I admire your ignorance in economics. Outsourcing is the result of minimum wages and many other reasons like high union wages and benefits. When you outprice yourself by unreasonable demands for me to pay for your production I will buy whatever is made overseas. And no US businessman is obligated to provide YOU with good paying manufacturing jobs and benefits. And if you say that raising prices stipulate the demsnds you are wrong. It the demsnds by various unions workers and manufacturing workers that force others to raise prices. And at some point it becomes unprofitable to manufacture in US.
President Obama has new priorities. That means new spending.
In his State of the Union, he said, "The American people don't expect government to solve every problem." But then he went on to list how, under his guidance, government will solve a thousand problems, including some (like climate change and a loss of manufacturing jobs) that are probably not even problems.
The president bragged about creating "our first manufacturing innovation institute" in Ohio and says that he will create 15 more. Politicians claim actions like this are needed to solve the "decline of manufacturing" in America. John McCain, Mike...
Remember the greatest period of "outsourcing" was the 1990s when unemployment was historically low.
No knowledgeable person can acknowledge that ON A NET BASIS "real jobs of real Americans have been sacrificed to free trade" because it flatly is not so. That jobs have been eliminated in some industries/areas while MORE have been created in other industries/areas due to free trade is true - but that is the nature of the competitive market.
There IS no "lost employment" in the aggregate from free trade. I'm sorry, but that is simply fact, not theory, not speculation, not a suggestion.
That we have high unemployment due to government intervention has NOTHING to do with trade policy.
IT IS ECONOMICALLY IMPOSSIBLE FOR WEALTH TO BE REDUCED BY FREE TRADE.
Government intervention is always harmful - including as a protectionist.
I'll stand corrected on Batra's politics. There were always concluding chapters of his theories I simply dismissed as looney. But the numeric analysis portions were never political and numbers are numbers.
Our gov't adjusts markets every day in the name of fairness, but not trade.
The process is called comparative advantage; it's not a theory and it's not disputable. Our nation was, in fact, most successful when tariffs have been least (primarily the late 19th century) and tarfiffs helped extend the Great Depression.
Batra's overtly socialist by his own admission (as Chang favorably cites Marx). Hamilton was a mercantilist whose theories were completely debunked by Adam Smith.
I read economists on both sides. I've never called those I disagree with socialists or Marxists. I try to understand how they disagree and why. If you don't like Batra's "The Myth of Free Trade" there are many. I don't know the politics of most. I don't think Alexander Hamilton was a socialist.
That the US drives up costs is certainly true, but the ONLY solution is to address THAT issue - adding protectionist tariffs are ALWAYS harmful to the economy under every circumstance.
Too deep to delve into, but at least consider that the US inflates the cost of goods manufactured within the US (FICA, workmens comp, osha, overtime, minimum wage, etc) but will not charge a compensating import duty for lower cost to manufacture where these same US regulations do not apply. The US gov't creates the financial incentive that drives all relocation.
doc's problem is that he would heap another bad decision (protectionism) on top of bad decision (minimum wage laws/unionization).