Quote:
Originally Posted by AVGWarhawk
Funny part is I believe the US helped China get to this point. Anyone up for a trip to Walmart?
|
Yes, we
did help China get to this point. Eventually, we will help them, and ourselves, advance beyond it through continued trade. How is that funny?
If I may be so so audacious, I will presume that you have at least a passing sympathy for arguments made by protectionist interests. I can't say I blame you if that is the case. The arguments made are very attractive. Who doesn't want to "buy American" or "Secure our future" or, as always
, "help the children". It all sounds very good, but the economic reality is that people just don't want all the junk we used to produce. It's too expensive and superfluous for the people we want to sell it to. We've moved on to another stage of economic development. Now we deal with finance and service; things that a nation with an advanced standard of living tends to do.
What we are really doing is exactly what anyone with their dang head screwed on right would already know. We're listening to intense arguments from people who have a vested interest in preserving their jobs because most of us don't have the time or the care to really look into those arguments. It's a side-effect of having an increasingly advanced and specialized society. We just go with whatever some sufficiently clever and interested person came up with. It's like an evolved Luddite movement. This should be obvious. We've been through this stupid (expletive) like, a thousand times before.
The fact is that Wal-Mart is a legitimate business entity that provides needed goods at low cost for a net gain in economic productivity, not just here, but the world over. It provides cheap goods to us, that we apparently demand in great quantities, and it provides a market for people willing to produce those goods for what they see as an aceeptable wage. The day will come when China and the, what, twenty-something other major exporters that nobody mentions because no vested interest told them to do so, will advance to the point where they can no longer offer us cheap products and someone else will take their place.
Ideally, everyone will move up and our descendants will be having this same discussion many years from now in a different world and someone will eventually knock some economic sense into them, only to repeat the process again. In reality, we're screwed. Our misguided efforts to freeze the status quo through protectionist trade measures will only result in our eventual decline. How many times have we learned this, now? Like, freaking ten!? And that's only concerning the major nations of the past anyone bothered to learn about. Why is it so difficult for people to understand that people at the top want to stay there, and that they are inclined to try to stratify things?
We have to be competitive if we are to remain a viable and powerful society. We have to run even faster if we want to stay on top. That's not a politcal message, it's just nature. If it were up to me, I'd remove every single trade barrier, be it tariff or quota, erected by the protectionists and in so doing send a clear message to the ambitous and productive the world over that
this is the place to do business, to trade, to generate wealth through mutually beneficial transaction. I'd also destroy the power of government to erect barriers, or play favorites. No freaking shortcuts, no handouts, no forced charity. Such measures would fix this economy in a matter of days, not weeks or months or years. It's as easy fishing, all you have to do is put the right bait out there, and they will come. Easier, in fact, as there is a shortage of wealth.
I do however, support the idea that those who have been fortunate should help the less fortunate. Most people do. That's how we ended up with charity in the first place, and a wealthy society is in a better position to give than one that is declining, or destitute.
So take a moment before decrying the evil that is Wal-Mart, or any other company, for that matter. Companies like Wal-Mart fight every day just to conduct legitimate business that people with other agendas and impressive rhetoric seek to oppose. This is not to say that businesses are saints, they are certainly no more saintly than the people who comprise them, but in giving them the power to protect their own interests, whatever argument they use, you are also giving them the power to destroy your interests. Amazing that it takes all that and more to explain something so basic. No wonder the idea has about as much popular appeal as physics.