[eightbanger]

Originally Posted by CPNE

http://www.truth-out.org/rebooting-a...-job-home65127

Very true...we all know it and they all know it, but the government doesn't give a fiddlers. This has been the way of things here in the U.K for years.

So here is the first big way we can reboot the economy: lose our recent fascination—obsession, really—with “free trade,” get back to protectionism, and impose tariffs (import taxes) on imported consumer goods as we used to do. Let’s apply the lessons that our own rich history teaches us. In other words, let’s resume the manufacture of consumer goods in the United States, protect these industries from cheap foreign labor, and bring all those jobs back home.

The High Cost of “Free Trade”

During the 1930s none of the “Asian powerhouse economies” had adopted American industrialization strategies, so when Roosevelt put money into workers’ pockets and they bought toys or clothes or radios, all of those items were made in Alabama or Connecticut or Michigan. Now they’re made in China, which experienced a “labor shortage” in 2009, causing its average wage to increase from $0.80 per hour to $1.14 and its economy to grow by more than 8 percent.2

China has been following the lead of Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea during the past half century and has become an industrial powerhouse as a result. And, ironically, each of those countries got its strategy from us: George Washington’s Treasury secretary, Alexander Hamilton, proposed it in 1791, and by 1793 most of the parts of his Report on the Subject of Manufactures had been instituted as a series of legislative and policy steps.3

And it didn’t start with Hamilton; he was just building on King Henry VII’s “Tudor Plan” of 1485, which turned England from a backwater state with raw wool as its chief export into a major developed state that produced fine clothing and other textile products from wool. He accomplished this by severely restricting the export of wool from England with high export tariffs and restricting the import of finished woolen products with high import tariffs. King Henry learned this from the Dutch. They copied the Romans. And the Romans got it from the Greeks three thousand years ago.

Nonetheless, President Obama continues to follow his predecessors—Bush Jr., Clinton, Bush Sr., and Reagan—in the religious belief that “free trade” will save us all. It’s nonsense. “Free trade” is a guaranteed ticket to the poorhouse for any nation, and the evidence is overwhelming. Even the very phrase free trade was introduced by Henry VII as something that England should encourage other countries to do while it maintained protectionism.