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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: craig crawford who wrote (21423)	3/15/2002 5:49:54 AM
From: frankw1900	Respond to of 281500

See my post Message 17194263

To: craig crawford who wrote (21423)	3/15/2002 8:34:11 AM
From: Hawkmoon	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Heard an interest blurb on the steel tariffs and which nations stand to lose the most... Apparently, it the Ukraine, which produces 3x more steel than it consumes, and which has been subsidizing its steel industry through state owned mills. I was rather surprised by that revelation. And the argumnent was that if Ukraine can be convinced to stop over-producing, that will support higher prices in the global steel market. Hawk

To: craig crawford who wrote (21423)	3/15/2002 12:00:09 PM
From: FaultLine	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

here is partially the reason <ref> which means we have a right to do this <ref> another reason here <ref> here is why national interest takes precedence over efficiency <ref> to which i say <ref> [and so on.. <refs>.] What's this...The Collected Works of Craig Crawford? Please consider: Writing a short, concise, pithy, tight, crisp letter is difficult. It requires a crystal clear idea of what you want to say. The greater your uncertainty, the greater the letter's length and cruftiness. The harder it is for another to read and understand. Making something effortless takes hard work. Creating a good simple explanation requires a deep understanding of what you want to describe. It requires you generalize. That detail be abstracted, removed, or aggregated away. That you know the thing's aspects, and know their relative importances. That you "grok" what is really fundamentally going on. It may sometimes not be possible to create an interesting explanation. Perhaps in some areas indescribable subtlety is all there is. But even there, with effort, it may atleast be possible to describably capture the essence of the subtlety. A View From the Back of the Envelope vendian.org vendian.org Regards, --FaultLine

To: craig crawford who wrote (21423)	3/18/2002 12:18:07 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 281500

i don't believe the wages would be artificially high. i believe they would be fair. i believe unfettered free trade leads to artificially low wages--excepting of course the fat cats who benefit from the exploitation Free trade is not the artificial condition. Trade bariers need to be imposed by the government. They are normally done so due to requests by "fat cats" who don't want to have to compete with foreign companies. In any case free trade does not normally reduce real wages. which means we have a right to do this Message 17194929 Except in cases where we have signed on to agreements to not create or raise tariffs, the US certainly has a right to do so, however it isn't in our interest. Not only because other countries might retaliate with higher trade barriers to our goods but also because the tariffs will hurt us (as well as our trade partners) even if there is no retaliation. just quit evading the issue and answer the question. let me do it for you. there are times when the national interest of a country takes precedence over "efficiencies" and bottom line economic numbers. Yes there are times where some major national interest takes precedences over economic efficancy. However economic efficancy is itself an important national interest. So normally the country will be served by low or non-existant import barriers. 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. No. Trying to structure the economy, or specifically imposing import barriers is having the federal government take care of favored industries at the expense of others industries and consumers. my argument does not hinge on proving that free trade causes net job losses. individuals and entire communities who lose their jobs to free trade usually do find other work. but as the article i posted last night pointed out, the statistics show that these jobs are replaced with lower wage service jobs. people that used to earn a decent living in a manufacturing job end up getting a service job in the government or working the cash register at walmart--someone has to sell all the cheap imported goods to our materialistic society. Wages and benefits combined have been rising not going down. The service jobs are not all lower wage, the category includes lawyers and CPAs, and stock borkers and many other categories with average or better wages/salaries not just burger flippers. Also as manufacturing becomes more automated fewer workers are needed but they often command higher wages. You don't directly say this but you seem to imply that the value of what is manufactured in the US keeps going down, but this is not the case. It has been going up over the years, but we can produce those goods with fewer workers. This change is somewhat similar to the earlier change where we went from over 50% farmers to the current level of under 1%, while increasing the amount of food produced. Producing more goods with fewer people means we have higher productivity. This productivity increase means that real wealth per person can increase and it has been increaseing. working for walmart means you are simply a middleman, skimming profits off the flow of goods. Most of the new jobs have not been at wallmart, and most of the people working at wallmarts would have been working at k-mart or other stores if wall mart was not so sucessful. Wallmart does skim profits off the flow, but it skims less then the alternatives that existed before Wallmart, which is one of the major reasons for its sucess. Its more efficent, which means it can price goods low enough to attract a good flow of customers. our foreign trading partners have much more to fear from a trade war than we do. we buy 25% of the world's manufactures. Everyone looses in a trade war, but many people thin raising trade barriers helps the protectionist country. This idea is almost always false, but since it is so popular countries often follow it. It becomes esp. popular when a major trade partner raises its own bariers. If we raise trade barriers, we hurt ourselves and our trade partners, and then to retaliate they hurt us, and hurt themselves in the process. We might retaliate further and so on. In the end everyone loses, sometimes everyone loses big. Tim