Comment by dclowd9901 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dclowd9901 | Hacker News Reader

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>There's no doubt that free trade is a big net positive for the US.

Eh, I'm not so sure that cow's so sacred. Is free trade positive for the American economy? Yes, of course. It moves our country toward a richer, more intellectually-based economy, which should lead to greater quality of life for everyone: fewer shitty jobs building stuff, being hurt by industrial processes, working really really hard to make little money.

I guess I'm going to parrot you a bit here, because I agree with the rest of your point, but what's happening is the second part of that equation, the benefit for the workers and the individuals, is not being met. Our economy is flourishing, but workers who have been displaced are not being supported.

Our rich, rich economy should be able to either 1) train up people who were formerly doing the blue collar work to succeed in an intellectually based economy or 2) provide them with a standard of living given their inability to find good work (the standard income idea).

We are not even attempting to do either.

College costs a fucking shitload and social programs are drying up left and right. Our kids are getting dumber, relatively speaking, so they will be less competitive in a global workplace.

So no, that is not what I would consider a "net positive" as a net positive, in my mind, means that what's happening is good for most people. Clearly, it is not. We shouldn't make it a platitude, because then we don't get to say, "Free trade is clearly good, but if and only if..."

> "Free trade is clearly good"

This statement reveals one of the larger problems in US culture: using profitability as he primary (or only) metric when judging social, political, or cultural issues. One of the best descriptions of this problem was David Simon's talk[1] from a few years ago, which I highly recommend.

    And that notion that capital is the metric, that profit is the metric by which
    we're going to measure the health of our society is one of the fundamental
    mistakes of the last 30 years. [...]

    [...] the idea that the market is going to heed all of the human concerns
    and still maximize profit is juvenile. It's a juvenile notion and it's still
    being argued in my country passionately and we're going down the tubes. And it
    terrifies me because I'm astonished at how comfortable we are in absolving
    ourselves of what is basically a moral choice. Are we all in this together
    or are we all not?

The thing we call "free trade"[2] has clearly helped profits in the US, but "profit" is only one aspect that needs to be considered when evaluating if something has been "good" to a society. As you pointed out, we have had several decades of policies that were very effective at creating profit by razing the demand side of the market. A proper evaluation would have included other concerns like preserving demand and investing in less-obviously-profitable things like education.

As a result of this myopia - combined with the gradual destruction of social safety nets - we are now starting to see what happens when people start to lose faith in society. This causes people to start looking for "someone else" to fix these problems. So now we see fascism rising to try to capture some of that unrest. This is going to turn violent a lot faster than most people expect if we allow the status quo to continue.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ZOH9DgzTCs http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/08/david-simon-cap...

[2] The policies pushed by the big treaties are just as much about adding barriers-to-entry and removing regulation (often called "standardizing" or similar newspeak; the canonical example is credit card companies racing into Delaware to exploit the local laws and the "free (interstate) trade" of credit.

+1

The real problem in the US is that costs are prohibitive, particularly with regards to education. Add to that crazy housing costs (SF/NYC/etc) as well as health care prices and you've got a recipe for disaster..

The places that are currently the most anti free trade are not SF/NYC/etc.

That's because trickle-down does work to some extent (which isn't to say it's not still a socially regressive economic idea). A larger share of the global economy going to someone in your town raises all boats.

But in towns where parent's trade-exported jobs predominated, there's only pain without the benefit. Hence the resentment of the policy.

Which is good. People getting pissed off about that and making political choices based on that fact should be happening due to the fact that we haven't allocated the increased wealth due to trade around fairly.

... Honestly, we're essentially running knowledge/tech trickle-down economic policies now. In that if you aren't one of that class, then hopefully some of that wealth might get down to you... eventually...

That's an explicit policy of the Federal Reserve. Technological and economic progress means the price of goods is always trending down. As such, anything that can be financialized inevitably skyrockets.

> fewer shitty jobs building stuff

I agree that jobs involving manual labor and assembly have a higher risk of physical injury than desk jobs. But I don't agree that "building stuff" is categorically more shitty than, say, sitting in a cubicle farm trying to maximize the rate at which people click ads.

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