“Donald, am I correct in guessing that one reason you want to be a politician is that you’re fond of making grand pronouncements on matters that you know absolutely nothing about?”
http://cafehayek.com/2011/03/open-letter-to-rush-limbaugh.html#
Does The Don have insight? Does he know why he would try to tackle, again, something to frivolous and vain as being The President? Or is it just a calculated play on celebrity, using the celebrity he has to gain the stage to further accelerate or sustain his celebrity curve? Either way, it does not take long to figure out he's not a serious candidate, but then, that's also true of virtually every other one.
http://cafehayek.com/2011/03/open-letter-to-rush-limbaugh.html#
Does The Don have insight? Does he know why he would try to tackle, again, something to frivolous and vain as being The President? Or is it just a calculated play on celebrity, using the celebrity he has to gain the stage to further accelerate or sustain his celebrity curve? Either way, it does not take long to figure out he's not a serious candidate, but then, that's also true of virtually every other one.
http://cafehayek.com/2011/03/open-letter-to-rush-limbaugh.html#
ReplyDeletePosted the following in the thread:
John, your comment highlights another part of US foreign policy schizophrenia, which, in short, whines about world poverty whilst agonizing over the competitive threat to US ‘workers’ when world poverty begins to actually decrease in some 'competitor' nation.
The partisans (mostly democrat in this case) wring their hands about loss of low skilled labor jobs while imposing and celebrating policies (social security, medicare, minimum wage, family leave act, MANY others) that make it artificially expensive to hire low skilled workers – unions simply add to those obstacles to low cost labor via their demands for higher compensation packages. They wail about US jobs ‘lost’ to China, but as you point out, due to the built in and added on costs to employ someone in the US, the jobs are inevitably going to be lost to somewhere, China’s just the most glamorous current competitor they can use to frighten us (aka the fashionable boogey man, which every politician needs).
The day after they publicly wring their hands about lost jobs and raise the specter of protectionism, they fake a deep concern about the inherent suffering of world poverty. How do they think that world poverty might be ended? Is every poor nation going to bootstrap itself into a thriving closed economy? That hasn’t worked well for Iran or N. Korea – and the nations that have bootstrapped themselves did so by successfully competing in world markets; which is what China and India are doing. Where’s the celebration for the millions being lifted out of poverty? We need a big board somewhere that marks the upward mobility in real numbers of the folks moving from subsistence to lower middle class through China/India’s trade success. Every job ‘lost’ to our economy should be celebrated as a victory for ‘fairness’ … unless the defacto morality is it is only fair if a US citizen is employed.
I’d also like to see a board comparing the dollars invested per person lifted out of poverty world wide through US Govt “foreign aid” compared to the same numbers for those lifted out of poverty through economic growth. I doubt having those numbers in hand would open anyone’s eyes to the absurdity of “US government economic development” or the fact that “foreign competitors” are REAL overseas economic development, but it would make me feel better. I suppose if a politician started pointing things like this out, they’d have a hard time explaining why we tax folks who build cars in the US so that their money can be given to the Egyptian government.
Unless the US’s long term economic strategy is to build cheap crap better than anyone one else in the world and sell it to a few tyrants and/or oil tycoons overseas, then non-US industrial growth must continue to accelerate to build new markets of middle class consumers for the higher end products that US manufacturers would like to be competitive making and selling. I’d like to think the US will be selling products that rely on innovation and intellectual capital rather than yesterday’s skills of cheaply converting iron into sheet metal or aluminum into auto parts.
The stunner is that the politicians have so perfected the skill of compartmentalizing these issues that virtually no one discusses how they are interconnected. We’ve collectively been bamboozled on this one … unless US foreign aid is an underhanded way to prevent more Chinas and Indias by empowering foreign states at the expense of their local markets. If so, the strategy was a dazzling success.