kalm wrote:GannonFan wrote:
You know, we are still the largest manufacturing country in the world (obviously China is about to overtake us - I'm sure we're in the gray area where they may have or may not have, depending on your source) so it's not like we aren't making things. We don't make zippers and those little umbrellas that go into girlie cocktail drinks, but we do make a heckuva lot of stuff.
But post-WWII is always a terrible reference when trying to make economic parallels. More than half of the industrialized world (i.e. Europe) was literally decimated by war - our economy could do whatever it wanted because there was virtually no real competition. You could make a fortune building or designing or selling most anything because the rebuilding of the world meant the demand was huge and the competition was minimal. If we need a world war to get ahead of the spending we've buried ourselves in and continue to heap on top of ourselves then it really is doom and gloom times.
According to CID 1990's Buchanon article 50,000 factories closed and 3,000,000 million manufacturing jobs were lost in the last decade due to free trade. That's not a good trend. You can be flippant all you want about inconsequential products, but with rising fuel costs, our debt, and the fact we have a natural resource and infrastructure advantage, those jobs and the wealth they create would come in real handy right now.
Free trade is a failure and an independent like you should at least appreciate the bipartisan nature of that.
Nonsense. Your way of thinking regarding trade is a dead end street. You can't ignore the fact that we live in a pretty small world and that there are going to be other people out there who can make things. Blaming free trade for all our woes, and by corrallary (sp?), extolling that rolling back free trade would be the answer, is an idea without any merit or reality. You can't reset the clock to 1950/1960 and then stop the advance of time to cement America's role in the economic world. The issue of free trade is not the issue and it's never been the issue. What is the problem is how we do we compete in the free trade world that is reality. When we lose manufacturing jobs or factories, we lose them not because of an economic principle, we lose them because we weren't the best at making whatever product that place was making (and being the best includes everything, from product quality to delivery to cost to service - the whole enchilada). And, more importantly, we weren't making something that the consumer valued us making at those deliverables. You can say I'm flippant about the tiny umbrella's in a cocktail drink, but there's no denying the facts that 1) we can't get those tiny umbrella's to the customer as cheaply as someone else can and 2) the customer doesn't value our tiny umbrella over the next guy's. We've had this discussion time and time again - the way for a country like America to compete successfully in a world against cheaper competitors like China and so on is to follow the German model at its core - i.e., make something that no one else can easily make or reengineer and make something that the customers for that product will value. Germany isn't making tiny umbrellas for cocktail drinks. There's lots of ways we can go about doing that, and loosening the vice grip we have on immigration, most especially immigration of highly educated, technical people from other countries, would be a really good first step.
But blaming all our woes on the boogy man of free trade is like being an ostrich with its head in the ground. Get your head out of the hole, find something that no one can easily make, and start making it. If a company is innovative and dynamic and constantly improving itself, it will last and thrive in the free trade world we live in. Time to stop complaining and time to start competing.
Well, maybe I shouldn't be shocked. All I know if we're fucked..... 
