ClimateSanity
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Do you have an answer to the berean?It's always easier to find someone who believes in the the tooth fairy than it is to get convincing evidence for her.
Do you have an answer to the berean?It's always easier to find someone who believes in the the tooth fairy than it is to get convincing evidence for her.
Do you have an answer to the berean?
Here is an article that goes directly to the point I was trying to make about NAFTA and globalism:Truth is, you have to go a long, long way back to find the roots of inequality. Agriculture. Pre-agricultural societies have very little inequality.
However, capitalism can initially produce greater inequality. If capitalism is entirely free, that won't last. But as Adam Smith wrote, you can't find three businessmen meeting socially, without some plot against the public good. Businessmen hate uncertainty and competition, and do what they can to reduce it.
So it's complicated.
NAFTA mainly disadvantaged unskilled workers, whose wages fell and who were competing for fewer such jobs. But this is the effect of free trade and market forces. We shouldn't be making many things that require only unskilled labor. Doing that would simply increase prices of those things, and so make all Americans poorer.
We need to do the things that require higher skills, things that we can competitively sell in the world.
The huge challenge is to prepare workers for that 21st century American economy.
Here is an article that goes directly to the point I was trying to make about NAFTA and globalism:
Multinational corporations and the export of American wealth.
theconservativetreehouse.com/2017/07/17/multinational-corporations-and-the-export-of-american-wealth/#more-135930
The extraction of American wealth is going to less developed countries, but it's their government apparatus and crony's that gets the wealth , not the people. The only people doing well in my wife's home country are those who work for the government or its state owned industries. My wife's uncle's wife works for the state owned electric company and is paid well above the average income of most people who live there and over 60% of the population lives under the poverty line.There's actually a lot in that post that's right. Multinational companies do much of what is described and more. However, it's wrong to say that they are expropriating wealth to the benefit of less developed countries. In fact, multinationals were exploiting poor and undeveloped countries, often with the backing of those companies' home countries, and often for their benefit, long before it became possible for them to do something similar to those richer countries. At one time, it was necessary for, say, BP, to keep good relations with the United States, because the United States's military and diplomatic dominance was useful for enforcing their rights against "sovereign" nations. Now, some of these companies are powerful enough that they don't need those big militaries and state departments, so they are free to switch to a more extractive model against the populations of those countries too. And they are powerful enough that even if they do need the tools of a country, they can force the government to do their bidding.
Who is the wealth being extracted for? Not the developing world, certainly. They're still being exploited for cheap labor and natural resources. It's being extracted for an increasingly narrow band of investors and financiers, most of whom live in "rich" countries, but who feel little obligation to any of them.
The problem is not that international trade has given the developing world too much wealth. The problem is that we let the protections against a race to the bottom of labor standards be set too weak.
Are we really creating more wealth? Doesn't the article and the other one I posted state that most of our economy is based on fake wealth that is all on paper and not backed up with anything real?So long as we are creating much more wealth per capita than other nations, it's hopeless to wish that a considerable part of it won't end up flowing out of the country, in order for us to get things made elsewhere.
Economics is not a zero-sum game.
The extraction of American wealth is going to less developed countries, but it's their government apparatus and crony's that gets the wealth , not the people. The only people doing well in my wife's home country are those who work for the government or its state owned industries. My wife's uncle's wife works for the state owned electric company and is paid well above the average income of most people who live there and over 60% of the population lives under the poverty line.
By the way, extraction of American wealth means from our economy. If any of these financiers live in America, the wealth gained overseas is kept in foreign banks.
We cannot grow an economy on green energy. It simply cannot do what oil gas and coal can do. The country is in sub Saharan Africa.Give me a hint here, what country are we talking about? Our trade relations are different with every country, and it's impossible to generalize about all countries. The biggest thing we import is oil, and we don't really want countries to stop selling us cheap oil just to lower the trade deficit. You want a solution? Invest in good mass transit, infrastructure, and green technologies like EVs.
Trump actually was saying some encouraging things about some of that, although he has an irrational and counterproductive attitude toward green energy. But he's been so hung up on trying to push through an unpopular and ultimately damaging assault on safety protections, and fighting old vendettas that he's put no effort into it.
We give countries dollars that we print ourselves, and they give us oil. Seems like a better deal for us than them.
It's actually better for us if we produce the oil ourselves rather than buy it from other countries.
The poor cannot afford green powered cars. The rich pay more for green cars. How is it a good thing for our economy to spend more on transportation than we used to?That depends. It very well could be a lot more expensive to do that. And really, we need to move away from using oil as we do. The healthiest option is to use green energy to power our transportation.
We cannot grow an economy on green energy. It simply cannot do what oil gas and coal can do.
The country is in sub Saharan Africa.
I wasnt really talking about trade as much as I'm talking about the financial sector making fake money here and then they invest in others countries who do not build their economies with it.
Oil and gas and coal can grow an economy at 6%. A green powered economy will actually shrink.
What measures is he implementing that is growing our trade deficit? That's the exact opposite of what he promised.