Woodruff wrote:patrickaa317 wrote:Woodruff wrote:waauw wrote:seriously ooge? you're against international trade? You do realise what happens when you hinder or stop international trade?
- Rise of inflation, because you lower the advantages of large scale production
- Less foreign products. This may sound nice to you, but this means less availability french wines, middle-eastern oil, peruvian copper, ...
- products the US imports will have to be produced domestically. This again may sound nice, but it has serious side-effects. The western world has a smaller secondary sector, meaning lower industrial polution. The US soil and air will get poluted faster and more easily.
- Slower technological development. Technologies nowadays develop fast because we exchange high tech products on a global scale. Take that away and people in the US can't ameliorate european technologies for example.
- Lower financial and monetary strength of the US. One of the reasons the US won the cold war is because of the Petrodollar. The US dollar is used as a reserve currency on a global scale. And to get these dollars businesses and countries worldwide intentionally trade with the US or invest in the US to get their hands on those safe USD currency papers(which of course is fading, because of the FED-policy).
- Lesser trade, means lesser need of USD by foreigners. So all that USD money will be sold on the market, again increasing inflation but for a different reason this time.
- Lesser trade, means lesser economic and financial influence over other countries. So if the US demands something from another country, they'll be less likely to comply to the american needs.
- setting trade barriers for import, means that other countries will react and not accept american products anymore.
You are assuming Japan is doing well with it's protectionist policies. Yet what you don't realise is that it's one of the reasons the japanese have been in a deflationary spiral for decades. So stop being so mercantilist. That's a way of economic thought that faded away more than 200 years ago.
While I don't agree with making it a requirement, I certainly WOULD like to see more things produced here in the United States as opposed to abroad. We seem to have lost our production vision in chasing the almighty dollar.
I completely agree. Unfortunately Americans want to get paid $20/hour to make a widget, while foreign workers will get paid $3/hour to make widget. And customers want to pay $5 for said widget. Unfortunately it takes 30 mins production time to make said widget. So either they can pay $15 for American widget or $3 for foreign made widget. It's a vicious cycle.
Certainly, salary is an important component to the cost of widgets, and it is absolutely an affecting factor in the costs. As well, the desire for a low price by the consumer absolutely affects how much companies can have wiggle room against the salary, Yet I do believe that they are often less of factors than the desire for larger profits encouraging the moves outside of the United States and into places like China and Nigeria. It's not a coincidence that more and more of the money is resting with fewer and fewer.
Right, and if the salary differences weren't so great between countries, they could probably enjoy those larger profits while making things here.
Also, as far as the money resting with fewer, all the current policies really only hurt the small guys wanting to be big. No matter what regulations/policies are put in place, Wal-Mart will always be able to thrive. But the next innovater is the one who suffers by additional regs/policies. The big guy can weather the storm, the little and medium guys cannot.