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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Selectric II who wrote (237252)	3/13/2002 4:48:21 PM
From: craig crawford	Respond to of 769667

>> and those who don't are eligible for job re-training and public assistance until they do. << thanks for helping to lead me into my next point. "re-training and public assistance" are yet more effects strewn in the wake of destructive free trade policies. people lose their jobs, so they have to rely on government assistance and retraining to get them by while they seek out new (lower wage) employment. carefully applied tariffs for protection of basic industries allows the less capable in our society to keep their jobs and maintain some semblance of dignity and self-reliance. sure it may be cheaper to dole out government assistance than to protect a few steel worker jobs. this is why i have tried to point out that you can't always run a country by numbers alone. ignorant, liberal economists who sit high atop their academic perch and preach to us about economics often fail to understand this. the way to run a country is to set it up so people don't have to look to the federal government to take care of them. the way you do that is by balancing the economy for all citizens. you don't structure the economy into strictly a knowledge-based system exclusively for the cultural elites and intellectually more capable among us. on the surface that may seem more efficient, but it results in some truly devastating effects for society. shifting the economy to a knowledge base means the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. then you are left with a great disparity of wealth--and we all know that when that disparity becomes too great, revolution is in the air. that is precisely what we have done. we have moved away from basic industry and now we have a whole underclass of people who for whatever reason can't compete in the fast paced knowledge based world of today. the free trade solution is often to just pay these people off so they will go away and let us get back to exploiting people around the world for profit. when people start looking to the government to take from the rich to redistribute to the poor, you end up with a whole host of problems. it leads to degradation of the moral fabric of society and results in an expansionist, authoritarian form of government--the only institution that can use force to redistribute the wealth and accomplish the goal. free trade leads the less capable americans among us toward a reliance on the federal government to take care of them. yet another reason why we need to protect basic industry and preserve a decent standard of living for them so they can take care of themselves. with income taxes as high as they are, a job at walmart won't cut it. >> Meanwhile, millions of others can afford to buy lower priced goods like tv's, etc. that they couldn't before, because the fact that they're, e.g., Hecho en Mexico, makes them affordable to the mass market. << i don't know how many times i can say this. tv's and many other consumer items will most likely cost more under a protectionist economy. but wages will be higher for average americans as well. furthermore, tariffs bring in revenue to the government, so income taxes can be lowered, leaving more money in the pockets of consumers. that is why all these arguments that we need free trade because without it we couldn't afford consumer items is specious at best.