December 27, 2015

Why free trade [sic] hurts

Economy in Crisis
  1. “Free trade” means unrestricted, uncontrolled access to our economy, tariff- and duty-free, for goods made for $4-per-hour or less.
  2. American manufacturers cannot remain competitive with these wages so jobs are shipped overseas
  3. Our trade deficit now averages $600 billion a year for the last ten years, averaging $1.14 million per minute
  4. For each $1 billion we have in trade deficit we lose 9000 jobs
  5. Real unemployment, which includes those who are underemployed and long term unemployed is now over 12 percent
  6. Wages have stagnated because we have lost manufacturing jobs
  7. The first year after NAFTA was introduced the U.S., our trade deficit with Mexico alone increased by over $17 billion dollars
  8. We have lost over 1 million jobs to NAFTA
  9. Since NAFTA was implemented, 300,000 American family farms have been put out of business. Overall, net farm incomes are down 13 percent

4 comments:

Capt. America said...

Free trade is ruinously expensive, but even without free trade unemployment will remain high on account of the singularity. New manufacturing jobs will not and should not go to humans. Free trade or anything like it must end, but that's not nearly enough.

Kevin Carson said...

Actually genuine free trade would also mean an end to taxpayers paying long-distance shipping costs on subsidized highways, railroads and airports, and protecting the sea lanes at taxpayer expense rather than the expense of those shipping goods on them.

It would mean an end to World Bank loans to build the local utility and road infrastructures without which it would be impossible to locate much of the outsourced manufacturing capacity overseas.

And it would mean an end to the patent and trademark laws that enable American corporations to maintain a legal monopoly on the disposal of outsourced production.

In other words, it would be a lot cheaper and more efficient under those conditions to micro-manufacture goods for Americans in garage factories close to where they live, and for the facilities in China to disregard American "intellectual property" and produce cheap goods for the local market rather than export.

Capt. America said...

But free trade means trade war. Always and forever. Once the "trading partner's"
capacity for production is destroyed, the winner is left with a bunch of bad
debts it can't ever collect. China has not only destroyed the US economy, it has destroyed its own by "winning". Now it needs new "trading partners" to exploit.
Garage factories need protection. Otherwise the big guys simply pick them off
one by one. Free trade is bogus economic theory. It never has worked as you expect, and it never will.

Kevin Carson said...

No. The "big guys" could never even exist without massive government subsidies and protections. Big business couldn't survive without government -- the capitalists' government -- to prop it up. Small-scale production is more efficient. Big business is like a turtle on top of a fence post: It couldn't get up there by itself.