Sunday, February 20, 2011

How Convincing Is the Case for Free Trade?

I understand the benefit of free trade and generally believe in the idea. But national governments exist not only to provide added benefit to the 'winners' but also to provide support to the 'losers' in this paradigm. The problem that I don't see anyone addressing with "off-shoring" is how do you replace those 30-40 millions of lost jobs. These are already service jobs being lost. In the past, the magic of progress replaced manufacturing jobs with service jobs. Also, if what is really being said here is that this off-shoring represents a transfer of wealth from richer nations to poorer nations, while that may be beneficial to the planet as a whole it does raise the question of what a particular nation needs to do to respond. Education is obvious, but I don't think it's unreasonable to consider ways of mitigating the loss of jobs

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