re: Is Reaganomics and free trade officially dead?

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Extremely small amounts of government manipulation of the market (domestic or international), to produce as close to a free market that avoids war.

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It’s not possible. No one is playing fair on the world stage. Not the EU, not China, and now not us. You’ve GOT to be protectionist to maintain any amount of goods manufacturing. The Chinese aren’t our only competition. The Japanese, Koreans, and Taiwanese melon-scooped vast swaths of the electronics and auto sectors decades ago. You don’t think those jobs were worth saving?

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The only way to justify domestic manufacturing at the bottom rung is via redistributive programs, like tariffs. That's inefficient and fricks consumers doubly

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How many consumers on the middle to lower rungs of the US have been fricked by closing down the factories and moving the jobs overseas? We literally have an entire region of the US in the Rust Belt that was gutted by these programs. You can’t just shove all of them into the service economy. Their SOL was irrevocably degraded far worse than can ever be made up by a 10-20% savings in price of goods.

The globalist free market only benefits the capital class, the local service sector elite (those who can’t/haven’t yet been outsourced to India), and the welfare class. Everyone else loses. It’s a historical fact that the US was at its richest when we were protectionist. I’m talking richest as a society. The top 5-10% might have lost a little in employee wage competition, but overall we were never better.

Naturally SFP doesn’t care about this as he’s a part of the few protected winners this system produces.