So... for those of you who don't know, I'm a college student, and as such I get the oppurtunity to learn from all sorts of colorful people. Here is a story my conservative economics professor told me today... that I grabbed from his webite...
"Those are the arguments I make in my college classroom. My favorite teaching tool is a fable based on a tale told by Professor James Ingram of North Carolina State University. It's the tale of a brilliant entrepreneur who invented a new technology for turning grain into cars. The entrepreneur built a factory by the sea, surrounded its inner workings with secrecy, and commenced production.
Consumers were thrilled to learn that the new cars were better and cheaper than anything Detroit had to offer. Midwestern farmers were thrilled when the factory ordered vast amounts of grain to feed into its mysterious machinery. There was indeed dismay among those autoworkers who had been trained in the old methods, but there was also a general recognition that technological progress, even when accompanied by growing pains, is on balance a very good thing.
One day an investigative reporter managed to locate a disgruntled employee who revealed the entrepreneur's great secret. The vast factory was hollow. The back wall opened out onto a shipping dock. Grain came in the front door and went out the back, where it was sent to foreign countries in exchange for cars."
Hmmm... before I had been sort of against free trade, but he makes a point. We as Americans gain by free trade equally as we would gain by inventions allowing us to trade one thing for another. The consumer class is NOT the wealthy class in our society.
Furthermore it is presumptuous of us to claim that we are protecting poor Chinese and other citizens from bad jobs when the alternative is no jobs for them at all...
I am a class warrior... I hate how much of the worlds natural resources go to the rich in our soiciety. I am also quite aware that by being an American and a college student, I am part of the rich in the context of the world...
What do our trade policies mean to the world as a whole?