The marvels of technology continue to boggle the mind and to change everyday lives. However, is there a tipping point where too much of a good thing doesn’t yield jobs or economic benefits? In fact, it might hinder job creation and limit broad economic benefits.
The CMA-CGM Benjamin Franklin, perhaps the world’s largest cargo ship will call Los Angles its home. It’s five times the size of the Titanic; these Chinese-made vessels are breathtaking.
- 1,300 Feet-long
- 177 Feet-wide
- 197 Feet-high
- 18,000 Containers
- 27 Crew members
However, with only twenty-seven jobs, the ship is a technological marvel for sure, but how many jobs could have been created on such a ship a decade ago? Ironically, the Emma Maersk, once the world’s largest container ship, can get by with a crew of only 13 (it is apples and oranges, but the Titanic had a crew of 913). Perhaps the biggest subplot here is the amount of goods leaving China and other Asian nations for the United States and the west.
No nation was ever ruined by trade
-Benjamin Franklin
I am really shocked that political candidates from both sides of the aisle haven’t seized on the photographs of the Benjamin Franklin container ship as an example of the lopsided nature of free trade.
Some might see this as a reason not to trade at all, while others might think that the image is the perfect symbol for fairer trade.
Ironically, naming a cargo ship after Benjamin Franklin, a pivotal figure in our nation’s history, he got some things wrong, including the would-be national bird to his estimated value of economic output.
Franklin calculated economic value according to the amount of labor used into the production of that good. It’s easy to see how this might have been more plausible during Franklin’s time, but it’s easier to dismiss this line of classical economics. (It’s the same with Franklin’s choice of the national bird, as wild turkeys have a lot of attributes in a start-up nation such as America exhibited in its desire for independence.)
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With protectionism being bandied as a possible elixir for the nation’s economic health scenes of a cargo ship, which is the size of numerous football fields could be held as a sign of America’s weakness instead of its greatness. On one hand, if these ships are loaded with a bunch of cheap plastic stuff that’s made in Japan and cars from places that won’t allow U.S. imports-is it a true plus or are we squandering something more important?
We need better trade agreements and true access to the rest of the world. Those giant Ultra Large Container Vessels (ULCV) can’t just dump mountains of junk on our ports and leave us packed to the gills with our dollars.
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