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Trade Deficit in U.S. Plunges on Record Petroleum Exports

This is real simple. Drill baby drill. Build refineries. Consume or export. Solar will have its day ... when our grandkids have grandkids. If only we can get the liberals to stop being so ****ing stupid before we cannot recover.
 
the_recruit said:
Again, most of that is the result of the recession - it doesn't have anything to do with protectionist policies or a lackthereof.

Your anecdotes are typical arguments in favor of protectionism. However, they fail because they don't view the larger picture. When I say protectionism is bad, i don't mean it literally hurts everyone. Protectionism is bad because it hurts the economy overall. In fact, protectionism DOES protect very isolated pockets of people- but only at the expense of the greater overall economy.

Such arguments are virtually identical to those against automation. Let's use the handweaver example I brought up earlier, whose jobs were eliminated by the invention of the power loom. Legislation that would have protected handweaver's jobs from being "outsourced" to a cheaper labor supply (power looms), would in fact have been beneficial to anybody that was a handweaver. But it would have hurt the overall economy and everyone across the nation who would have benefited from being able to purchase lower priced woven cloth. Ultimately, the handweavers find other jobs and the economy ends up the stronger. Protectionist policies behave the same way - protecting a small minority at the expense of a net loss.

Virtually all contemporary economists across the board, from Friedman to Krugman are opposed to protectionism as a rule on the grounds that it's damaging to the economy.
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Here's the difference: Automation, or innovation, often leads to higher quality and higher productivity. The same cannot be said, necessarily, for outsourcing.

The goal should not be to protect the few at the expense of the many, that much is clear. However, you need to understand that we're not operating in a perfect economist's bubble - this is the real world.

What I mean by that follows: The cost of doing business in America is falsely pumped up. Corporations are taxed more for having a plant in Michigan than Nanjing. Corporations have to pay for Obamacare, liability insurance, retirement packages, training, etc in the United States. They need pay for none of that in China.

That's why we need to level the playing field.

If you were simply comparing "Worker X" with "Worker Y" and the only variables were wages and output, then classical economics would work. It's simply not that cleanly drawn in the real world.
 
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