Protectionism --- Free Trade Poll

Fenian, Post your resume and I will post mine. I don't NEED to. I am posting about a topic I care about, not touting my education and work experience. I allowed myself to get roped in as far as I did just now with an offhand comment about posting my resume because of people like you and JR who won't respond to my posts but question my qualifications to post and my level of intelligence. My intelligence has been insulted several times and my qualifications have been challenged--go back and read JR's posts on that other thread--even though he has no clue what my qualifications are. Shit about how I took a night course at the library and think I am expert or how I have a fifth grade education. It's why I ALMOST allow myself to get roped in.

But if you want to play that bullshit game, I'll play along. Go ahead and post your resume on the board. I really don't have to, but what the hell. If you post your resume, I will follow right behind you.

 

Once again, though, you are looking at negative things in a vacuum. Economics looks at the whole picture. It doesn't find the horrors of the world and then make false conclusions about their causes.

Show me how free trade leads to 12-year-olds working in coal mines -- model it, taking into account all the economic factors at play -- and demonstrate to me how a free and open economy that allows free trade is responsible. I'll give you a few months to come up with your model and I will invest the time to grasp the complex interactions of multiple factors at work that you are going to have to detail and teach to me and get me to understand.

Then I'll have a conversation with either of you.

Until then, you are showing no cause and effect. You are saying, "the world is a cruel place for a lot of people." And you are jumping to false conclusion about the causes, which is made even more curious, because then you offer up your own politically-motivated--not based on rational economics--prescriptions that very often have been shown to hurt people when you do that sort of modeling, and you are not making the same cause and effect arguments.

But at least now cranberry can post about how I get my jollies about 12-year-olds working in coal mines and pass it off as my thought.

 

I haven't insisted on arguing from expertise any more than you do. And I welcome anyone to use the search function on here to read through interactions between you and I. While you are often posting "witty" pictures or calling me a foof or a wingnut, I am taking the time to be thoughtful, offer up an economic thought and support it with examples and links, such as the Bill Poole speech. I let the Regional Fed President be the "expert." I let an example about Lenovo manufacturing computers in China leading to higher-paying research jobs in the U.S. make a point (yes, a simplistic point, but it's hard to delve into something complex like this). That wasn't good enough for you either, though. You can't have it both ways.I'll even let the guy you brought into it--Robert Rubin--be the expert. I'll actually let just about any PhD in economics who is not pulling a paycheck from a lobbying group or a specific industry be the expert when it comes to open markets and free trade, because there is such widespread agreement about the effects.