Brent P wrote:
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.

You ignorantly pretended in your comment that some among them would
condemn trade. That was stupid of you.


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.

At any given moment, little economic illiterate, the real value of both
the debt and GDP are pretty much fixed. It's the ratio of debt to GDP
that matters, not the absolute amount of debt.

Why don't you ask some of those economists and bankers you foolishly
invoked above?


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.

No, the money supply is *not* being doubled in "shorter and shorter"
periods of time.


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,

In certain parts of the country, house prices have increased in
relative terms. So what? That reflects land scarcity in places where
lots of people still very much want to live. It's not a macroeconomic
problem. Someone in Des Moines whose house value hasn't changed much
over 20 years in real terms is not concerned and should not be
concerned with house prices in Los Angeles.


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.

No, chicken little - you are wrong. You have nothing - no theory, no
facts - to back up your alarmist statement.


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.

Not in that page you foolishly cited, he isn't. If you're going to
cite a source, twit, you ought at least to be sure that it supports
what you're saying. That page does not.


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.

No, it isn't. You clearly don't understand what "strawman" means.


It's a loaded question

That's something different.


asking me to defend a point of view I
did not take.

No, he did not. Now, you're lying. Implicit in your babbitry about
prices and competition is that you expect you would *still* find low
prices on U.S. manufactures even in the absence of foreign competition.
His question was,

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

It's a legitimate question - no 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.

And there's plenty of protectionism built into U.S. laws, too.
Nonetheless, today is a freer trading period than, say, 30 years ago.


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.

There was a global shift of manufacturing from the U.S. to Japan, and
then on to Korea and Taiwan and some of the other Asian tigers. How
much steel was produced in the U.S. in 1965, and how much in 1980?

You aren't whining about the ownership of the factories, dummy - you're
complaining about the nationality and location of the workers.


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.

No, it was quite different at first.

The fact is, the gist of your complaint about China - "knowledge
drain", jobs relocating - was said about Japan as well. The
purchasing-power-parity per capita income of Japan has shrunk relative
to America's since 1990.


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.

non sequitur


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'.

As with trade, there are more and less market oriented economies. Ours
is relatively more market oriented. It's a good thing.


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.

When are you going to learn that it DOES NOT MATTER if it's U.S.
companies or Chinese (or Japanese) companies operating the overseas
factories? The effect is the same, then and now: manufacturing jobs
going overseas, service jobs increasing here. Understand, kid, that
"service jobs" includes financial services, media content development,
the *design* of the goods (that foreigners will manufacture), and all
kinds of other things. They are higher paid than the mfg. jobs that
have fled.

Mfg is *so* 20th century, kid. Get with the times.