When Americans No Longer Own America

When Americans No Longer Own America

The old concept was that if there was a dollar's worth of labor in a pair of shoes made in the USA, and somebody wanted to import shoes from China where there may only be ten cents worth of labor in those shoes, we'd level the playing field for labor by putting a 90-cent import tariff on each pair of shoes. Companies could choose to make their products here or overseas, but the ultimate cost of labor would be the same.

Then came the flat-worlders, led by misguided true believers and promoted by multinational corporations. Do away with those tariffs, they said, because they "restrain trade." Let everything in, and tax nothing. The result has been an explosion of cheap goods coming into our nation, and the loss of millions of good manufacturing jobs and thousands of manufacturing companies. Entire industry sectors have been wiped out.

These policies have kneecapped the American middle class. Our nation's largest employer has gone from being the unionized General Motors to the poverty-wages Wal-Mart. Americans have gone from having a net savings rate around 10 percent in the 1970s to a minus .5 percent in 2005 - meaning that they're going into debt or selling off their assets just to maintain their lifestyle.

(via)

I'm sure the "Global Free Trade at all costs" brigade will tout the "success" of free trade by showing that large multinational companies make a lot of money by outsourcing everything except top management to third world countries without reflecting on the human cost of this "success". They're not 'Free Traders', they're 'Cheap Labour Conservatives'.

Cheap-labor conservatives like "free trade", NAFTA, GATT, etc. Why. Because there is a huge supply of desperately poor people in the third world, who are "over a barrel", and will work cheap.

Source: Cheap Labour Conservatives

Personally, I'm in favour of "Free Trade", but not "Free Trade at all costs". I don't believe that a corporation should be allowed to massively profit from driving local farmers out of business, or laying off first world workers to recruit sweatshop labour to make their products.