Re: Trade debunking

[rick.baird@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]

The effects of free trade are pretty much agreed upon by most economists.
The saliant point in the article is that whatever we switch to will
eventually be off-shored too.  While true, this has always been true and
we've always found our way out of the problem.  Forward thinking societies
will find something else they are better at than the rest of the world.
This is no different than any such economic cycle in the past 100 years.
We've always found a new way to reestablish dominance.

The problem as I see it isn't that it's happening.  It's inevitable.  The
problem is that it's happing so quickly.  More people are getting hurt,
more quickly in more and more job sectors.  It will be tougher to absorb
the jobless into other existing industry sectors and they can't be trained
quickly enough for new ones.

In the past, the economy would eventually right itself.  With training,
displaced workers could actually better themselves.  But now, if I become
unemployable in IT, it will take years to re-tool my skills to the point
where I could regain my current earning potential.

As I said, I'm really on the fence here.  but I'm starting to lean....

Rick

------original message-----------
Folks:

You know they keep saying outsourcing increases trade and so forth.  The
economic theory this is based on is called "comparative advantage".
Any  beginning book on economics will have this in the  first couple of
chapters.  On March  22, 2004, Paul Craig Roberts (former Assistant
Treasury Secretary in the Reagan Administration) wrote a guest column in
Business Week titled "The Harsh Truth About Outsourcing" where he
debunks the "comparative advantage" myth.  Read below for his commentary.

MARCH 22, 2004
<snip>