If, as Gross asserts, modern Democrats have embraced free trade as a good thing, then why was so much of the early Dem primary debating dedicated to establishing who would be the most agressive about repealing NAFTA? And why did the Dem leadership in Congress have to be negotiated into promising to support ratification of additional free trade treaties, then reneg on that promise after having their demands delivered on by the administration?

Why would any working person (99% of the population) support any candidate who is pro-free trade? The idea that free trade has brought prices down is obviously false, since the CPI has grown steadily (and at a greater rate than wages) since the early 1970s when free trade began to take hold.

There are surely some instances of less expensive items being imported from other countries, but those savings largely go to the pockets of importers, not the consumers. More than offsetting any price savings on products has been the decline of wages brought on by the transfer of jobs to the producers.

Only an idiot would support free trade.

The CPI rising is not all the data you need. For starters, you need to know, or estimate, what it would've been in the absence of free trade. Possible it would've gone up more, right? Do you really think a clock radio produced in the U.S. would be close to the same price as one produced in China? That's ridiculous.

Protectionism is a temporary fix to a long-term reality: industries change and evolve. We are not an efficient producer of a lot of stuff anymore - not even close. So we should be focusing on things where we are competitive. We've certainly failed our citizens by not helping them with their transition, and should focus on that more than enacting short term fixes that will turn us into France.

The entire concept of free trade as a beneficial scheme is based on century's old concepts of comparitive and absolute advantage. Those concepts were developed in a time where distance itself was a barrier to trade, adding enormous costs to trade and itself creating comparitive advantage for some countries (it's difficult to ship peaches on a sail boat from China, I'm sure you'll agree). Technology has erased any comparitive advatange in almost every industry you can describe; even surgeries will be done via internet connection in the near future.

In sectors in which labor can't be outsourced, technology is largely employed to do away with human labor at all. I stayed at an Embassy Suites this weekend, they had self-check-in, I printed my airplane boarding pass from a terminal in the lobby of the hotel, I served myself coke from a fountain...&c. How many human beings would have done those jobs 15 years ago? And, in the absense of a manufacturing sector, where do you suppose the unskilled get jobs? Supposing we could all become college educated, what becomes of the value of a college education? Unrestrained free trade, if allowed to go to it's final conclusion, would have nations of PhDs who can't get jobs. And how do you suppose all of those people will pay for ever increasing education requirements given decreasing wages and increasing living costs?

In the past, free trade was seen as a way of creating a delegation of labor for the world, now it's seen as a way of seeking the cheapest labor possible. It is a global race to the bottom for all but the wealthiest among us. And, there's no doubt that free trade is good for them; a middle class (even upper middle class) person, and certainly poor people, cannot make a case that free trade is beneficial for them (but can only puke back political B. S. that they've been told by the media and the major parties).

To say that CPI doesn't tell the whole story is ignoring the fact that defenders of free trade tell us that the reduction that we see in our wages is offset (or even more-than-offset) by cheaper goods. The numbers don't pan that out at all -- which is of course why you have to suggest that in the absense of supposedly cheap imports the CPI would have grown all the same (a reasonable person would assume that U. S. manufacturers would have become more adept as time went on, and that new technology would have made them ever more effecient). Of course, even if CPI had gone up for the last 25 years (as it has), then in the absense of the free movement of capital (while labor is forced to remain static due to immigration laws), then wages would have been forced to increase.

The only reason manufacturers can afford to see wages slip in the major consumer capitals is that they are driving their costs of production ever lower through exploitation of a never ending supply of cheap labor around the world.

Funny, too, that people would claim merchantilism (or, as you call it, protectionism) to be a troublesome economic construct when that very system built America as an economic powerhouse!

I find myself astonished to be in agreement with FaxMeBeer. How did this happen?

But look -- it's glib and superficial to say we need to buy whatever crap the Chinese churn out. regardless of factors other than price. Do we really have to ignore anything but short-term gain and pleasure, and ignore the long-term effects of what we do?

You know, like the man says, fat drunk and stupid is no way to go through life.

A little bit more on this topic:

Borders' books is rapidly going out of business. Barnes and Noble will follow. The larger business structure is in trouble, and everyone, from the little labor of love presses to the university presses and of course the distribution systems that store and move books around will all fail. Amazon, which is essentially a parasitic operation, will die when its host dies. Why does this matter? I'm not sure. Do we need books? Do our children need to learn to read anything longer than a paragraph?

Is this part of the transition our government needs to help us through? I'm just plain unsure of all this. Yes, the internet has made markets more efficient and there's been unprecedented capital movement, and the combination has made it hard to be sure who's the real progressive in any argument.

One small quibble: we should not assume China is a fixed entity or that its gains will be secure. In the long run China is facing population pressures like Japan's but worse. In the medium run they have already pushed their environment to its limit. In the short run party tyranny has exhausted the willingness of the poor to be shit on. Sadly, what generally follows that kind of exhaustion is not good for anyone.

Certainly technology changes the way we live. I once listened to a 90-something-year-old man being interviewed on NPR and he talked about the way he very much hated the noise of cars in New York City and missed desperately the sound of horses trotting down the street. I'm sure our grandchildren will not read the sorts of books that have been around for so many generations, but they'll read. Perhaps. Of course, they may just have information downloaded into the microchip that will be inplanted within their brain. Who knows?

Question is, will they be able to afford books, e-readers, or cerebral downloads when only .01% of the population controls all of the wealth because we've squandered our children's birthright?

By the way, why the surprise at agreeing with me?

Considering that some of the books I read (and from which I have, time to time, taught) are between two and four thousand years old, I find that prospect of their disappearance from use within this century depressing and threatening. The attitude displayed regarding this by the ALA (normally a sensible org) is also depressing.

I'm not a fetishist. Go ahead and replace books, but only when you can do it with SOMETHING BETTER. That birthright you're talking about is currently to be found in most public libraries -- the exceptions being the ones that have turned themselves into video stores with free internet access.

BTW, Mister Conservative (the reason I was surprised), how do you propose to stop our current upward trend in wealth and income distribution? I would start with a return to progressive taxation on all income, particularly short-term capital gains. I would do away with Taft-Hartley (unions are dying anyway, right?) and even out our competition with Europe by nationalizing healthcare.

Spain, in 1600, was the richest and most powerful country in the world. It excluded the Hidalgo class from taxation, and a hundred years later had become a colony of Austria. Perhaps I exaggerate, but perhaps also you can see my point.

We also traveled by horse for a couple thousand years. And donkeys. I digress.

In my view, we are in the situation we're in because of liberal policies. To answer the failures of liberalism (even as practiced by today's moderate liberals that make up the Republican Party) with more liberal policies (making the tax system increasingly progressive) seems folly to me.

Let me explain my position, as it may be different than that of other conservatives. Progressive taxation is a tool of influence. When the government determines at what rate which groups are taxed, then the government gets to pick-and-choose the winners and losers (as they have). If you see the answer to our ills in the tax system, then you have to (in my opinion) see the answer as a flat tax. Excluding 30% of Americans from carrying the burden of Federal fiscal ineptness, as we do now, has not proved a good way to encourage active stewardship of our nation's wealth. Excluding another 10%, as Obama has indicated he'd do, or taking the middle and lower classes off the tax rolls altogether, is not going to quench this nation's thirst for irresponsible spending.

I'm honestly not sure how liberals think that separating people more and more from responsibility for their own actions and those carried out by their representatives creates a society that is sustainable. If the people want "programs" (spending), then the people should pay for them.

The reason those people are dropping off of the bottom of the tax rolls has little to do with their moral failings -- what do you think will be helped by taking even MORE away from them to further subsidize the greedy bastards who are currently gaming the system? Our Gini coefficient is now that of a third world economy. Do you think it's time to change the measures of success -- applying the "lessons" of NCLB to our development issues?

I say we should return to more progressive rates for two reasons: first because, as you note, it steers the greedy away from grabbing more they won't be able to keep. CEO and CFO compensation is insane these days. The boards seem unable to stop it. Shareholder suits might be nice, but jerks like Icahn seem focused exclusively on targets like Yahoo! (that will net him less while preserving his reputation. such as it is.)

The second reason why we should make rates more progressive is we have to restore a sense of fairness to the system as a whole. Reform will require major surgery on the AMT (which it might not survive), and that will leave a revenue hole, at a time when life will be hard for most everybody and Bush's insane deficit spending will have to stop. So what then? After years of being told life is a beer commercial, the middle class is going to be told some Jimmy Carter lessons about how life is unfair, and any government that does that without spreading the burden out and socking it in a BIG way to the guys who drove the economy off the road in the first place will not be the government for long. You probably think Carter was too liberal. Try looking at it the other way, just as a thought experiment. Appointing Volcker was not the act of an excessive liberal (though it was a good appointment, don't get me wrong; I just think he was way too weak and appeasing with the big financials).

You start belt tightening with the fattest guys. Otherwise it doesn't sell. this isn't about ideology: it's about what works. I would actually like to be a lot more certain that Obama has the spine for that. I look at what's on offer and think, no brains versus no guts is maybe not such a swell choice to have.

I'm not even sure how much more progressive the system could get. The top 20% already pay half of the tax, and the bottom 30% pay nothing (as far as income tax). That's a pretty damn progressive tax system, and it hasn't created anything approaching a responsible government. You don't want fairness, you want a free ride. I'm not a defender of the rich, but I'm not a defender of those who want to live off of the rich either. Since I neither get a free ride, nor get taxed into submission, I more or less feel that's a pretty fair system. If the tax burden on the bottom would be too great -- then perhaps we need fewer programs so as to reduce the burden on them?

That's the FEDERAL INCOME tax you're talking about, after all sorts of income peculiar to the wealthy has been excluded.

So what you're doing now is playing word games. The bottom 30% pays to support all local entities (heavily burdened these days by unfunded mandates) at a HIGHER rate than the top 20%, so basically, everything you've just said is crap.

So back up the bullshit truck and try again.

In liberal states, you'll find the highest local tax burden. In the most conservative states, such as Texas and Montana, and others, you'll find no state income tax, no property tax...those states support themselves on sales tax rates that are about the same as those in Liberal states which also tax income and property. You have no idea what you're talking about.

Sales taxes ate teh most regressive taxes, as you maybe know, or at least should know.

Again, you're playing a stupid shell game. I find this tiresome.

Do these cute little bait and switch games wow your fellow libertarians and other reactionary jerks? In case you ever want to know why I regard you as an asshole, I suggest you archive your last three posts here.