Comment by sprafa | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sprafa | Hacker News Reader

First of all I think this article is completely delusional. I've yet to meet that many people who don't want a good job with good pay. The actual catastrophe that's happened is the massive loss of manufacturing. Vaclav Smil has said "In every society, manufacturing builds the lower middle class. If you give up manufacturing, you end up with haves and have-nots and you get social polarization. The whole lower middle class sinks."

And that's exactly what's happening. For all his faults (including mass manipulation and being a possibly-tyrannical demagogue) Trump is right about one thing - free trade is not always great and the loss of manufacturing was not "value added" for everyone in the US. But of course discussing this means opening up the whole argument about how economics is broken and you can't do that, as it would threaten stability too much. But anyone who looks into it can see it if they wish. Look into Jonathan Goldsmith's appearance on Charlie Rose when GATT (precursor to the WTO) was announced. He predicted the whole thing and what was going to happen. And he tried to warn us.

Link to video - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4PQrz8F0dBI

See 1 minuet or 3 minute mark

Some of us don't think humans are less deserving on account of which side of a border they were born. Agreeing that free trade did somewhat hurt the American worker, America's loss helped lift hundreds of millions of people elsewhere (especially China) out of poverty.

It's hard to say they should have remained abjectly poor just so some Americans wouldn't experience a (fairly small) drop in living standard. A drop which could be alleviated by more socialist government policy anyway. From a global perspective, free trade is the best thing for improving the welfare of humans going.

It's creating social pressures that might unravel democracy though. It's happened before and it's happening again.

And you say "everyone is deserving of a good life" but Americans do not elect their representatives to lift hundreds of millions of Chinese out of poverty. They elect them to help improve their lives, and they are waking up the fact that they're not doing that, so they are choosing a radical alternative in a desperate attempt to move things in the other direction.

This is the problem with democracy: the people making the decisions often aren't those who are affected by them the most. It's how you define the demos. It's unjust for Americans to vote on policies that make the difference between life and death for large numbers of much poorer people, without giving them any say.

If democratic decision-making goes against vast improvements to the lives of billions of people, then democracy is simply wrong and should be abandoned.

Maybe you're right but I haven't heard of any sensible alternatives.

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