i dont follow why we need food or anything else to be made here. why cant we buy guatamalan tomatoes?

there will always be a small market for local produce, because it is the freshest, and there will always be small farms.

but why do we pretend we need to be self-sufficient in terms of food production? we can echange money for goods and servies. yunno, specializiation. we dont need to make everything. we do our thing, and we buy the rest of what we need.

there will never be a situation where politics makes it so that other countries refuse to sell us food. selling food to the US means mad crazy money and everyone wants to sell us food.

propping up domestic farms and manufacturers restricts our economy from reaching its potential. let the free market work. if american products are better, people will pay more for them (like new balance sneakers, i love those) but dont enact protectionist policies that screw over everyone in order to keep favor one industry over another, because we are working under the misguided assumption that we have to keep american farms alive because "we need to feed ourselves".

or C.: we import the food or whatever from a guy who doesnt have to pay his workers as much. the american guy hiring immigrants goes out of business, which is fine by me.

(although it does suck for him that we didnt allow him to hire immigrant workers so he never had a fair chance at competing)

a nation (A) is said to have a compartive advantage over nation B in production of product (A) if it can produce said product(A) at a lower cost than another country. The cost of the product is defined as the amount of Product (B) that must be given up in order to produce one more unit of Product (A). So therefore nation (A) would have the comparitive advantage in Product (A) Production RELATIVE to nation (B) IF it must give up less of Product (B) to produce another unit of Product (A) than the amount of Product (B) that Nation (B) would have to give up to get another unit of Product (A).

nation A would have a comapritive advantage in producing ping pong balls relative to nation B if it must give up less tennis rackets to produce another unit of ping pong balls than the amount of tennis rackets that nation b would have to give up to get another unit of ping pong balls.

yes I paid attn in school.

hey GFY supa :lol:

So why can't you apply the concept and realize it is exactly what martin is talking about?

C'mon guys...can't we all just get along? All together now.....

I feel better already.

A few observations:

Red is right, the U.S. needs to be self sufficient in food production. If you look at our trade deficit, assuming we could live without agriculture and buy everything we need just doesn't add up.

martin is right, to an extent, when he says there will never be a political situation where all other countries refuse to sell us food. I compare it to oil, they'll always be willing to sell it to us, and we would always have to buy, no matter what the cost. I don't exactly see this as a good thing, however, which is one of the reasons I agree with Red, as I said before.

JS is right. Illegal is illegal, and we currently have a whole bunch of companies in the US breaking the law and getting away with it. Although I favor sending all the illegals we catch back, its kind of like pulling the plug out of your bass tracker and bailing it out with a thimble. You've got a whole lot more coming in than you can send out. Punish the companies who break the law and stop giving these illegals gov't. benefits and you'll plug a lot more of the flow. I doubt that will happen, because the republicans like having them here to work, while the democrats want to give them hand outs and not let them work. Damned if you do, damned if you don't on this one I'm afraid, until some serious changes take place in D.C.

SupaFan is right, comparative advantage is a wonderful concept. Too bad the perfect factors neeed to allow this wonderful concept to come about don't exist and won't ever exist. (I guess it may one day, but that gets into what the Bible says, so I'll leave it out of this discussion.)


The minimum wage: I think the minimum wage has been a good protector of the American way of life. We really haven't had any socialist revolutions that I can think of, so the have-nots must be pretty content, at least to the point they aren't trying to overthrow the government. I like that.


I think we can all agree that we would like to stop the abuse of social welfare in our country. I have no problem with taking care of the old and disabled. What I don't like is people who won't work because they make a decent living off of hand-outs, or people who will only work up to a certain $ amount so they can maintain government support for housing, medical care, food etc (I believe there are a whole lot of people who do this, BTW). If we stop the use of illegals, and force Americans to go back to providing for themselves, we can put an end to much of this whole argument. But, this will tick off a bunch of prospective voters, so it probably won't happen any time soon. Until it does, I'm just gonna walk around and sing that Coca Cola song and think about what might be.

No factors need to exist. If Mexicans produce cotton for half of what we do we buy Mexican cotton and sell them something we make better. We need to stop subsidizing people for being inefficient because it is stupid.

Yo solve the illegal problem all the government has to do is catch companies on the back end. Instead of deporting illegals when they are caught just have them fill out the right paperwork and tax them. Then fine their employers.

why do you think agriculture is unique?

if one country wants to overcharge us, we can buy from another country. if guatamala wants to gouge us, we will shop with el salvador or china. and food is much easier than oil because there are so many more countries that can export it to us. with many sellers in the market, nobody is gonna be able to corner us and bash us in the head with high prices, unless they want to lose the best customer anyone could ever imagine.


one country makes one thing, one country makes another, and we are both happy. we do they pharmaceutical research, and brazil grows bananas. specialization. it works.

it also puts people out of work. plus i just dont feel like it is our right to tell one person what they should have to pay another person. they should write up and sign their own contracts.

me too. i like to sing.