IN DEFENCE OF FREE TRADE

"The United States must not hide its economy behind a protectionist wall, President George W. Bush said today, during a joint press conference with visiting Mexican President Vicente Fox. "We must reject economic unilateralism," Bush said after talks with Fox at his private ranch in Crawford, Texas. He said the United States would "gain nothing in building walls".

Politics and trade: "Years divisible by four are not good for free trade. When Americans go about the quadrennial chore of choosing a president, the candidates seeking their votes know one thing: everyone disadvantaged by the free international movement of goods and services and jobs knows who they are. But the winners -- consumers who get cheaper goods, shareholders in businesses that profit from free trade, workers whose jobs are created by free trade -- are a diffuse group, often unaware that their good fortune is a result of free trade."

An email from a reader: "Outsourcing, the practice of moving jobs from domestic to foreign locations, has been and will continue to be a major political issue in the upcoming presidential election. But once you get past the rhetoric of "two million jobs lost since GWB took office", what are the facts about job loss, particularly factory jobs since they have been the subject of so much recent debate? Robert Reich, who served for 4 years as secretary of Labor during the Clinton administration, and hardly a "right-wing extremist", wrote an interesting article in December , 2003, for the "The American Prospect Online", a far-Left magazine. Surprisingly, while the USA lost 11% of our factory jobs between 1995 and 2002, we weren't the biggest losers. Japan and China lost 16% and 15%, respectively. Brazil lost 20%. Unlike the liberal establishment looking to make this an issue in the election, Secretary Reich blames the loss of these jobs around the world to productivity gains, not "corporate greed", as has so often been espoused by our good friends on the Left." A good quote from Reich's article: "We should stop pining after the days when millions of Americans stood along assembly lines and continuously bolted, fit, soldered or clamped what went by".

"Jobs protection has become the rallying cry of the Democratic presidential campaign. Yet Sens. John Kerry and John Edwards never present a clear-headed plan on how they would create new jobs. Instead, they vow to tear down growth-producing free trade treaties, an effort that would impoverish, not expand, the U.S. work force. Among the many flaws of this year's Democratic argument on jobs is the total absence of facts to back up the claims. Take the Democrats' position on jobs outsourcing, their idea that the country is bleeding away a finite number of jobs to far-off places like India. Outsourcing is not a new issue, but its one that Democrats are using to circumvent the reality that the U.S. economy is surging toward a new boom cycle and that it's President Bush who has us headed that way."

"So now I wonder: when they write the history of the world 20 years from now, and they come to this chapter "Sept. 11, 2001, to March 2004" what will they say was most important? The attack on the World Trade Center and the Iraq war? Or, as Mr. Rao suggests, the convergence of PC's, telecom and work-flow software into a tipping point that allowed India to become part of the global supply chain for services the way China had become for manufacturing -- creating an explosion of wealth in the middle classes of the world's two biggest nations, India and China, and giving both nations a huge new stake in the success of globalization"

Dishonest Dobbs does it for dollars. Some excerpts: "Not too long ago, the people who watch Lou Dobbs's evening business program on CNN tuned into see someone who looked just like Lou Dobbs ranting about free trade and corporations that outsource jobs--"Exporting America," he calls it. It's as if whatever made Linda Blair's head spin around in "The Exorcist" had invaded the body of Lou Dobbs and left him with the brain of Dennis Kucinich. No public figure has moved so far left so fast since the transfiguration of Arianna Huffington. What's weird is what a lonely fight it turns out to be. This Tuesday, after Lou described "the shipment of hundreds of thousands of high-tech jobs to cheap foreign labor markets," a CNN reporter's piece on the outsourcing of computer jobs bowed in Lou's direction, then quoted an industry source who says they still can't meet the demand here for programmers. Later, after Lou teed up Ohio's manufacturing job losses, a CNN reporter found evidence to blame Ohio itself--its crummy educational performance and an uncompetitive tax structure with nine income-tax brackets"

U.S. manufacturers say that constant lawsuits and burdensome environmental regulations are the main destroyer of U.S. factory jobs.

The Happy Carpenter has more on what the Government COULD do to keep jobs at home -- WITHOUT going the failed socialist route of restrictive legislation.

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ELSEWHERE

One of my readers replies as follows to the email by Gary Bezowski that I put up yesterday: "Mr. Bezowsky should read Steve Sailer's statistics about Hispanic voting habits over the past 30 years before he throws out the old, old bromide about Hispanic conservative values. 80% of Americans want this damn invasion stopped yesterday! I can assure you as someone who works in my State Republican Party that this immigration insanity by the Bush administration has depressed his base. I don't think I'm going out on a limb by saying that most of the astute Party workers that I have run into on a National or State level concede now that if things remain as they are today Bush will lose. You might want to check out www.freerepublic.com and read the immigration threads; the Party base is going insane"

Peg Kaplan has now joined the ranks of the Krugman demolishers. Perhaps I am being a Pollyanna but my impression is that the new editor of the New York Times is trying to swing the paper back closer to middle ground. Quite a bit that is congenial to conservatives appears there these days. If they really want to get away from their reputation as a Leftist propaganda outlet, however, they will have to do something about columnist Krugman. Giving Donald Luskin a column too would be one idea.

The last item on "Best of the Web" of 5th. shows that the Los Angeles Times also has a long way to go in easing its Leftist bias. Apparently, their sub-editors automatically change "pro-life" to "anti-abortion" -- with sometimes hilarious results.

There is a carefully-reasoned article by a Bible Christian here arguing that Islam is a Satanic religion. If I were a Christian I think I would agree with him.

I am pleased to say that one of my German readers has responded to my request yesterday for a copy of one of my academic articles that I had lost. See here or here. The findings in it throw into a cocked hat almost all of the research into attitudes that psychologists have ever done. No wonder it has been thoroughly ignored!

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The Left have always wanted more spent on welfare and made "Fascism" a swear-word. President Bush deposed a brutal Fascist dictator and sponsored a big expansion of welfare. But instead of being admired by the Left, he is hated with a passion. What does that tell you about the Left? It tells you that they have no principles at all: That everything they have ever claimed to stand for is fake.

Three more examples of Leftist dishonesty: They blame the 9/11 attacks on "poverty" in the Islamic world. Yet most of the attackers were Saudis and Saudi Arabia is one of the world's richest countries! They also say that they oppose racism yet support "affirmative action" -- which judges people by the colour of their skin! They say that they care about "the poor" but how often do you hear them calling for the one thing that would bring about a worldwide economic boom in poor countries -- the USA and the EU abandoning their agricultural protectionism? Leftists obviously care more about conservative farmers than they do about the poor!

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