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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: epicure who wrote (5791)	11/26/2005 1:48:45 PM
From: Mary Cluney	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 542169

I am very concerned about the American economy. I think it was obvious to most of us, who thought about it, that when jobs became a world commodity like bananas, the price would settle to the lowest value possible. With jobs leaking out of our country to other countries whose workers want significantly less, it's hard to see how America's people can sustain their rates of consumption, as they lose jobs, and have their wages eroded. Life is about change. Things are never going to stay the same. Some of the reasons why we have a good economy is because we had an open society. Success was based on merit more than anywhere else. I am optimitistic that we will continue to have a good economy. The only way we will not is if we screw it up ourselves. First of all we should not be afraid of competition. Secondly, we should not try to close things up. The more things are open, the better for us. We were founded by Liberals and we were able to thrive. Other countries are trying to copy our success. They are trying to open things up, liberalize things, while we are going backwards trying to close things. I think they call that protectionism. Another words, the more we are afraid of things, the more we want to close thing up and hide behind protectionism. That would be a mistake. If continue to keep things open and not be afraid - nobody can compete against us. They can compete unfairly by putting up protectionist barriers - but we should just let them because in the long run they are only going to hurt themselves. If we can keep thing open, we have tremendous natural advantages. 1. We have terrific location. We border on the Pacific and the Atlantic. We are in the middle of things when it come to the Pacific Rim and we are in the middle of things wrt the Atlantic community. Nobody else has that kind of location. 2. We have good natural resources for farming, fishing, and for energy production (coal, oil shale, sun, forests etc.). 3. Our language is for all practical purposes the universal language. 4. We virtually own the Internet. We started it and we control it. We have Google. 5. We are the leaders in technology. 6. We have diversity. We bring together the smartest people in the world. And they bring with them, the best that their world has to offer. And we put it all together. Conservatives want to end this. They want to close things. They want to bring religion into the classroom where they teach science. It is not enough for them to be able to teach religion in places of worship or in religious schools. They want to force religion into where it does not belong. They want to use force to bring other people in line with us. Whereas we should just want people to envy us and try to copy us. They want to keep out all foreigners. They want to keep out things that are foreign to us. Whereas integrating foreign people and foreign ideas is what made us great. They want to turn back the clock - they are afraid that we can't compete in open competition.