Could protectionism stop the race to the bottom?

Could protectionism stop the race to the bottom?

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economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21711911-donald-trump-might-get-trade-war-without-even-trying-early-salvo-trade
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_cloning#Current_law
ccsenet.org/journal/index.php/ass/article/download/36581/20566
cairn.info/revue-mondes-en-developpement-2006-3-page-63.htm
imf.org/external/pubs/ft/wp/2003/wp0330.pdf
money.cnn.com/2016/02/06/news/economy/obama-us-jobs/
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no

robots are going to put 90% of China out of a job within two decades anyway

then the chimpouts on a global scale begin

I never understood the double think of the average American when it comes to shit like this.They cringe and cry when people print stories about the horrors of Chinese sweat shops but don't like people telling China to fuck off because they like cheap shoes and muh economy

How much is the life of a Chinese laborer worth?

Chinkouts?

>Amerifats promote free market trade for 2 centuries
>forcibly open Japan for trade
>suddenly find themselves unable to compete
>waaah chinks are flooding the market with cheap products - we protectionists naow
Really makes you think

>implying

You can ban new technology by law you know.

Yeah sure user, we're going to ban the greatest manufacturing advancement of the century

And why not? If it puts people out of work and there would be enough of a social push to ban it, it could happen. The same way we banned human cloning.

For how long do you think those bans can be enforced? forever?

If all countries agree to ban then sure, if not then the countries with the ban will be out-competed by those that use robots

Until you can prove that you're faggot-ass universal basic income works.

Not if they don't have a consumer market to export their shit to.

Yep. Forever.

The supply chain is linked, if you ban exports of oil drilled by robots, then you'll also have to ban car, computer, medicine, agriculture ... basically all exports from that country. You cannot win.

Sure we can ban all if them, why not? If your purchasing power is strong enough it's more likely the companies will abandon robots if you threaten to slap an embargo on their products.

What you're basically arguing for is protectionism. It's been done before, the quality of life for your citizens will be lower since the price of goods they buy will be much higher and they will have access to less goods since no country has all the commodities they need.

It's because we Americans practically worship the free market as God. But after seeing how much blindly pursuing free trade has cost a lot of Americans their jobs, we're starting to realize that maybe we should be more mercantilist like you guys.

Why shouldn't it work when robots can produce everything?

No.

Enjoy your inflation for the next 8 years.

>protectionism
>rising currency

Can't wait for the inevitable American collapse.

I also can't wait for working class retards to blame it on "culture" when it will be the economy...it's always the economy...

What's the point of having cheap goods if you don't have a job to pay for them though?

Luddite.

protectionism is always a mistake

retards like you only see half the equation. we could put every person to work in this country, but it would make the price of goods and services skyrocket. full employment is neither feasible nor desirable

No, Chimpouts; the primitive ape-race of man will bow low before the living forces of capital.

And as at last the whip itself turns against the master, there will be feels of universal brotherhood,

or there will be an end to all flesh who sired an autistic child race who in their parent's own image and example, discard the undesirable, the used, and the unemployed.

>mfw we had a chance

...

Can you explain further why protectionism is bad? Am interested.

>protectionism is always a mistake

Explain this
economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21711911-donald-trump-might-get-trade-war-without-even-trying-early-salvo-trade
>ANNIVERSARIES should be happier than that on December 11th, marking China’s 15 years as a member of the World Trade Organisation (WTO). On that day, China expected to be unshackled from its legal label as a “non-market economy” and attain “market-economy status”. In the event, America and the European Union refused to give it the nod. On December 12th the Chinese reacted: see you in court.

Explain what? It's a bad fucking idea. It always is.

Can you explain why it's bad? I'm economically retared.

Then why are the EU and US doing it?

low-skill manufacturing is in its dying days regardless of where the money goes

Cloning has never actually been banned, fyi.

Protectionism is bad for some countries, but good for others.

For example, protectionism was disastrous for Brazil, since their industrial output is shit and there's very little competition, which effectively led to skyrocketing prices. Brazil is also a net exporter with very low purchasing power.

Meanwhile America could get away with protectionism since it's the #1 consumer market in the world and companies are going crazy for the ability to compete on the American market, since it's a fucking goldmine for them. Notice that Cuba got economically fucked up after the embargo.

Because the US and the EU have many asinine economic policies.

Take sugar tariffs in the United States. Since its formation the US has had some form of import quotas on sugar (meaning that as a country we may only legally import x amount of tonnes of sugar per year). What has been the real economic effect of this? Americans have paid as much as 5 times the world price for sugar. The price of sugar has been artificially inflated for domestic purchase because of restrictions on imported sugar. And why is this done? To protect a small minority of sugar farmers (and more recently, corn farmers) in the US who have used their money and their influence to lobby for their interests in Washington. They are protecting themselves from global competition AT THE EXPENSE of everyone in America who does not work in sugar production. We all have to pay more for sugar so these special interests can maintain their petty monopoly.

As it happen, it is much cheaper to grow sugar in a country like Brazil. That has to do with climate and soil quality. In a fair market, sugar imported from Brazil would be fair cheaper than sugar produced in America. So we have to skew the market and make Brazilian sugar more expensive in order to keep American sugar farmers in business. Today we go even further. Sugar tariffs and quotas are where the artificial sweeter industry came from. Most sugar substitutes are corn based. The American government subsidizes corn farmers in order to keep them in business, because in a fair market their substitutes could not compete with natural sugar from Brazil.

Britain historically has done similar things. Milton Friedman put it thus:

Free trade benefits the larger society at the expense of a small minority. Protectionism benefits a small minority at the expense of the larger society.

tl;dr

Free trade is good because we get cheaper goods and services at the expense of non-competitive domestic labor. Protectionism is bad because we get non-competitive domestic labor at the expense of more costly goods and services.

800$ iPhone

>How much is the life of a Chinese laborer worth?
The love of his family, something you burgers will never understand.

You work your lives away for more and more and more

They work their lives away for stability

so what's the desirable alternative?

Free trade and a natural rate of unemployment

so how do you counter the people that say protecting our domestic labor is more important because it's ours?

no I mean for the people who are unemployed

>Chinese
>valuing life, love, or humans

Nice try, Zhang.

Ancestor Veneration is a literal religion.

I'd say that protecting our domestic prices is more important still, because those prices affect all of us, not just this or that special interest.

Can you think of the utter mayhem that would be wrought in this country if we decided to put strict import quotas on petroleum and cut off the supply of OPEC oil to protect our domestic petroleum industry? Gas a 15 dollars a gallon? The economy would come to a screeching halt. So if a lot of protection is bad, what in the hell makes you think a little protection is good?

Find jobs in sectors of the economy that are undersupplied on labor.

>good for others.

Not really it's more less bad.
A country that's propping up their shitty agriculture industry will just make prices inside the nation massive for food. It also prospects farms that should have gone under and make farmers lazy when instead of palying the market and coming up with a product people will pay top dollar for they jsut become a generic x farmer with the only thing letting them survive is subsidies shitting on foreign completion.

But American food is basically all homegrown and there are some extreme restrictions when it comes to importing food. For example over-the-quota raw sugar imports get hammered by a 90% tariff. You could classify that as food protectionism, yet our economy isn't collapsing.

Anywhere in the world that isn't plagued by the Abrahamic slave shackles values life, love and humans much more than their Abrahamic counterparts

Actually not really nobody cares about anything other than a few vestiges of what humans once were, we're all completely subjugated by dopaminic addiction to screens and saturated fats through a toxic and uncultured consumerism. I guess internet nationalistic dick wagging mitigates that

>cloning
>banned
amerifat please. That arnold movie was fiction.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_cloning#Current_law

Protectionism is a wash because whatever economic gains you get from keeping production in your home country are lost when you have to pay increased prices for goods that you either can't make well or can't make at all.

I'm not entirely sure protectionism is the best or worst policy, but your defense to that accusation sucks.

Theoretically, lets say the price of foreign sugar rose by exactly the amount of duty imposed on foreign farmers so the local producers could utilize their resources on producing sugar by underselling the natural price of the sugar plus the tariff. Now, there are centuries and centuries of British and Austrian economists who will tell you that the labor being used to produce sugar could be applied elsewhere to produce another good, which we have better operational efficiency in than sugar. You see, producing that sugar when another country could produce it cheaper means we have more average real income for the citizens which depreciates the monetary unit faster than it would otherwise. Even if you don't take the basket of commodities approach towards real income, there is a second, fundamental point to be made here, are you ready? Instead of producing the fucking sugar, we could be producing something that would buy more sugar than if we had produced the sugar without the tariffs. What ends up happening is certain countries develop productive efficiency in certain goods over centuries or decades because these long standing productive efficiencies are only broken or developed by new regulations or patented technological developments within the countries themselves.

but you said there should be a healthy level of unemployment

yes because people are constantly transitioning in and out of jobs, and there are always people who can't work because of physical or mental handicaps

Yes yes, we all know why cotton comes from Egypt and not from Libya. Cotton has been a staple commodity in Egypt for centuries. I don't see the special point you're trying to make. It is implied that if we're spending more to produce our own gasoline there will be less capital available to produce other things which are more lucrative than domestic gasoline. Assuming you have a foreign supplier and your relations with them are normal, it is economically wasteful to invest in gasoline production purely for the sake of employing a few thousand people in domestic petroleum engineering.

It's just you didn't directly dispute the point he was trying to make about losing jobs. Whereas in reality, if you focus on productive efficiencies, you shouldn't be losing any jobs, but creating them.

Fair enough, I just thought it was implied in my previous posts.

But it heavily bumps up the prices for many food.

>robots are going to put 90% of China out of a job within two decades anyway
t.knows fuck all about automatation

Proteccionism is needed. A country without heavy industry could crumble if a few things go south. Having no heavy industry or anykind of manufacturing whatsoever is a weakness

But having heavy industry in your country allows a bigger independence and more high paying jobs to develop the economy. Just look at the EU. Greece was suddenly put in the same market as Germany and as they couldn't compete the Greek economy just relies in spme public companies and tourism while their manufacturing sector is shrinking.

>America acts in America's best interest
>this is somehow wrong

WE'RE COMING FOR YA GLOBALIST

In which case you go full Japan mode, lock yourself away from the world for a few centuries and then collectively shit yourself as a nation when New Tajikistan shows up with airships and demands you open up your markets.

so you are willing to work for the salary of a chinaman or you are aware if you employ americans the cost of production goes up, the prices go up (because business only cares about profit) and your little fat american mind will be very upset by it

Most countries industrialized because new technology was an unstoppable force that increased productivity. Protectionism only had a limited effect if any. It only succeeded in diverting resources away from the multitudes of small businesses and services towards heavy industry and large scale manufacturing controlled by whatever small collection of plutocrats was in charge.

The best way to "stop the race to the bottom" is to get back to clean cut free markets, all the way.

>But after seeing how much blindly pursuing free trade has cost a lot of Americans their jobs

:^)

>jews act in their best interest
>this is somehow wrong
:^)

1. An increase in consumer prices because cheap foreign products are no longer available will hurt the people on the bottom more than anyone else.
2. Provided that other countries follow suit, you will no longer be able to export the things you are actually good at, leading to an increase in unemployment and a decrease in exports.
3. Because companies are forced to hire less qualified local labour at artificially high salaries, efficiency decreases and inflation rises.
4. Because source or location of production suddenly becomes a more important factor than quality, quantity, price, efficiency, innovation, etc., the quality and efficiency of goods and services provided is bound to worsen.

I'm sure there are many more reasons for why protectionism is retarded, but these are the most obvious ones. Simply put, you are using a completely arbitrary metric, country of origin, and applying it to a system that is based around ruthless objectivity and merciless striving for efficiency. I don't see how anything good could possibly come of that.

That pic is stupid. the short guy is perfect for sucking cocks he's crotch height.

Good luck selling $20 sneakers for $150

>Most countries industrialized because new technology was an unstoppable force that increased productivity. Protectionism only had a limited effect if any.
protectionism has worked in allowing non-industrialized nations to catch up to the rest of the world without having local producers undercut by foreign ones
it doesn't work so well when you're already caught up

> has cost Americans their jobs

Thing is, though, it hasn't. Unemployment is at a historical low.

It has cost a tiny, but very vocal, minority their ability to work a very specific set of jobs, i.e. manufacturing, and while I can see how that may have led to a loss in quality of life, it still doesn't quite warrant a complete restructuring of our economy.

Especially because these jobs wouldn't be coming back - manufacturing is decreasing globally, not just in the West. Assembling a car simply isn't as desired a skill as it was 30 years ago, and trying to artificially remedy that will only hurt other parts of the economy.

I don't see how what you are talking about with the EU applies to what you are saying regarding heavy industry.

To my knowledge, Greece never had any heavy industry to speak of in the first place.

Ehh those countries had a another nation to sell to that was willing to deal with their protectionism.

1) Muhammad Tahir & Dr. Dk Hajah Norulazidah Binti Pg Haji Omar Ali, Trade Openness and Economic Growth: A Review of the Literature (2014). "Overall, this paper concludes that the available literature provides an affirmative answer to the question whether or not trade openness causes economic growth": ccsenet.org/journal/index.php/ass/article/download/36581/20566

2) Jean-Jacques Hallaert, A History of Empirical Literature on the Relationship Between Trade and Growth (2006). "Because international trade theory has not provided an unambiguous prediction on the impact of trade on growth, much of the focus has been on empirical analysis, the weight of which suggests that trade positively affects growth. Case studies point to a positive impact, but are difficult to generalize. More recent empirical studies have focused on cross-country and panel regressions and, although their methods can be criticized, they usually suggest that trade openness strongly enhances economic performance. In addition, industry and firm-level research also show that openness contributes to growth through a positive impact on exports and productivity": cairn.info/revue-mondes-en-developpement-2006-3-page-63.htm

3) Andrew Berg and Anne Krueger, Trade, Growth, and Poverty: A Selective Survey (2003). "Evidence from a variety of sources (cross-country and panel growth regressions, industry and firm-level research, and case studies) supports the view that trade openness contributes greatly to growth": imf.org/external/pubs/ft/wp/2003/wp0330.pdf

>Unemployment is at a historical low.
Huh? You think history started five years ago or something? And read this: money.cnn.com/2016/02/06/news/economy/obama-us-jobs/

fair enough, historical low was an exaggeration.

So should we just upend the entire economic system because we are 0,8 %points above historic low?

I wasn't the guy who said that. But two things remain true:

1. There's a lot of number cooking when it comes to unemployment rate. Labor participation rate is a better indicator. Somehow there's a lot of people who aren't seeking employment at all for some reason, this is a problem.

2. Wages aren't growing, they're fucking stagnant or even going down. Millennials are now making less than their parents which is almost unprecedented.

3. America historically did the best during its most "socialist" (for the lack of better word) years, in the 1950s. Free trade policies and the increasing reliance on loans have fucked America beyond repair.

three things*

>Somehow there's a lot of people who aren't seeking employment at all for some reason, this is a problem.
there are a lot of people dropping out of society in general
this could be the fault of many things besides free trade

The shipping of jobs overseas shit has only been happening since like late 80s. It's still ongoing.

>How much is the life of a Chinese laborer worth?
Not nearly as much as my overpriced shoes. The US needs to start outsourcing Chinese manufacturing jobs to Africa.

youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU

The current demands of protectionism from Americans is one of the most hypocritical shit that ever happened in recent history.

Imagine that: the poster boy of capitalism and free trade. Who shilled that for much of the 20th century, bawling and bawwing for protection.

Like communists.
Like fucking communists.

Cocksucking is an elastic luxury and so doesn't represent the economy at large.

>allowing
Technology can improve productivity by several orders of magnitude while protectionism just raises prices, I don't think we would still be trading pelts for fire water if it weren't for some snaggletoothed commie in the government raising tariffs.

>catch up
They would only "catch up" in one sector of the economy at the expense of the whole. If they can make more money by expanding coffee and groundnut production using cheap foreign imports to furnish infrastructure they should do that. Once the local economy has grown it will naturally expand into other areas, processing raw materials prior to shipping before expanding into manufacturing goods on a large scale themselves. Ironically in the long term manufacturing and heavy industry benefits from unfettered free trade. All protectionism does is slow down this process by diverting capital towards things that yield lower returns.

>robots do all the work and provide for the society
>people will do voluntary work or be just neets and pay the taxes
i don't know what's so bad about it?

This so fucking this.
i cringe so much whenever I happen to browse /pol/ and see people shitting on globalism while sucking on capitalism, IN THE SAME FUCKING POST.

If you think society is degenerate now, just wait until mankind becomes a global collection of NEETs served by robots. That'll make fucking Sodom look like a nunnery.

But asian children are much, much cheaper than robots

>dude free markets rule bruh
the world: we will bury you
>no trust me dude you gotta try this shit
cue offshore manufacturing
>dude what the FUCK! why does this keep happening

I'm pro-free trade but that is one very stupid graphic.

>America historically did the best during its most "socialist" (for the lack of better word) years, in the 1950s. Free trade policies and the increasing reliance on loans have fucked America beyond repair.
I'm a bit of a commie at the best of times but I don't think that's giving the full picture. There was no real competition in the fifties.

It's a real tragedy that low-value, low-efficiency light manufacturing jobs are no longer prevalent in the US.

not for every application

It's illegal in the US. t. someone who tried to have a doctor clone himself.

The hangup was on people cloning themselves to harvest organs and other stuff from an exact copy of themselves. It opens up a whole world of legal confusion.

That's already happening. The problem is how to sell $150 shoes for $20 and still stay in business.

You brand it as upscale.

Lol fucking kekkles

Make them electric and get a $250 subsidy per pair :P

>Bernie "white people can't be poor" Sanders
>a chance
this is what SJWs actually believe