Reply #7: I don't entirely agree [View All]

[wuushew]

Western style affluence is more a less a result of the disproportionate consumption of finite material and energy resources a by a minority population relative to the other 5 billion of Asia, Africa and South America.

Free trade only makes sense when there are comparative synergies to be had by dropping trade barriers on things that can be more efficiently produced elsewhere under identical means of production. That is why we should drop sugar,cotton and lumber tariffs immediately.

Free trade as it is practiced now is simply a hunt for the cheapest source of labor. As dollars flow out of the country we become less wealthy as an aggregate even while the producers of any given good get rich on the parasitic destruction of their own consumer base.

By making China richer we are sending untold billions of tons of CO2 into the air as coal fuels their industrialization. The rising middle class of Asia is competing for the use of scare liquid fuels, of which their is no certainty that a sufficiently large window of time exists to move to an alternative source without major pain.

As manufacturing moves out of the states, the remaining labor pool in left competing for a finite number of service jobs in a more slack labor environment that would exist without the previous manufacturing sector.