It is the WTO and NAFTA “free trade” treaties which put cheap foreign wages into direct competition with middle class auto and other American workers. This is why the auto makers supposedly “can’t compete”.

If we want a nation where our citizens can earn middle class wages and have important benefits such as pensions and non-socialized medical care, then we cannot let foreign countries who offer no such benefits or who are state-subsidized under-price our products.

No job in America is safe from cheap wages, particularly Chinese sweatshop and slave labor. None. And for every job that can’t be sent to China, the corporate-greed response is to import low-paid 3rd world workers to replace Americans.

“Free trade” apparently refers to what corporations wish to pay their workers. Next to nothing. “Give me the China price” is what is now demanded of American manufacturers, but of course they can’t because China pays sweatshop or slave wages and use poisonous and shoddy components; so the American manufacturers who pay middle class wages and use quality and safe components go bankrupt and their workers join the unemployed. And then those formerly middle class workers now have no choice but to root for counterfeit-quality Chinese products, unable to afford quality American goods and the middle class wages paid to produce them. The cycle will only end with national bankrupcy, which we are fast approaching.

The free trade concept does NOT work when high wage countries directly compete with the lowest wages on the planet, or even with countries where workers earn less or get fewer benefits.

We can kill our domestic automakers and other domestic industries, and buy 100% of everything from foreign companies, running up the trade deficit to infinity until the nation is completely bankrupt. But we will quickly become a third world country, selling only foreign goods to each other, and the great good the United States has done in keeping freedom alive around the world will be only history. China and Russia will rule the world and we will be in total debt to them and never complain even as our own freedoms vanish.

Free trade isn’t “free”. We are paying the price now, and the price may well be that the USA falls to 3rd world status.

Do you want that?

It is easy for others to be anti-American when we no longer make products the rest of the world needs. Lose the auto industry and the loss of American influence will decline even further. We are now importing even major military items–witness the Air Force tanker project; hastening the day when even our defense is completely reliant upon imports from other nations. Our nation is being hollowed out, a mere retail store for imports, not the manufacturer for the world.

Scrap the WTO and NAFTA and restore Congressional authority to set tariffs to balance the difference between sweatshop wages and middle class wages. The US has an astronomical trade deficit which must be ended. Leaving WTO and NAFTA will not stop world trade, it was already robust before WTO and NAFTA, but America will no longer have it’s wealth and workers held hostage by the poorest nations on Earth.

Obama–you promised renegotiating NAFTA. Do it for real and scrap WTO and you will reap credit for restoring America’s prosperity.

Does not this line of reasoning (which I may have misinterpreted) reduce the Libertarian vision to a theory that can never be practiced? Even those who believe it to be sound also believe the cost of implementation could be a disaster equal to or greater than the cost of inaction. Furthermore, the private recipients of state privelege will surely not give it up, even if that means incorporation into the state.

Is regulation without privelege the answer? Are we damned if we do, damned if we don’t?

What has been proved false?

I sigh when people say things like this, because it indicates they’ve taken what “conservative” politicians say they believe at face-value, instead of actually looking at how they behave, and comparing that to a standard of “conservative” or libertarian scholarship on a given issue. You’ll find that what most conservatives are good at is platitudinous lip service, and not much else.

It should not be a shock that when you “deregulate” an industry, like banking, by relaxing loan requirements for example, while leaving intact its State Privileges, like arbitrarily fractional reserves, deposit insurance, a cartel enforcer (the FED) and the ability to multiply money out of thin air…You will get abuse, and possibly disaster.

Notice that underlying all of these economic crises is a dysfunction in money and credit allocation, which leads to malinvestment of capital? Guess what, “irrational exuberance” is just a greedy desire to milk this cow. There would be no cow in the first place were it not for the fundamentally mercantilist nature of the financial system, monetary and fiscal policy. “Market discipline” and “self-regulation”, while valid concepts and applicable to a true market with requisite transparency, accountability and liability, are irrelevant to the workings of State Capitalism.

Deregulating corporatism without removing privilege is simply unchaining a self-destructive beast.

However, This libertarian realizes that the “Economic Man” is a fantasy and the more likely result of massive dislocation and upheaval is social regression–making totalitarianism a real possibility. This is the paradox purist libertarians have to grapple with–a frustration in the belief that these kinds of crises would never occur in a truly free economy (ex. free banking, private money, minimal interventionism, priced-in moral hazard, minimal taxation and subsidies), while having to face the fact that we don’t have the prerequisite political economy to make the libertarian “solution” viable.

It seems because statism has been so thoroughly ingrained into the social and economic DNA, only statist solutions can solve statist crises, while an attempted free-market solution will backfire and result in super-statism. Arghh! Of course the endgame is either total state usurpation of the means of production and/or a currency crises both of which result in the inevitable bankrupcy of the State. What then, “moderates”?

The mid to long-term macroeconomic consequences of the govt.’s activities today will make the inevitable collapse even worse when it does come, assuming they can prevent it from occuring now. I suppose the reality is, given the unsustainable fundamentals, we’ll have totalitarianism now, or later…take your pick.

I don’t think Detroit has operated under a free market for decades, so I wish that argument would ease. And it’s not like the foreign makes are playing on an even field. Doesn’t Japan provide health insurance for its citizens, unloading a major employee cost for Toyota, etc.?

This narrative may be correct, but it raises some questions that I would like publicly answered before any money is spent:

Just what will they do with the money (i.e. pay down debts, invest in research, temporarily shore up operating budgets, etc.), and how long would it prop them up?

Is bankruptcy protection not government involvement? If it is, then is the charge of free-market zealotry relevant?

Does anybody else find familiar these dire warnings about a perilous end to our way of life without major government action outside the bounds of its constitutional authority?

Does anybody still wonder why progressives truly believe that libertarian/conservative ideals sound fine but are proved false when the stuff really hits the fan?

Remove “socialism” and that sentence doesn’t sound so bad to me…

Are you rehearsing for a job at the Onion? Your piece is parody-proof.

These auto company “loans” you advocate are nothing short of taxpayer theft. It’s extortion, nothing more. In other words, you’re proposing that the coercive power of the state be used to confiscate property from Group A (the taxpayers), with a healthy cut for the middle man (the government parasites), with the remaining loot going to Group B (the Big 3 in Detroit). This is your brilliant idea.

Here’s a better proposal: let the car companies re-organize under bankruptcy protection. That’s what it’s there for. If management cannot produce a product or service that consumers want at a price they’re willing to pay, they should have no alternative but to liquidate and allow more competent management to take over. The capital and equipment would not disappear. If there is a profit opportunity, someone will seize it.

As for the notion that we should entrust a band of government thieves “responsible for the hurt” with fixing a problem it created, I can only question your judgment. Why would anyone think it’s a sound idea to give them more money and power? Haven’t they inflicted enough economic damage already? Are you completely insane?

Nor did they ask for the auto industry to be freed from all those other regulations (often ignored in other countries) governing what kinds of cars they must build – for every hugely profitable SUV, they must sell a crappy compact to meet CAFE. They need specific emissions equipment (yes, a catalytic converter even if the engine can meet regulations without one).

The late Harry Browne described Government as one who says they are magnanimous for giving you a crutch – after breaking your legs. Too many libertarians’ idea of a free market is to keep you crippled, take away the crutch, then let you compete against a foreign athlete who cheats using steroids, and saying the loss was just the market.

One ought not treat or demand things of the sick and injured the same as the able.

The greatness of Ron Paul is he does want to get BACK to the constitution, but describes it as a journey, and describes the promises and dependencies we have today. Dismantling them as a bomb is diffused, not blowing things up letting things fall where they may.

The auto industry is one such case. If you desire socialized medicine, it will come as the corporatists desire it, and cutting off all the employees in an entire industry from the payer will bring it to pass.

The alternative – generally as described above – is to realize the same government (and the people as well as their representatives) that caused the mess – perhaps unknowingly and unintentionally – first shoudl make restitution and restore things to their proper balance and only then figure out how to remove government from the picture.

There are many stories of people the government prosecutes into bankruptcy with charges that prove to be completely wrong. Do the libertarians say the victims should have saved more? Had some kind of unobtainable insurance? Or that Government should heal what it injured? If the government is responsible for the hurt, and perhaps it is a case of entrapment (remember DeLorean?), should they not bear the cost of the healing?

So… subsidize them so they can continue to operate under the same failed business model they’ve been operating under for the past thirty years? So they can make lousy decisions like killing the electric car because gas-guzzling SUVs were the wave of the future? So they can hand out astronomical bonuses to the jackasses who make these bad decisions? So they can come back in another thirty years and ask for another bailout – which we’ll give them for the same reasons?

At what point do Ford and GM become Lada and Trabant – kept around because the government won’t let them go out of business no matter how badly they’re run? Are the auto companies going concerns in a capitalist economy, or are they state-subsidized jobs programs? If the latter, why not just rename them the CCC and the WPA and get it over with?