Vote in Congress Tues. or Wed to stop Mexican trucks

[MarkWarner08]

So this Amendement already passed 75-23? Great stuff! Every Democrat voted in favor.

Another example of why Byron Dorgan is one of the best politicians in Washington, he always has the best interests of the middle class and working people in mind.

Very bad. BTW, Mexico will, likely, retaliate - probably, painfully for all those concerned.  For one, Mexican government is right now under an enormous domestic pressure to backtrack from the agricultural trade liberalization provisions of NAFTA that are due to enter into force next year.  It's job resisting the pressure has just been made enormously harder, if not impossible (this would mean humongous losses for American farmers).

Overall, the loosers are: overwhelming majority of Americans (including the truck drivers), overwhelming majority of Mexicans, reputation of the U.S. Congress, Mexican-U.S relations.   Winners - small group of union bureaucrats and populist politicians, who are willing to lie in order to induce major losses on everyone else for minor personal gain. The only other group that, possibly, gains (though indirectly) are the Chinese manufacturers, whose relative disadvantage in transportation costs will remain smaller than technologically necessary.

Whatever the bullsh**t the proponents of the ammendment may put forward, the likely result is a) fewer jobs BOTH in the U.S. and Mexico b) higher store prices for everywone c) HIGHER accident rate on both sides of the border.  When I am saying that well over 99% of Americans will be directly hurt by this, I am not really exagerrating.  Indirectly, any sort of cooperation w/ Mexican authorities on numerous matters is going to be undermined. For one, U.S. has demonstrated that it is unable to stick to signed agreements - next time it will have to pay in cash on the spot for any concessions.

Great points.  Sadly, this is another example that the three menaces in American politics (protectionism, isolationism, and nativism) are once again rising.

[MarkWarner08]

What a joke. Lets put a brake on the economy to earn some political points with the unions.

The economy is improved by redistribution through high union wages, Jake, not by increasing  the enslavement of the working class.  Please try to distinguish what is good for 'the economy' and what is good for the owning elite.

You seem to be under the false view that capitalism only benefits the rich. You probably have seen the salaries of the hedge fund managers rise as the bottom 95% has faced stagnating wages.  This is vindication for my far left William Jennings Bryan like economic views! Right? Wrong.

You're ignoring one of the most basic principles of economics: the invisible hand. I don't mean to be pedantic here, but to understand the way business works, you should try to examine what Adam Smith was theorizing. The invisible hand theory asserts that when a businessman seeks to make money for himself (the raw motive of capitalism is profit and the enrichment of the leisure class), even if he cares little for his workers, he's actually improving society. This is because companies hire workers, pay taxes -- even if the companies themselves don't pay taxes, their workers do -- and create a ripple effect that benefits other companies in service sectors like retail and restaurants.

The next time you  reiterate your hackneyed neo-Marxist talking points and bemoan the rise of the rich,  I hope you'll consider that the the benefits at the top help all of society, even if they don't "trickle down" directly, like the supply-siders say they do.

[MarkWarner08]

You're ignoring one of the most basic principles of economics: the invisible hand.

Sorry, though I agree w/ your point (globalization is, indeed, good for most of us, and, of course, not only for the rich), you are wrong about basic economics.  The modern formalization of the "invisible hand" hypothesis is what economists call the First Welfare Theorem.  It says that if you free the markets do their job, and if all people do the best for themselves, the resultant outcome will be Pareto Efficient. Even if you take it that all the assumptions of the theorem hold (and they are non-trivial), the rub is in the meaning of Pareto Efficiency.

A situation is efficient in the Pareto sense if it is impossible to improve anyone's wellbeing without hurting somebody else. That's all: essentially, resources are not wasted, not used inefficiently. However, in principle, it may not be inefficient to give everything in the world to me and make everybody else work for me for the subsistence wage (if makin one person free of my command makes me unhappier, that is).  Pareto efficiency says nothing about equality, nor does it say anything about everybody being happy. It could well be that 99% of the people are happier under the Pareto inefficient state of affairs then they'd be under an efficient one (in fact, democracy routinely contradicts efficiency, as the theory says it should).

I am saying all this not to contradict your main point, but, rather, to defend it. Bad argument in favor is worse than none at all.

Anyway, the situation we have here is very different. A very small but vocal group (mainly, actually, not even workers, but union bureaucrats) stands to gain from blocking a policy that would benefit an overwhelming majority of residents of both countries.  But as they are vocal, and as they are not averse to playing up the worst xenophobic and racist fears of the society, they win.

I was referring to the general sense of the benefits of the private sector and cutting corporate taxes; I didn’t mean to imply a perfect competition world, which, alas,  an non-existent area of study for microeconomics.   If you look at it literally, there are no sectors of the economy that adhere to prefect competition (which includes multiple firms selling an identical product), even  soybean and corn farmers have found ways to differentiate their products. Since there are few industries which don’t sell goods or services to governments, and there are zero industries in which all the companies sell the same product,  Pareto and Smith cannot prove their views in a real market environment. So, obviously, I wasn’t implying that we send some economists out to Peoria and instruct them to give 100 kids at 100 lemonade stands the same ingredients to produce the same product, in order to test this theory.
The dearth of “economic profit,” which leaves the ATC paid off and nothing else, shows why perfect competition is a non-starter.

I was attempting to use an early tenant of economics to prove a larger point about why globalization is good, soaking the rich soaks everyone, and why populism should could back to the graveyard of irrelevant ideologies.

[MarkWarner08]

But the result was a very weak argument. Hey, the most faithful follower of Adam Smith (at least, methodologically) was Karl Marx - and you aren't going to cite him, are you?

I appreciate your critique. I used Marx as a rhetorical tool because he personifies a philosophy that is counter to capitalism. Yes, we both know that the truth is gray, not black and white, so I apologize if I used generalizations to make an otherwise valid point.