OT: The free-trader's agenda

Thanks Paul! That added another piece to the puzzle.

Gunner

"The British attitude is to treat society like a game preserve where a certain percentage of the 'antelope' are expected to be eaten by the "lions". Christopher Morton

Reply to
Gunner
Loading thread data ...

That's OK. My dad worked for Victor, for most of his adult life. From young apprentice in '37 til he died in '65. I kinda kept tabs on them over the years.

Paul K. Dickman

Reply to
Paul K. Dickman

Yep I can imagine. Most of mine was outdoor & equestrian stuff. Not much publicity work back then in those fields. Of course, if you don't see your byline, you haven't been "published" either (according to editors) :o). I aways got paid, but never much. Jackie Suzzane was asked if she liked writing for a living and she replied that she preferred "having written". Magazine work never does that for you.. unfortunately. Greg Sefton

Reply to
Bray Haven

"Kirk Gordon" wrote

What was the phrase.... "lies, damned lies, and statistics" ?

Mark

Reply to
Mark Winlund

On 23 Nov 2003 08:01:15 -0800, jim rozen wrote something ......and in reply I say!:

Only trouble is, it's not with Govt right now, and look at it anyway! It's not screwed?

I know I know. It could be worse.

Which reminds me (not sure who Ima quoting here, but I like it).

"I was walking along the other day, feeling pretty bad. A guy saw me looking miserable, and said 'Cheer up mate! Things could be worse!'. So I did , and he was right, they were."

**************************************************** sorry remove ns from my header address to reply via email

Imagine a _world_ where Nature's lights are obscured by man's. There would be nowhere to go. Or wait a while. Then you won't have to imagine.

Reply to
Old Nick

Haha! I think she borrowed that line from an earlier novelist, I can't remember who. But I know the feeling.

Ed Huntress

Reply to
Ed Huntress

On Sat, 22 Nov 2003 15:22:02 GMT, "Ed Huntress" brought forth from the murky depths:

A Freakin' Men!

Ditto "welfare".

- Don't be a possum on the Information Superhighway of life. ----

formatting link
Dynamic Database-Driven Websites

Reply to
Larry Jaques

The American way, the human way, is to try to cut the best deal you possibly can. Everyone wants to sell high and buy low, whether that's goods or labor. The driving force is greed. Greed is good. It is what makes the wheels of commerce turn.

In a free market, value is established by the no holds barred back and forth bargaining between buyers and sellers. Whatever both of them are willing to accept *is* the real value of the item, commodity, labor, or whatever else the haggling is about.

Now sometimes one party gets skinned, sometimes the other party gets skinned. Not all buyers or sellers are smart enough to cut a good deal, or know when to walk away from a bad one. But in the aggregate of the market, the dumb and the smart average out, and we get what we call the market value.

This process is called the action of Adam Smith's Invisible Hand. It is the best, and most natural, way of establishing value when there are many buyers and many sellers operating in an uncoerced market. Where things can get sticky is when the market is coerced, by government, by unions, by monopolistic enterprises. etc.

That's why we have anti-trust laws, so monopolies can't dictate to the market. It is why we have right to work statutes, so unions can't become all coercive. It is why we vote for people who promise to try to minimize government distortions of the market by eliminating discriminatory tariffs, tax policies, regulatory activity, etc.

It isn't a perfect system, particularly where government involves itself, but it is the best we've been able to come up with to try to maintain a market where Adam Smith's Invisible Hand can work freely, and true market value can be established and maintained.

Gary

Reply to
Gary Coffman

But they don't exist in an economic vacuum either. Short of war, we can't stop the Chinese from trading with other nations. We can't stop them underbidding us for the world's business, or competing with us for the world's resources. We can keep them from selling directly to our domestic consumers, to the detriment of our consumers. We can prevent our manufacturers from selling to them, to our manufacturers detriment. But we can't stop them from playing in the world market where we have to compete with them.

More to the point, money is fungible. Since the world trades with dollars, anyone's dollars are the same as anyone else's. When the Chinaman sells something to the Turk, he gets dollars. When he buys something from the Englishman, he pays over those dollars. When the Englishman then buys goods from the US, he's paying with the Chinaman's dollars, which in turn were the Turk's dollars, which in turn were part of an eight billion dollar bribe paid to the Turks by the US taxpayer.

In other words, we're trading with the Chinaman whether we realize it or not. And his absolute advantage in terms of lower costs is affecting us whether we realize it or not.

Gary

Reply to
Gary Coffman

This is about a country mile from what we were talking about, and I've never said anything about manipulating the Chinese or anyone else. But before we get off on a theoretical tangent, let's do a reality check on what you just said.

China's trade surplus with the US was around $103 billion last year. But, with the rest of the world, China ran a trade DEFICIT of over $75 billion.

I'll leave it to you to figure out the implications of that. I'll just point out that there is no way we would want to cut them off, because we'd go into a depression just as fast as their economy tanked. It would be like knocking a hole in the bottom of the boat you're both sailing in. You should consider, also, that no one would give them credit without the trade surplus; they need the cash, and they need at least 7% growth to keep the house of cards afloat, which they couldn't have without a trade surplus, and every country in the world knows it. Well, Hamei may not know it.

We could, but there is no conceivable circumstance in which it would be to our advantage to do so.

Their currency is not fungible. They play fungies with *our* currency. There is no offshore trade in the renminbi because they won't accept renminbi in exchange for others' currencies. They like it that way.

Oh, I think we realize that China's cost advantages work their way through a variety of trade routes. I don't think anyone can escape it anymore; when we're the ones running the big deficits, and the rest of the world is running a net surplus in relation to China, *somebody* must be coming out of the other side of the deal.

Reply to
Ed Huntress

Yes, I know. I believe I was the first to mention that in this thread. Someone else mentioned the obvious corollary, we aren't doing a good job marketing our products to the Chinese, but others in the world are.

So we want them to have a strong trade surplus. It is in our own self-interest to encourage them to do so. Anything we might do to harm their trade surplus would rebound negatively on us.

So tariffs, offsets, and the like are a very bad idea.

Doesn't matter. The world trades in dollars, so do the Chinese. They could use cowchips for money internally for all we care. The only money that impacts us is the dollars which cross their borders, in both directions.

Yes, and this brings up a very obvious point. It doesn't really matter what sort of bilateral trade agreements we might sign with China, the effects of their trade will still be felt here, if not directly then indirectly due to the fungibility of dollars. The same goes for bilateral agreements with any other country. We really need a single global WTO agreement to address world trade via all its various and sundry routes.

Gary

Reply to
Gary Coffman

I've been following this thread with great interest; the URL above is much appreciated. Here's another that I happened to stumble across just a few days ago - , titled "The Nation That Lost Its Jobs, But Got Them Back". It doesn't get into the economic theory, just describes the results in an amusing, folktalish way.

Reply to
Scott R. Keszler

Nation

Cute story. I wish they'd tell us how Jerry managed to make enough carvings to support an entire industry, and still have time to sit in his hot tub.

That's the Austrian school of economics for you. They tend to drop a few stitches of logic from time to time. Neat theories are what they're about, and don't bother them with the facts.

Ed Huntress

Reply to
Ed Huntress

PolyTech Forum website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.