TheAgitator.com
Lou’s Blues
Sunday, February 15th, 2004A bevvy of free-trade homework assignments for you:
1) Let’s start with Lou himself, and this very entertaining transcript of his debate with Jim Glassman, of Tech Central and Washington Post fame. Let’s just say it got ugly. Lou actually takes offense when Glassman calls him a “protectionist.” I kid you not.
2) Jagdish Bhagwati, who’s fast becoming the most persuasive public intellectual on the pro-globalization side, defends outsourding in the NY Times.
3) Also in the Times, from last week, Nick Kristof too defends offshoring (or outsourcing), though he manages to tie the practice to a call for increased spending on education (question for Kristof — you understand very well how competition is good for labor and consumers when it comes to trade, why can you not see how it might benefit education, too?)
4) John Kerry, meet Ross Perot. After Kerry called business leaders who ship jobs overseas “Benedict CEOs,” we learn that the family fortune that allows him to live the high life, not to mention partially finances his campaign, operates 57 factories outside U.S. borders. I like Tyler Cowen’s solution: “Unless a candidate supports free trade, his party can only drive supporters to the polls with American-made cars.”
5) Of course, the alternative is no better. The Bush administration just negotiated a “free trade” agreement with Australia. Among the “concessions” the White House made at the expense of domestic industry: Australia gets access to the U.S. beef market — in 18 years. Australia gets increased access to the U.S. dairy market — a 0.17% increase. Way to stand up to those special interests, Mr. President!
Big Sugar managed to block all access whatever of Australian sugar producers to the American sugar market — which means that U.S. candy manufacturers will continue to relocate overseas ([sarcasm] see how “protectionism” secures U.S. jobs? [/sarcasm]), and everyone else who manufactures anything sweet will have no choice but to continue to use corn syrup — which of course is also heavily subsidized by U.S. taxpayers.
Bilateral agreements, if they accomplish any liberalization whatsoever, are of course better than no agreement at all. But when the emerging opinion on these agreements is that the U.S. basically bent over the other party, it only inspires skeptism from future potential partners.
Jagdish Bhagwati’s piece is moronic and ill-informed. US software developers and engineers aren’t being replaced by laptops, even if his secretary was.
I hate when people who don’t know jack shit about the IT job market give their two cents because, hey, they’ve got these spiffy credentials and they wrote a book about globalization. But they’re still ignorant as fuck.
Also, Kristof’s piece was pretty stupid too. When it comes to jobs being sent offshore, the only educational issue that matters is teaching people how to live on $10,000 a year or less, especially when they’re paying $5,000 a year on college loans taken on to pay for a now-useless skillset.
Jobs are going offshore because workers overseas are cheap, not because US workers are unskilled.
Whether or not globalization is a net positive thing, it’s a big problem for the US. It deserves better, deeper thought than Kristof and Bhagwati’s crap.
Any American who makes $10,000 a year is an idiot. Federal minimum wage pays $10,712 ( 1 job with no overtime). Most jobs pay more. The area where I live is an economic shit hole and even fast food jobs pay at least $7-8 an hour. When I was in school, I made over $20K in my summer job. So any American who graduated from college who makes $10K is lazy and stupid. A degree of any kind will get you in the door for a lot of jobs.
The Kerry factory story has been repeated and refuted many times, but: I’m sure those factories are for local consumption, and have local labelling, etc. That’s not really outsourcing as those jobs would always have been performed in those countries.
The US-Australia trade deal also imposes US style “IP” laws – the DMCA is going down under! I guess telling people that holding your Shift key will allow you to copy certain DRMed CDs is going to be a crime there too.
The Australians are also still including protection for local “cultural products”, as if TV and movies really need to be restricted, but at least the wine tariffs have disappeared.
Oooh, they’ve also extended the special government-granted monopoly of copyright another 20 years there. Some nice commentary about this from an Australian over at http://www.crikey.com.au/yoursay/2004/02/10-0002.html
“Bilateral agreements, if they accomplish any liberalization whatsoever, are of course better than no agreement at all.”
Um. Why?
If you go back to your globalization web site and reread the Friedmans you’ll find that they were advocating that the US unilaterally drop trade barriers.
That would in fact be better for Americans than any trade agreement.
Free trade is no trade agreement at all.
Table thumping protectionist Lou Dobbs.
My hero!
All you idealists who visualize a hypothetical happy utopia of free trade need to exercise your abilities to work out chains of economic consequences.
Or do you all want to wind up working in Wal-Marts and getting locked in at night?
First we lost our heavy industry base. Now we are losing our “knowledge industry base” What’s left: the service sector that’s what. So we all stand behind counters, saying “may I help you?” to each other in the brave new America of free trade.
Don’t let your theories blind you to reality!
I hold BS, a JD and an associate’s degree in hamburgerology (no joke) from when I was in high school and an assistant manager at Mickey D’s.
The BS was not completely useless but close, and the JD is giving me ulcers and causing me to work 80 hours a week.
I’ve done the math; I’d be making more per hour as a store manager at the Mac shack. And though I am being somewhat facetious, the degree from Hamburger U gave me the greatest value-added; it cost me nothing and doubled my income. Had I stayed and become a store manager I’d be earning about $70K today. It’s less than my current earning potential, but it does say something about the job market in the US.
I agree that we were lied to. We were told that we would only lose jobs in the unskilled labor bracket. Now we are losing them in IT and other tech fields. The “herd” only cares about their own pocketbooks and lower costs. I think they’re ravaging our human resources for short-term or at least shortsighted financial gain.
I’d like to hear someone explain why “michael the wanderer” isn’t right in his prediction that without some sort of reasonable controls I may be forced to bust out my headset and start taking orders in the drive-through again? I’d like extra logic on that answer and please hold the lawyer jokes.- thank you!
“I’d like to hear someone explain why “michael the wanderer” isn’t right in his prediction that without some sort of reasonable controls I may be forced to bust out my headset and start taking orders in the drive-through again? I’d like extra logic on that answer and please hold the lawyer jokes.- thank you!”
I have no idea what you’ll end up doing for a living.
But where whould you get any right to interfere with what others want to do with their property? If an employer would prefer to hire someone in India or Mexico instead of you what right do you have to prevent him from doing so?
What makes you think it’s properly a collective decision?
â??But where whould [sic] you get any right to interfere with what others want to do with their property? If an employer would prefer to hire someone in India or Mexico instead of you what right do you have to prevent him from doing so?â?
John,
I get it, youâ??re a free trade guy! But I’m not (yet) sure you know your Lexus from your Olive Tree. After all, your post is not responsive to my inquiry. Nonetheless, I will respond to yours (at least in part).
â??What makes you think it’s properly a collective decision?â?
Last I checked, these States of America were â??United.â? (You know mutual protection yada-yada-yada) Weâ??re not incorporated. USA not USA, LLC. Each of us is limited in the decisions that he or she may make by the various laws that govern this nation. We are a nation under the rule of law.
A nation must be governed and operate within some sort of value system. We must collectively make some decisions about what we value and what we want this nation to be. The founding fathers put that ball in play some 228 years ago.
You could not, properly, hire and pay someone to kill Lou Dobbs despite the fact that you would be using your hard earned resources to accomplish that task. We don’t allow that because we have collectively decided that such actions are harmful in general to society and the fabric of this nation. Similarly, it is proper and wise for us to collectively preclude ABC, Corp. from engaging in activities which would be harmful to the security, safety and future of our Union.
Hence, we limit, for security reasons, the exportation of certain products (ie tech stuff); we impose occupational safety standards which curtail industry practices that are (though less expensive) harmful to our labor force (at the time the OSHA Act was signed by Nixon annual deaths from occupational injuries numbered in the tens of thousands); and we certainly ought to give some serious thought to practices by ABC, Corp. or GE that will result in this nation becoming a one trick pony only capable of providing entertainment and service sector jobs.
We know two things for sure John, laissez-faire and communism donâ??t work! So I ask you once again, why isn’t Mike the wanderer right?