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Technology Stocks : Disk Drive Sector Discussion Forum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Frodo Baxter who wrote (5639)	2/18/1999 5:33:00 AM
From: Z Analyzer	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 9256

<<I run a trade deficit with McDonald's. They have "sucked" thousands of dollars out of my pockets. Imagine if Burger King, Pizza Hut, and Kentucky Fried Chicken also did that to me. Whoa Nellie!>> "Whoa Nellie" is Right! If you overall ran deficits with everyone, pretty soon Burger King, MacDonalds and everyone else would cut you off and you'd be begging on the streets. <<I'm confused. Free trade made this possible. Hard drives are not made in the USA. So what? Should we subsidize the industry, maybe impose a few tariffs on those "predatory" workers in SE Asia? I'm sure America would be a greater nation if you could only buy domestic $500 2G hard drives, if your DRAM is made by Micron, if your TV is made by Zenith, and if your choice of automobiles is limited to Pintos and Corvairs.>> Talk about straw men. Why does everyone fail to see that the desire for BALANCED trade is not the same as the absolute corrupted protectionism you have immediately turned it into. As for the other issues I raised: 1) such as worldwide unskilled or manufacturing wage equalization (a non-trivial social issue). Here I asked only what yor own economic theory says will happen? 2) gross trade imbalances such as we run with China and Japan which are indicative of anything but free trade 3)the issue of what happens to a country running chronic deficits (try to avoid even thinking about free trade in answering this since it distracts you from the basic question), 4) The issue so starkly demonstrated in the past year by other countries of vulnerability to massive short tern "investment" to fund chronic deficits. I'm sorry to see these issues didn't warrant a serious answer instead of a snicker. You have well learned Krugman's closed minded ivory tower attitude that those misguided "average laymen" who haven't blindly bought into the absolute applicability of "free trade" theory to the real world are unworthy of a serious discussion or tutorial. Krugman spends pages analyzing why it is that they don't, or can't see things his way rather than providing supporting arguments to real world situations that may not be as clean as his textbooks. -A disapointed Z