“In later years, the United States took mercantilism to its most advanced and fully developed level as an economic policy when Alexander Hamiltonenunciated the Hamiltonian economic program, and Abraham Lincoln finally solidified a trade and industrial policy which was to guide American economic policy into 1972.”
Have you noticed that the U.S. has been stagnating since around the early 1970’s? How everyone’s in debt to their eyeballs and working like dogs, if they’re lucky enough to be employed? Despite all the fancy computers, the doubling of productivity, and so on?
The people who tell you you have no right to a government which serves your interests are the same as the people who tell you you have no right to own a gun. Hardly anyone is silly enough to think that guns or governments serving interests won’t exist in the future… it’s just that you’re not allowed to hav__e__ one.
The idea is to make us helpless and dependent [on “the market” - which means faceless multi-national corporations and banks] so we can be easily colonized [by - guess who].
And LaRouche is a creepy megalomaniac cult leader.
What’s the connection? You need an actual argument, that is, you need to show causality. How does free trade lead to stagnating wages? Don’t you think that it’s far more likely that wage stagnation is actually the result of inflationist policies pursued since the 60s and 70s? Specifically, the introduction of the modern welfare state (LBJ’s great society) and the breakdown of Bretton Woods (cut all ties to gold)? You literally have no argument. Also, leisure time has actually increased since the 1960s.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_labor_arbitrage### Global labor arbitrage is an economic phenomenon where, as a result of the removal of or disintegration of barriers to international trade, jobs move to nations where labor and the cost of doing business (such as environmental regulations) is inexpensive and/or impoverished labor moves to nations with higher paying jobs.[1] The “global labor arbitrage” phenomenon has been described by economist Stephen S. Roach.[2]…
Often, a prosperous nation (such as the United States) will remove its barriers to international trade, integrating its labor market with those of nations with a lower cost of labor (such as India, China, and Mexico), resulting in a shifting of jobs from the prosperous nation to the developing one. The end result is an increase in the supply of labor relative to the demand for labor, which means a decrease in the price point (wages, standard of living) where supply and demand curves intersect. This means that some of the workers in the lower cost of labor country integrate into the global economy and their wages and standard of living may rise slightly. According to supporters of international trade, highly skilled laborers, especially college-educated white collar workers (such as computer programmers and IT workers), in the prosperous nation develop new products, services, and markets due to the freeing of their time from mundane activities and they create new opportunities for wealth creation. In reality, however, people in wealthy countries do not possess a monopoly on innovation and knowledge-based college-education-requiring jobs can also be performed for lower wages in other countries, so many of those jobs, such as computer programming and information technology, have also been offshored or may be filled by foreigners on work visas (such as the H-1B or L-1)…
Race to the bottom### From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A race to the bottom is a socio-economic concept that occurs between countries. When competition becomes fierce between nations over a particular area of trade and production, countries are given increased incentive to dismantle currently existing regulatory standards.
A race to the bottom may also occur within a country (such as between states or counties), but this occurs much less frequently because the federal government has recourse to enact legislation slowing or halting the race before its effects become too pervasive.
Is a guy on a desert island ever going to be as rich as the poorest country in the world? Of course not. Introducing nation states does not make economic laws moot. I fail to see how intranational commerce differs from international commerce in any meaningful way. I also see no evidence, theoretical or emperical, of the race to the bottom.
Here’s an experiment for you: live the next 30 days without engaging in trade of any sort. Let us know how that turns out.