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It all depends on which side you are on. If you live a work in a low cost country that is now developing a middle class, hell yeah it worked.
Watching the middle class shrink, and our country moving from one that produced goods that the world wanted to one that is service based, it is an absolute fail. How can wealth be made without producing something of value that can be sold?
Intellectual properties (services) are sold. Googled a quick definition - "Most of the value of new medicines and other high technology products lies in the amount of invention, innovation, research, design and testing involved. Films, music recordings, books, computer software and on-line services are bought and sold because of the information and creativity they contain, not usually because of the plastic, metal or paper used to make them. Many products that used to be traded as low-technology goods or commodities now contain a higher proportion of invention and design in their value — for example brandnamed clothing or new varieties of plants."
Protection of US exports of intellectual property (at which America excels) are incorporated into trade agreements.
There are some real questions here - but freedom and liberty and globalization aren't the issue. The educated middle class that makes a living (in part) off intellectual properties, tech, high-value added manufactured goods is doing just fine - admittedly at the expense of that portion of the increasingly former middle class who has lost jobs in less competitive manufacturing industries not protected by the trade agreements that open borders and help other US sectors to prosper.
What we have is capitalism - let the market make the decision and allocate resources. It has - but the problem is that some of us don't like the decisions they've been handed.
I get that, appreciate it, and think it's a societal problem that we should confront. Retraining is all well and good but sometimes it just isn't practical, especially for older Americans who cannot easily relocate. In the name of "free trade" (which is not an unbridled good for it does lead to these inequities), they have after years of hard work basically been told you're no longer needed and please get out of the way. Worse, those now seeking aid from the government they've supported for years with taxes are labelled "takers."
But for one group of Americans (those who are the admittedly on the losing side of the economic equation in recent decades) to ask the government to TELL those on the winning side that they need reduce their income (as exporters) and pay higher prices (as consumers) does NOT strike me as an exercise in personal LIBERTY.
Question is, why were working class white voters ever in support of globalization in the first place if they're so against it now? Am I supposed to believe that all these so called Reagan Democrats didn't know that their jobs would be shipped out? What were they expecting?
The Republican Party IS NOT anti globalization even one bit. They aren't anti "free trade" either.
So I'm confused as to what these voters want.
Trickle down. Neo-liberal economic policy that was seemingly so beneficial for all starting with Reagan.
But what happened in the '80's and '90's is we got corporate downsizing, and conglomeration with those efficiencies of tossing out jobs. Owners and shareholders began to benefit to a larger degree, and we never turned back. Unions withered away. In the '90's and 2000's we began to see much more off shoring, along with those efficiencies, savings, loss of jobs and here we are.
The voters want to return to the good ole days of yore. Ain't gonna happen. IMO of course.
I guess i should have clarified. I am talking about engineers, designers, machinists, toolmakers, etc. Since 1998 i've watched these highly technical and skilled jobs lost to globalization. These are / were solid middle class jobs. This is what has gutted the country. These jobs provided wages where a family could comfortably survive with just one wage earner. A time when houses and vehicles were paid for. People weren't strung out on credit.
I will never be on board with globalism.
You are very right that there are some real problems - the issues faced by those slipping out of the middle class will work their way up the food chain. But my fear is that we are fighting the war of the last two decades when we need to be facing the one(s) coming.
Automation is a major issue. For example, software increasingly is being used to replace basic work done by lawyers, architects. Admittedly, some of that software is used by offshore firms (for example, India) - but the workers don't even have to be physically located in the US. It is "globalization" in that the sense that we're literally tied together by the high-speed telecommunication lines that run along the sea beds and satellites. But can the government tell folks not to use it? Set up black-outs of some sort. That's what North Korea does - and look at their standard of living.
My personal take is that we have some serious societal decisions to make - basically, how gains from increases in productivity are distributed within the population. But we're too busy fighting among ourselves to even begin to ask the right questions much less to start to work our way towards possible solutions.
The fact is free trade is good and absorbing the poor huddled masses is bad. The globalists and nationalists are both half right.
But the trade is not really free. We offer a very valuable free market to most of the world and they practice nationalism and mercantilism. Definitely agree it's bad to allow in constant masses of non-interchangeable and non-compatible and even unassimilable. All we get is too much population growth and ethnic and identity division, struggle and strife.
But the trade is not really free. We offer a very valuable free market to most of the world and they practice nationalism and mercantilism. Definitely agree it's bad to allow in constant masses of non-interchangeable and non-compatible and even unassimilable. All we get is too much population growth and ethnic and identity division, struggle and strife.
Even if the rest of the world was that stupid we would be better off with free trade. If other nations wish to give us goods on the cheap we can hire people to dig holes and others to fill them up if jobs is all we want.
Location: Live:Downtown Phoenix, AZ/Work:Greater Los Angeles, CA
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Quote:
Originally Posted by whogo
Even if the rest of the world was that stupid we would be better off with free trade. If other nations wish to give us goods on the cheap we can hire people to dig holes and others to fill them up if jobs is all we want.
I have never been a supporter of globilization, mainly because with the anti-welfare attitude of this country, those who lose jobs to outsourcing are usually screwed. I would be more in favor if any employer who outsourced had to pay a $30k fine annually for each job that could have been done here, but was outsourced instead, and use that money to provide UBI for the workers displaced here
Even if the rest of the world was that stupid we would be better off with free trade. If other nations wish to give us goods on the cheap we can hire people to dig holes and others to fill them up if jobs is all we want.
I agree. Look at solar. China about gave us panels. Great for the US consumer, bad for US manufacturing.
And of course cheaper goods of all sorts that almost everyone wins on. Even the laggers and those lost out of manufacturing. IMO the trick will have to be some combination of retraining, with millions of people relocating, along with central subsidies maybe in transition, and then very definitely in 100 years. When so many more people will have no job simply due to advanced technologies. I would expect to lose much of my job as a doc by then.
Otherwise it will be a very slow and haphazard time trying to bring back manufacturing, and all at the expense of the rest of society. Without new central moneys directed at this problem, if we can agree on relative isolationism, the money will have to come from redistribution.
Technology evolves and so do the jobs. The same reason we don't insist on horse and buggy but have bus drivers.
These technical and skilled jobs could have evolved into modern day versions of those tools but some people just didn't believe it could happen.
It is your choice to be on board but it won't really matter as the rest of the world has voted to move forwrd with it.
You just don't get it do you. There was no evolution of those jobs, the same job is being done in another country. Machine tools being engineered, designed, and built overseas. How does one "evolve" to that ? Just imagine whatever it it is you do is gone , done , offshored ? Sure, one will learn to adapt and pursue another career, but it just might not pay the same. Multiply this by multiple thousands and what are you left with ? Not sure if you are aware that college and a paper pushing career is not for everyone. Sorry globalization is a fail for the American middle class and our manufacturing base. Funny thing, i remember having the same argument back in the late '90's. Just picture an hour glass...one side fills up, while the other empties. Well that is exactly what is happening here, the wealth of the middle glass is emptying in the country while it is filling up India, China, Mexico..etc.
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