In article . com, Leif Erikson wrote:
Brent P wrote:

Why don't you pay attention to people from the World Bank, Federal
Reserve, etc and so on if you don't believe me?

I do. They unanimously say that trade is beneficial.

They unanimously feel the need to breath too.
I've also heard that they believe the sky is blue.

Got anything more than that capt. obvious?

So you want to make the debt smaller by inflating the currancy.

The real value of the debt is what matters.

And one reduces the real value with inflation.

That appears to be what is being done.

That is not what's being done.

Doubling the money supply in shorter and shorter periods of time is what
is being done.

If your parents earned $10,000 a year
in 1950 and had a $20,000 mortgage on a house, and if your earn
$100,000 a year and have a $200,000 mortgage on a comparable house, and
if the price level today is 10 times what it was in 1950, then you're
in the same financial position regarding housing as your parents were.

In reality, people are making more like $50K a year and the house is
closer to $300,000 but hey, you can make arbitary numbers be whatever you
want them to be.

But work as slaves... like in china.

No one in the U.S. is working as a slave.

Just wait. Unless the wage competition stops, that's where we'll end up.

Nothing in that page indicates any disagreement.

Nahh... he's only predicting far more gloom far sooner than I... that is
if you listened to him recently.

And do you think you'd find them at those prices if you eliminated
foreign competition?

Strawman.

No, not in the least. It's a legitimate question, and you whiffed on
it.

No, it's introducing arguments and assigning them to me through a
question. It's a loaded question asking me to defend a point of view I
did not take. One that is absurd and easily knocked down. Hence,
strawman.

There is no such thing as free trade.

There is more free trade and less free trade. We generally live in a
period of more free trade.

So what about china's domestic content laws? Doesn't seem like free trade
to me.

You don't seem to grasp the whole picture. Guess who's going to be
building Airbus aircraft? Guess... you think any job is safe? You're
deluding yourself. It's not just no-skill low-skill or 'dirty-jobs' that
are going to china. In fact, with the manufactruring now much of the
engineering is going too...

The knowledge drain from the US to China has been monumental as well. US
company starts manufacturing over there, next thing they know they have a
new competitor using everything they learned from the US company.

This is the same tired, stale, discredited crap that was said 20 and 30
years ago about Japan. Japan has been mired in stagnation since 1990.

There was no mass relocation of US company facilities to Japan. The
Japanese companies started selling their goods in the USA and made a
better product with more or less equal footing with regard to labor and
environmental regulations.

There are *always* gains from exchange - always. China may well master
some manufacturing techniques that we pioneer. No big deal. The U.S.
will continue to have a comparative advantage in activities that
require a highly skilled and knowledgeable workforce for decades to
come.

Spoken like someone who has never been in the trenches of it.

What works is a free economy.

There is no such thing.

Yes, there is.

There are various levels of regulation, taxation, etc, there is no 'free'.

And in that scenario, each country
makes products that fit their workforce and capabilities. Everyone
made your argument 40 years ago, when Japan was the boogey man. Then
is was supposed to be Taiwan that was going to ruin us all. Then
Korea. Funny how we are still here and by any reasonable
interpretation of actual economic statistics, we're doing quite well.

Japan was never a boogey man.

Yes, they most certainly were. You're too young to remember it.

I remeber it quite well. Japanese companies imported goods of various
quality levels with great success as many US companies did not rise to the
new competition. Some went out of business because they didn't make a
good enough product. China is entirely different, the US companies close up
shop in the USA and open up in China. The only competition going on is wage
competition between US workers and Chinese workers to make the same
products for the same companies. The US worker can never undercut the
chinese worker. Especially with the chinese currancy fixed against the
dollar.

The whole set up is so slanted in China's favor, only someone entirely
ignorant of the details or a complete moron would call it 'free trade'.

No, that applies to you. You exhibit classic mercantilist ignorance.

Not my fault I know details you don't.