actually, a lot of those American workers are busy working overtime making those damned SUVs. The workers on the Ford Expedition floor make as much as $200K with overtime.
The poor millworkers in Appalachia are unemployed because they won't move to where the new jobs are and won't learn a new trade. I've learned two major trades in my life and four or five minor ones. Not to mention learning how to touch-type 60 wpm, email, fax, photocopy, install software, network computers, and a couple new software packages every year or so (bankruptcy, divorce, bookkeeping, number crunching, tax). |
