User Controls
Time difference sucks.
-
2015-08-30 at 5:38 AM UTC
Tarrifs are necessary to ensure the market's viability. If nations had no tarrifs richer more developed nation's markets would be destroyed by cheap foreign labor. Simply put if an item can be made for $1.00 in your market by your labor force but can be made for $.10 in a foreign market economic security for the people whom the government is responsible for dictates that a fair tariff be imposed upon the goods imported from the nation with the cheaper labor source. A fair tariff in this scenario would be one that that raised the retail price by $.90 cents. That way both the domestically produced goods and the foreign produced goods will be sold at prices which are competitive with one another. Without fair tarrifs corporations would rape both nations by under paying workers in developing markets and decimating the manufacturing sectors of developed markets all for their own profit.
How is that situation 'fair'? It's the government giving an obvious economic advantage to one group of businesses over another via unequal taxation. That's supposed to be anathema of the right, that's big government deciding what should and shouldn't be sold in the US and for what price and half way to a command economy. It also fucks the "natural state" arguments that folks like mike make.because 'universal health care' is not essential to the survival of the nation. do you really think that people will just suffer with no heathcare or something? you act like just because I think that 99% of government is unnecessary and parasitic, that we would live like barbarians out in the woods, dying at age 40 or something. No matter what you may think of americans in general, we are the most advanced and ingenius people on the planet. I am sure we can easily balance maintaining our complex modern conveniences with the practice of allowing people to live unmolested by government..
Lol, how does taxation (to support the military you insist on) and giving one arbitrarily selected group of merchants advantage over others constitute "living unmolested by government"? Universal healthcare goes a lot further towards preventing the "living out in the woods, dying at age 40 " scenario than trade tariffs do.By universal health care do you mean everyone gets the same level of care regardless of what they produce?
No, I mean the state levying taxes necessary to ensure the best quality of life for as many of its citizens as possible. I don't see why that matters though, if you think the state providing equal healthcare to everyone is worse than administering care according to need then you're advocating policy closer to my side of the spectrum than yours.
I'd be interested in what soph has to say about tariffs. He may be on the wrong side of isle but at least he understands the ideology that underpins his position which seems to be more than I can say for you two. I suspect he's going to bite the bullet and admit that economies that need tariffs to survive are market-inefficient and should fail. It's a questionable position if you ask me but at least it's not hypocritical. -
2015-08-30 at 5:59 AM UTC
Lol, how does taxation (to support the military you insist on) and giving one arbitrarily selected group of merchants advantage over others constitute "living unmolested by government"?
you say arbitrarily selected but I would prefer that domestic merchants gain advantage, not foreigners located outside of the US.
you basically want to outsource all our production, so people can sit around with their thumb up their ass, getting free government healthcare, rather than working and paying doctors to take care of them? -
2015-08-30 at 6:07 AM UTC
you say arbitrarily selected but I would prefer that domestic merchants gain advantage, not foreigners located outside of the US.
you basically want to outsource all our production, so people can sit around with their thumb up their ass, getting free government healthcare, rather than working and paying doctors to take care of them?
No, I actually support carefully considered tariff policy. The difference is that I have an ideological framework that supports that sort of action by the state. You on the other hand crusade against all sorts of things calling them unfair or unjustified government action. When I offer evidence that greater state power could produce a better quality of life you appeal to some idea of "fairness" that for some reason involves state non-intervention. But here you 180 on that, it undermines all your other positions if you think "the ends justify the means" works in this particular case. -
2015-08-30 at 9:29 AM UTCPfft, tarifs are wholly unnecessary there are ways in which the government can make it cheaper to source domestically without messing with the market by for instance not obligating companies to pay for their employees health insurance and decreasing minimum wage among other things.
-
2015-08-30 at 9:32 AM UTC
Tarrifs are necessary to ensure the market's viability. .
If you need tarifs to keep your market viable, you have a bad economy. That's like subsidizing people to eat at your restaurent, hey look we suddenly have a lot of customers now that we pay them 20 bucks to eat here. All it's actually saying is that your food is worth -20 dollars and normally you'd go out of business which is good. Market forces work like that, they get rid of the bad businesses and keep the good businesses. The solution is not subsidizing bad practices, the solution is taking on the underlying more fundamental economic problems that got you there in the first place. -
2015-08-30 at 9:46 AM UTC
I suspect he's going to bite the bullet and admit that economies that need tariffs to survive are market-inefficient and should fail. It's a questionable position if you ask me but at least it's not hypocritical.
Lol, predicted what i would say. I just read this now, kek. Also, i'm not saying they should fail, all i am saying is that they should take a long hard look at how they can become more cost-efficient/productive in face of their competitors. -
2015-08-30 at 12:53 PM UTC
If you need tarifs to keep your market viable, you have a bad economy. That's like subsidizing people to eat at your restaurent, hey look we suddenly have a lot of customers now that we pay them 20 bucks to eat here. All it's actually saying is that your food is worth -20 dollars and normally you'd go out of business which is good. Market forces work like that, they get rid of the bad businesses and keep the good businesses. The solution is not subsidizing bad practices, the solution is taking on the underlying more fundamental economic problems that got you there in the first place.
I like you Lan but that was a horrible analogy. Your scenario has all the restaurants in the same market. In other words they are staffed from a common labor pool, they purchase their raw materials from the same pool of suppliers, they lease or purchase their locations from the same real estate market, and they cater to the same customers. In other words a level playing field. The International market is not a level playing field and you are smart enough to know that. In the real world some markets pay (let's say for example not real figures) 4 or 5 times more wages which affords the people who live in those markets a higher standard of living than those people who live and work in the markets which pay 4 or 5 times less. Without fair and balanced tarrifs corporations can buy all their goods in the poorer markets, and sell them for obscene profits in the richer markets. If this continues unchecked the people living and producing goods in the richer markets soon find themselves unemployed or working for substandard wages in a market they can no longer afford to live in (see Walmart employees). A real world example is when Bill Clinton gave China most favored nation trade status thereby vastly reducing the tarrifs on goods imported from China to imbalanced levels. This has driven a great number of manufacturers from the US to China to take advantage of cheap labor and still be able to sell in the developed markets a much higher profit levels than before. The only ones who enjoy an imbalanced trade situation are the multinational corporate kings. The workers in China are no better off than before in terms of average income/quality of life and the workers in the US have suffered loss of income/quality of life. I know you are smart enough to already know this and therefore must take any further statements supporting a no tarrifs stance as trolling. -
2015-08-30 at 2:04 PM UTCHave you seen Voices of a Distant Star? Your post reminded me of it. http://myanimelist.net/anime/256/Hoshi_no_Koe
I was pretty much saying to sophie that his ideas about promoting domestic employment, and then tariffs, would fix pretty much everything wrong with employment in america right now.. then I signaled that I wanted to end the discussion, because this thread is boring.
No it wouldn't, this is such incredibly simplistic thinking. There's a good reason why free trade is one of the few issues with almost unanimous support among professional economists, and it's not because they're "biased" right-wing shills for corporations (most are actually center-left even in the US), but because the arguments against it are moronic and don't stand up to scrutiny.Tarrifs are necessary to ensure the market's viability. If nations had no tarrifs richer more developed nation's markets would be destroyed by cheap foreign labor. Simply put if an item can be made for $1.00 in your market by your labor force but can be made for $.10 in a foreign market economic security for the people whom the government is responsible for dictates that a fair tariff be imposed upon the goods imported from the nation with the cheaper labor source. A fair tariff in this scenario would be one that that raised the retail price by $.90 cents. That way both the domestically produced goods and the foreign produced goods will be sold at prices which are competitive with one another. Without fair tarrifs corporations would rape both nations by under paying workers in developing markets and decimating the manufacturing sectors of developed markets all for their own profit.
This is such a stupid argument. That isn't how comparative advantage functions, and the vast majority of people have an extremely basic grasp of it at best, so they're oblivious to the responses to their criticisms, which they almost never even try, or even think to try, to find.
Let's use states as an example, imagine they're different countries and ignore how accurate to reality these scenarios are. Let's say New Mexico is extremely arid, water is scarce and expensive to transport in the quantities needed, they're regularly ravaged by natural events that destroy crops en masse. Due to this the natural cost of growing crops in general is 4x higher than it is in California, where conditions are the opposite. Now, would the people in New Mexico be better off if they had tarrifs on the much cheaper imports from California so that there would be a level playing field, where they would have to pay 4x as much for their food as they could be paying, which effects the poor disproportionately? As for jobs, are those farming jobs permanently lost? Look at the history of the percentage of the population employed in agriculture, what happened to all those people who used to work as farmers? Economies restructure rapidly without destructive forms of government interference. It's a myth that these types of jobs are higher paying, on average, than the ones that replace them, and even if they weren't you can't assume that the net welfare gains will outweigh the costs. Agriculture, for example, requires far fewer people nowadays, and those jobs are lousy anyway. How would x percent more people employed in that sector as opposed to another outweigh the massive losses?
You can find examples like this all over the place in the real world. Japan has very mountainous geography, most of it unsuitable for habitation or other use, some places are very poor in natural resources, some have a much lower cost of living, so when you factor in price purchasing parity the amount workers are earning is far higher than it seems.
Then there's the issue of limiting consumer choice. Japan isn't a third world poorly paid country, their auto sector out competed the US legitimately for good reasons. Look at the cars the big 3 manufacturers were selling. IIRC the Ford F-150 by far accounted for most of their sales. General Motors largely sold large SUVs with low fuel efficiency. On the other hand, Japanese cars were reliable and relatively fuel efficient. Would limiting people to those types of cars, or steering them in that direction by making Japanese vehicles much more expensive, have been a sensible policy? What about the environmental impact, is that in line with general leftist ideology?
This is the problem with you arm chair central planners, you vastly underestimate the complexity of the world and the scope of human knowledge, overestimate your own understanding (the pretense of knowledge), and feel qualified and confident enough to enact policies that for all you know you could be inadvertently disastrous. -
2015-08-30 at 3:07 PM UTC
Have you seen Voices of a Distant Star? Your post reminded me of it. http://myanimelist.net/anime/256/Hoshi_no_Koe
No it wouldn't, this is such incredibly simplistic thinking. There's a good reason why free trade is one of the few issues with almost unanimous support among professional economists, and it's not because they're "biased" right-wing shills for corporations (most are actually center-left even in the US), but because the arguments against it are moronic and don't stand up to scrutiny.
This is such a stupid argument. That isn't how comparative advantage functions, and the vast majority of people have an extremely basic grasp of it at best, so they're oblivious to the responses to their criticisms, which they almost never even try, or even think to try, to find.
Let's use states as an example, imagine they're different countries and ignore how accurate to reality these scenarios are. Let's say New Mexico is extremely arid, water is scarce and expensive to transport in the quantities needed, they're regularly ravaged by natural events that destroy crops en masse. Due to this the natural cost of growing crops in general is 4x higher than it is in California, where conditions are the opposite. Now, would the people in New Mexico be better off if they had tarrifs on the much cheaper imports from California so that there would be a level playing field, where they would have to pay 4x as much for their food as they could be paying, which effects the poor disproportionately? As for jobs, are those farming jobs permanently lost? Look at the history of the percentage of the population employed in agriculture, what happened to all those people who used to work as farmers? Economies restructure rapidly without destructive forms of government interference. It's a myth that these types of jobs are higher paying, on average, than the ones that replace them, and even if they weren't you can't assume that the net welfare gains will outweigh the costs. Agriculture, for example, requires far fewer people nowadays, and those jobs are lousy anyway. How would x percent more people employed in that sector as opposed to another outweigh the massive losses?
You can find examples like this all over the place in the real world. Japan has very mountainous geography, most of it unsuitable for habitation or other use, some places are very poor in natural resources, some have a much lower cost of living, so when you factor in price purchasing parity the amount workers are earning is far higher than it seems.
Then there's the issue of limiting consumer choice. Japan isn't a third world poorly paid country, their auto sector out competed the US legitimately for good reasons. Look at the cars the big 3 manufacturers were selling. IIRC the Ford F-150 by far accounted for most of their sales. General Motors largely sold large SUVs with low fuel efficiency. On the other hand, Japanese cars were reliable and relatively fuel efficient. Would limiting people to those types of cars, or steering them in that direction by making Japanese vehicles much more expensive, have been a sensible policy? What about the environmental impact, is that in line with general leftist ideology?
This is the problem with you arm chair central planners, you vastly underestimate the complexity of the world and the scope of human knowledge, overestimate your own understanding (the pretense of knowledge), and feel qualified and confident enough to enact policies that for all you know you could be inadvertently disastrous.
AnCap Master Race.
-
2015-08-30 at 3:12 PM UTC
I like you Lan but that was a horrible analogy. Your scenario has all the restaurants in the same market. In other words they are staffed from a common labor pool, they purchase their raw materials from the same pool of suppliers, they lease or purchase their locations from the same real estate market, and they cater to the same customers. In other words a level playing field. The International market is not a level playing field and you are smart enough to know that. In the real world some markets pay (let's say for example not real figures) 4 or 5 times more wages which affords the people who live in those markets a higher standard of living than those people who live and work in the markets which pay 4 or 5 times less. Without fair and balanced tarrifs corporations can buy all their goods in the poorer markets, and sell them for obscene profits in the richer markets. If this continues unchecked the people living and producing goods in the richer markets soon find themselves unemployed or working for substandard wages in a market they can no longer afford to live in (see Walmart employees). A real world example is when Bill Clinton gave China most favored nation trade status thereby vastly reducing the tarrifs on goods imported from China to imbalanced levels. This has driven a great number of manufacturers from the US to China to take advantage of cheap labor and still be able to sell in the developed markets a much higher profit levels than before. The only ones who enjoy an imbalanced trade situation are the multinational corporate kings. The workers in China are no better off than before in terms of average income/quality of life and the workers in the US have suffered loss of income/quality of life. I know you are smart enough to already know this and therefore must take any further statements supporting a no tarrifs stance as trolling.
You missed the part where i said.
"The solution is not subsidizing bad practices, the solution is taking on the underlying more fundamental economic problems that got you there in the first place. "
My point is, in general when you have a healthy economy it's easy to out-compete other nation-states, problem is the current US economy is anything but healthy. and of course like Malice pointed out, there are some countries which can cheaply produce product A or B, nothing wrong with that, not every country produces as efficiently, getting certain resources cheaply is important for domestic growth as well. -
2015-08-30 at 3:33 PM UTC
You missed the part where i said. "The solution is not subsidizing bad practices, the solution is taking on the underlying more fundamental economic problems that got you there in the first place. " My point is, in general when you have a healthy economy it's easy to out-compete other nation-states, problem is the current US economy is anything but healthy. and of course like Malice pointed out, there are some countries which can cheaply produce product A or B, nothing wrong with that, not every country produces as efficiently, getting certain resources cheaply is important for domestic growth as well.
Sigh... No point in continuing this since you don't seem to understand the basics of International trade that have Ben established for many centuries. -
2015-08-30 at 4:54 PM UTC
Sigh… No point in continuing this since you don't seem to understand the basics of International trade that have Ben established for many centuries.
Saying 'basics of trade that have been understood for centuries' is not an argument. -
2015-08-30 at 5:28 PM UTC
No, I actually support carefully considered tariff policy. The difference is that I have an ideological framework that supports that sort of action by the state. You on the other hand crusade against all sorts of things calling them unfair or unjustified government action. When I offer evidence that greater state power could produce a better quality of life you appeal to some idea of "fairness" that for some reason involves state non-intervention. But here you 180 on that, it undermines all your other positions if you think "the ends justify the means" works in this particular case.
I think you are mistaking me with someone else. I never used, nor ever would use, a term like 'unfair'. life is unfair, and that is how it should be. its unfair that niggers can never and have never had actual civilization, and that is a good thing, in my book. that is just one example. my position is that government is mostly unneccessary, wasteful, and parasitical. My main concern is what is good for America and americans, that is all. -
2015-08-30 at 5:34 PM UTC
Saying 'basics of trade that have been understood for centuries' is not an argument.
Allow to put it another way. I like you and agree to disagree. -
2015-08-30 at 5:48 PM UTC
Allow to put it another way. I like you and agree to disagree.
Fair enough. -
2015-08-30 at 10:48 PM UTC
I think you are mistaking me with someone else. I never used, nor ever would use, a term like 'unfair'. life is unfair, and that is how it should be. its unfair that niggers can never and have never had actual civilization, and that is a good thing, in my book. that is just one example. my position is that government is mostly unneccessary, wasteful, and parasitical. My main concern is what is good for America and americans, that is all.
So then you would support socialistic policy such as: strict gun control, universal health care, and basic wage if we had good evidence that these policies were good for america and americans?
And malice makes a good point, the increase in prices that tariffs represent are as likely to reduce quality of life and economic opportunity as the greater local employment is to improve the situation. You're really damned if you do and damned if you don't here, you have an uphill battle if you want to make an argument from utility and an ideological support for tariffs is an obvious non-starter. -
2015-08-30 at 11:15 PM UTC
So then you would support socialistic policy such as: strict gun control, universal health care, and basic wage if we had good evidence that these policies were good for america and americans?.
no, because I believe that total autonomy and freedom is what is best for america and americans, and those policies directly conflict with this.
-
2015-08-30 at 11:40 PM UTC
no, because I believe that total autonomy and freedom is what is best for america and americans, and those policies directly conflict with this.
You're setting yourself up.
Mike: I care what's good for americans
Lan: What if it turns out socialism is best for americans, would you support it?
Mike: Fuck socialism.
If we assume statement one is true, your answer to lanny's question MUST be yes.
What you're effectively saying is even if god forbid socialism actually works you wouldn't support it, thus we can conclude you actually don't want what is good for americans you want the world to run according to your idea of what is right no matter the evidence to it's innefectiveness. That sounds like something an irrational person would say, one could succesfully argue that a belief system based on your personal preference is wholly subjective and thus fundamentally flawed.
You just lost the debate. -
2015-08-31 at 2:30 AM UTC
Fuck socialism -
2015-08-31 at 3:08 AM UTCSoph, old boy, you're not so bad for a wingnut
