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Ok fine, then what do you do when all the steel is foreign and they decide to leverage that against us. Do you just let consumers take it below the belt and pay obscene prices now?

No, I would expect the market to respond, and that industry would come back to life naturally. Fortunately for us we have the ability to respond quickly.

The market responded, steel mills closed, workers went on welfare or got other jobs. You can't reverse this on a dime.

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And what happens to all the employees who got laid off by the steel companies locally?

Find another job. Crazy.

Great, but our economy pays the price and so do the taxpayers.

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They wind up getting public assistance, or possibly taking lesser paying jobs and in the end the govt. and yes the taxpayers gets hammered all because a foreign government undercut the market.

Well then we better ban technology and innovation since it does the very same thing.

That's an entirely different issue, and a problem all societies wrestle with, but it doesn't have anything to do with protectionism.

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If a foreign govt. is attacking our private businesses, our govt. should fight back.

The government is our savior, huh? That's the type of mentality I expect from socialists, not the other side

Our Constitution gives Congress authority to levy tariffs. As a strict Constitutionalist, I don't see how govt. is overstepping their powers by levying tariffs. What am I missing?

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and can be a serious threat to our national security.

Maybe in rare exceptions, but the statists love this argument.

If the USA didn't fight back maybe the situations wouldn't be so rare.

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Remember OPEC? Remember the Carter years? And what had changed since then? More energy independence, maybe?

American technology overcame the problem and our own govt's interference in time, but meanwhile we had the economy crippled by OPEC, we fought two wars, and it cost the economy Billions of dollars.

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Free trade is no longer free trade when one of the trading partners is cheating.

But responding with anti-free trade policies, is a step further away from it. People can support that, but it's dishonest to pretend that they are for free trade when they advocate for policies further from it

It's either free trade or its not free trade. If one govt. interferes in the market no matter what the other governments do won't change things. It won't be free trade.

There are two options, do nothing and let foreign interests dictate how your economy works to a certain extent, or try to do things on your side so the interests of the US are improved.

I realize that is a simple outlook, and things are way more complicated, but simply sitting idly by when all the other nations of the world use their govt. to benefit their businesses while we sit and watch things slip away isn't very smart.

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Posted by buckeye_vol

Member since Jul 2014

35255 posts

Posted on 2/24/17 at 1:19 pm to doubleb

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Why would you permit a foreign rival to kill an important industry in the USA?

I may not like it, but either the industry can adapt or not. If the only way it can survive is at the expense of the consumer, and every other industry that loses when the consumer had to pay more for another industry, then it must not be that important.

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The market responded, steel mills closed, workers went on welfare or got other jobs. You can't reverse this on a dime.

Yep. Just like we argue that the minimum wage workers begging for more should adapt, those workers were no different.

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Great, but our economy pays the price and so do the taxpayers.

But the economy doesn't suffer when the costs are raised as a result of saving an industry that only employs a small fraction of the population?

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Our Constitution gives Congress authority to levy tariffs. As a strict Constitutionalist, I don't see how govt. is overstepping their powers by levying tariffs. What am I missing?

Having the legal power doesn't somehow make it acceptable to use that power, especially since that power is largely ineffective, and invariably like anything in government, will probably have negative consequences.

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If the USA didn't fight back maybe the situations wouldn't be so rare.

Previous energy issues aside, what industry has such foreign dependency that it puts our national security at risk?

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we fought two wars, and it cost the economy Billions of dollars.

Yeah. But let's not pretend they were beneficial to our national security, expecially as it relates to trade.

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It's either free trade or its not free trade.

There such a simplistic cop-out.

Since we don't have absolute free speech, then we must not have free speech and then strict government censorship is fine since it's already not free.

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There are two options, do nothing and let foreign interests dictate how your economy works to a certain extent, or try to do things on your side so the interests of the US are improved.

The problem is these types of policies to "save" some jobs and/or an industry have consequences for everybody else.

I mean if I have to pay more for product A, then either I'm going to buy be less of that product, OR buy less of something, or everything else.

So when the consumers, and all the other products and services are detrimentally impacted by government intervention, how can we not justify government intervention for everyone who had been detrimentally impacted? And now you either create cronyism, or you create a perpetual cycle of government intervention and dependency.

Not to mention I don't see how one can morally justify government intervention in one case and not all others that have the same moral premise (e.g., minimum wage).

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