Just curious, but what's wrong with 'protection-ism'?

[flexnor]

we have a 5 sided building in washington, that costs an awfull lot of money to run, and it's sole purpose (supposedly) is to 'protect'

so obviously, there's nothing wrong with the root word itself, it's the -ism.

but nearly all other nations of the world (correctly) view their markets as a sacred resource, that cannot be accessed without compensation to those consumers (who make the market) who lose income when that market is tapped by a foreign product

I'll never forget reading a fed ex document attached to an ipod shipped directly from china, with it's sternly worded warning about china's 'anti-dumping' laws, making it totally illegal to dump good in THEIR country that can be made more cheaply elsewhere. i remember my stunned reaction reading it 'Really!?'

why do we provide military 'protection' to every other nation in the world for free, while viewing our domestic consumption market asset (one of the world's most valuable assets) as something wrong to protect?

to artificially prop up this asset, while real incomes have sunk due to global-ism, we have flooded the nation with cheap credit, and created perhaps the stupidest economic thing in the nation's history, the housing bubble, to help bail out the last failed bubble, the stock market, then created another stock bubble after that by just giving a trillion borrowed from the nation we gave all the jobs to to bail out theose who caused it, with no strings attached cash. TARP, they buying of 'toxic assets', is little more than the govenment buying someone's old car, ready for the junkyard, for the original sticker price

the average citizen got nothing from this but scary inflation and national debt

and BOTH parties have done this to us with their free trade kool-aid

any thoughts on this?

[OhioChick]

1. Agreed....no argument here n/t

[flexnor]

2. my point is, you cannot exclude quality and security of work life from 'standard of living'

and that's exactly what globalism has done

[TheMastersNemesis]

3. What The GOP Has Done

What the GOP has done with the aid of big business is replace job quality, job security and longevity with "gypsy jobs". Those are and endless series of low wage no benefit jobs that offer nothing of real value to the worker except the modern version of slavery. Democrats have done very little to counter this trend by allowing labor laws to be weakened.

The American business community has betrayed the American worker to protect insane profits. They have ended the social contract. We have entered and era where a worker is pretty much finished with regular employment by the time they are 45. It used to be that your highest earnings were just before you retired. Now you are sent to the scrap heap 20 or more years before you can get Social Security.

Today's younger workers cannot get their 1st Social Security check until they are 68. If the GOP has its way they will not get Social Security and Medicare until the are 72 or older. No wonder more and more of the young might support privatization.

The most brutal statistic is that with the GOP "train wreck free market economy" 60% of the working populace cannot make enough money to even have a 401k much less pay for health insurance.

[flexnor]

4. BOTH Parties have done this to us. NAFTA, WTO were designed by Bush Sr, but

were signed and implemented by Clinton, along with massive H-1b visa increases and MFN-China

Obama talked a good game about NAFTA before being elected, but added South Korea free trade agreement after he got in

while this may have been a GOP design in it's orgin (Bush Sr), more of free trade actually was signed by democrat presidents than GOP, even if that was just a coincidence of timing of economic cycles

[Fumesucker]

5. Democratic presidents..

Using Democrat where Democratic is the proper form is kind of considered a slur on the party here on DU since Republicans use it with iron consistency.

Not to say I don't agree with the substance of your post.

[flexnor]

13. no offense intended

and i'll honor that here

although that distinction had never been true in my family, a family that has been in the party for over 100 years

[TheMastersNemesis]

15. Exactly Right

You are exactly correct. The free trade agreements came out of the Reagan era, were substantially negotiated under Bush I and then passed by Clinton. Clinton originally ran against NAFTA and then turned around and sided with Newt and the GOP and forced Democrats to pass NAFTA and GATT and favored nation status for China. That was a complete catastrophe.

I believe the Democrats lost control of the Congress because of his betrayal. Clinton's actions gave the GOP all the cover they needed to dismantle manufacturing. For some reason Clinton was really stupid. He did as much damage to the Democrats as anyone and they have been on the defensive ever since. So now the Democrats cannot realistically talk against free trade because they have economic blood on their hands as well.

And to top that the "new Democrats" have embraced the free trade mantra and that is a huge mistake. Obama cannot really support free trade that kills American jobs and talk a populist agenda. We will never be able to compete with wages in the third world no matter how supposedly "fair trade" is. You cannot compete with countries where a wage might be as low as 50 cents a day.

So the whole scenario is a train wreck for American workers. And the Democratic party is more right wing and antiworker than it ever has been. The support for unions is weak at best.

[flexnor]

16. ross perot explains it all in 1992 debate

[Spike89]

6. It is a tool and sometimes it's appropriate, other times not

The obvious aspect that must be considered is that trade requires two willing partners. If we refuse to allow, say China, to compete in our markets, then we can't expect them to allow our goods in their country. Of course not all goods/industries are anywhere near comparable as trade items, nor do all products require the same level of protectionism. For example, our wheat and corn production is high enough to make us a net exporter of food--we don't need to protect those crops perhaps as rigorously as we protect say citrus.
In manufacturing, we might choose to allow high labor/low margin goods (electronics assembly) from countries with a large semi-skilled workforce in order to get their government's permission to sell our high-tech specialized products in their market (such as turbine engines). An aside, but many people are unaware that the great commuter train systems in Europe, Japan, and increasingly in China are overwhelmingly run with locomotive engines made in the U.S. (we also dominate in nuclear energy plant equipment, heavy equipment, and many other high dollar products).
Protectionism is a key part of maintaining a healthy economy. Free trade is also important--despite all the focus on outsourcing and imports, the US is still the biggest exporter of goods (by dollars) in the world. If all trade ended, we'd be the biggest loser. More importantly, free trade significantly lessens the pressure to wage war for resources.

[HopeHoops]

7. As long as trade agreements are fair, all parties benefit. That's not the case in most cases.

Free trade with China means we have no control over abuse of workers and wages but get their crap for a fraction of what a humane factory would cost to make the same thing. We have unions, and any good Republican knows THAT's bad for the bottom line. Mexico used to be a land of shitty products but because of NAFTA they are actually well on the way to what we consider minimal standards. From what I've heard, even their pot has improved. Canada probably benefited the most from that agreement but they've been a trade partner forever. It just dropped some outdated barriers.

Tariffs and exclusions don't benefit anyone but the political entities behind them. Exclusions for safety reasons are entirely justifiable and yet some agreements prevent them. As for me personally, I PRACTICE protectionism when possible. If there's a US made option, I'll buy that. If there are none, I reconsider the purchase.

[flexnor]

11. exactly - trade does make sense in many cases, but MFN-China and NAFTA

was union busting, plain and simple

union busting, once and for all

[HopeHoops]

14. US-Mexico was worse before NAFTA and Candada was basically a "meh".

China and India are the ones that are fucking us sideways now.

[Fumesucker]

8. Umm.. It would interfere with the ability of the 1% to economically rape the 99%?

[Jim Lane]

9. What's wrong with it is that other countries protect their markets against us

If every country were completely free to set its own trade rules, most would impose tariffs and other import restrictions to protect their domestic manufacturers. It would hurt their domestic consumers, who would have to pay higher prices for some items, but most governments respond more to producer pressure, because their economic interest is more concentrated.

Politically, the problem arises when the producers are threatened, because Country A's protectionism hurts Country B's producers, and vice versa. An agreement by both countries to allow free trade helps the producers in both countries, and often incidentally benefits the consumers in both. So there are some genuine problems with protectionism and some genuine benefits to free trade.

Of course, it's far from black and white. A free trade agreement produces losers as well as winners. Most obviously, if Country A drops its tariffs and Country B's widget producers can then enter the widget market in Country A and undersell the Country A producers, then the people who used to work at the widget factories in Country A will lose their jobs. There are other problems that are probably familiar to most DUers.

I think you're wrong, though, in emphasizing, as one problem, that other countries protect their markets heavily. Most free trade agreements involve reciprocity. It's a matter of smart negotiating to make sure that what you get is more valuable than what you lose. Because there is such a thing as a mutually beneficial exchange, however, there's room for free trade agreements to create a win-win situation. The Kool-Aid comes in thinking that every free trade agreement is automatically beneficial.

[Zalatix]

10. The free trade advocacy bloc seems to have fled the DU.

Where do they have left to run to now? It seems neither party supports them anymore.

As one of them said to me on here, the GOP voters are more against offshoring than the Democrats. Now we're finding out the Democrats are as much against it as the GOP.

America is waking up.

[ProSense]

12. Here's a

good read:

FDR’s Comprehensive Approach to Freer Trade

by David Woolner

<...>

The driving force behind this effort was FDR’s Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, who considered the passage of Smoot-Hawley an unmitigated disaster. Hull had been arguing in favor of freer trade for decades, both as a Democratic congressman and later senator from Tennessee. Given the long-standing protectionist tendencies of Congress — which reached their zenith with the passage of Smoot-Hawley, the highest tariff in U.S. history — Hull faced an uphill struggle to accomplish this task. He also had to overcome FDR’s initial reluctance to embrace his ideas, as the president preferred the policies of the “economic nationalists” within his administration during his first year in office. By 1934, however, FDR’s attitude began to change, and in March of that year the president threw his support behind Hull’s proposed Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act — a landmark piece of legislation that fundamentally altered the way in which the United States carried out foreign economic policy.

Convinced that the country was not ready for a truly multilateral approach to freer trade, Hull’s legislation sought to establish a system of bilateral agreements through which the United States would seek reciprocal reductions in the duties imposed on specific commodities with other interested governments. These reductions would then be generalized by the application of the most-favored-nation principle, with the result that the reduction accorded to a commodity from one country would then be accorded to the same commodity when imported from other countries. Well aware of the lingering resistance to tariff reduction that remained in Congress, Hull insisted that the power to make these agreements must rest with the president alone, without the necessity of submitting them to the Senate for approval. Under the act, the president would be granted the power to decrease or increase existing rates by as much as 50 percent in return for reciprocal trade concessions granted by the other country.

The 1934 Act granted the president this authority for three years, but it was renewed in 1937 and 1940, and over the course of this period the United States negotiated 22 reciprocal trade agreements. Of these, the two most consequential were the agreements with Canada, signed in 1935, and Great Britain, signed in 1938, in part because they signaled a move away from Imperial Preference and hence protectionism, and in part because they were regarded as indicative of growing solidarity among the Atlantic powers on the eve of the Second World War. It is also important to note that Hull, like many of his contemporaries, including FDR, regarded protectionism as antithetical to the average worker — first, because in Hull’s view high tariffs shifted the burden of financing the government from the rich to the poor, and secondly, because Hull believed that high tariffs concentrated wealth in the hands of the industrial elite, who, as a consequence, wielded an undue or even corrupting influence in Washington. As such, both FDR and Hull saw the opening up of the world’s economy as a positive measure that would help alleviate global poverty, improve the lives of workers, reduce tensions among nations, and help usher in a new age of peace and prosperity. Indeed, by the time the U.S. entered the war, this conviction had intensified to the point where the two men concluded that the root cause of the war was economic depravity.

<...>

Of course, it is important to remember that the Roosevelt administration’s efforts to expand world trade were accompanied by such critical pieces of legislation as the National Labor Relations Act and Fair Labor Standards Act, which vastly strengthened the place of unions in American life. The 1930s and ’40s were also years in which the government engaged in an unprecedented level of investment in America’s infrastructure and industry — largely through deficit spending — that helped vastly expand our manufacturing base and render the United States the most powerful industrialized country in the world. Our efforts to expand trade and do away with protection were only part of a broader effort to reform the U.S. economy in such a way as to provide what FDR liked to call “economic security” for every American.

- more -

http://www.newdeal20.org/2011/10/13/fdrs-comprehensive-approach-to-freer-trade-61632/