that's not everything he is talking about.

Red, no one has taken me to "school"

I am not your amigo.

You're definately to the left.

good day.

You cant talk to these tree stumps. It's like finding a rotten stump in the woods and trying to get an decent conversation out of it.
Supa thinks he and martin are economic Prof's. A devout catholic and an atheist. Go figure.
Red thinks he's a moderate and Supa is his new hero, for takin me to school, yeah right.:dis:
I've probably forgotten more about the world than SUpa will ever know. BUT Experience doesn't count anymore. Status quo. God help us. :dis:

Meanwhile, my dog probably controls more economics than all three of these guys put together. :shock:





rave on ye lunatics :lol: I got a hot rod to play with.
No use teaching tree stumps, life's too good. :lol:

correct.

they do, but i am not biased. i am consistently for small government and free trade. plus i still consider myself a southern fellow.

i like to use pharmaceutical research as my example because it an obviously important industry that doesnt require cheap labor. we should be concentrating on industries that we have advantages in, like industries that require education, like research. and there is tons of money to be made in these industries.

what do you mean?

i dont think intel or apple is worried about competition from a nicaraguan company. we can do industries others cannot. so lets do them and stop pretending we can compete in industries we cant.

anything that requires an educated workforce.

i am thrilled about, because the reason they have that cheap labor is that they are poor. if you want to be poor too, then by all means lets prop up a dying industry with tax dollars. lets hurt ourselves so we can compete at a lower level, like them.

if that is the case then we wouldnt need any susidies would we?

being too good to work for crappy wages isnt "giving in".

i would rather be a low level office administrator making copies than working in the fields. yunno urban areas have working class jobs too, why not just go ahead and be totally socialist and give them free money too?

we dont have to support employees with tax dollars. unless of course you cripple our economy my spending billions of dollars on stopping our economy from advancing out of the industries that should be taken care of by third world countries.

not to mention the punishment you are doing to theird world poor people who want a fair chance at selling their products to us, but cannot because we are charging ourselves to "cheapen" our own products.

i think this your position can be quickly summarized by this statement:

"I'm a little biased, since so many people in my area depend on agriculture for a living."

that is unfortunate because subsidies and protectionism will make us far poorer than we have to be, as well as badly hurting developing countries who want access to our markets. plus it just is immoral to take money from one person and give to another because you favor a particular industry.

i just dont think it is possible to overstate how important free trade is.

give supa a break, he cant be wrong about everything.

red is a moderate compared to america. not to us, but we are mostly rightys. not that i think being moderate is good, it isnt. but red surely is moderate.

sometimes i say red is unpricipled. but he inst the only one. i would like to see republicans really oppose government intervention in their lives and favor free trade. too often principles break down because of religion or geography or race or whatever.

We don't even have to get away from agriculture completely. There are hi-tech crops like soy with boundless potential. Instead of trying to compete in markets where they cannot, why can't farmers change their crops?

At the end of the day I think free trade and cheap labor is almost always good, and protectionism and artificially raised wages are almost always bad,

Your logic is flawed because some countries that have cheap labor also have an educated workforce, like India and Malaysia. We see this in the technology industry. We are losing more than just unskilled jobs to other countries. There are plenty of smart people in those countries to handle research jobs, as well as other jobs that requires an education. Their labor costs are less than here in the good ole USA.

If we continue losing all these jobs overseas over the next couple of decades, our two largest industries might end up being retail and government ... not exactly high paying jobs.

Your counterpoint is slightly flawed. While countries like India, China, and Malaysia do have educated workforces they are better at working with existing technology. The R&D dollars are all in the US. Noone is even close to matching us on R&D.

No, not yet in R&D. But remember, they weren't close to us in technology two decades ago either.

It's only a matter of time. Our costs here are just too high. As other countries grow and can provide an environment for R&D, companies will move it overseas. We simply have too many government regulations and high taxes that drives our costs up. I don't see that changing anytime soon.