Last year I reviewed Lou Dobbs’s first "book." (You can find my review here — a review that explains why I put the word "book" in quotation marks when referring to Dobbs’s yelp.) I had occasion today to thumb through this "book" again. I ran across this ominous observation on page 17:
The final indignity is that these imports, both legal and illegal, are usually arriving on foreign-owned ships.
Lou Dobbs’s image and voice arrive every evening into American homes on foreign-produced televisions. An indignity?
Update: My better half pointed out to me that Lou Dobbs is employed by CNN — an American network carried worldwide. I wonder if Mr. Dobbs and his employers worry about all those many countries throughout the world "outsourcing" their news coverage to an American firm.
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That is beyond hilarious. People operate property that United States citizens do not own for the purpose of giving them more property? Nefarious!
It makes me wonder about econ degrees from Harvard.
It is definitely an indignity until I can change the channel.
Another lesson in hypocrisy. While he decries the horrors of outsourcing on TV, he promotes the benefits of cost cutting companies in his financial newsletter. Guess how they cut costs? Outsourcing.
I do wonder if – to steal an analogy you used previously – Dobbs' family makes sure they do not have any "trade imbalance" with any town in which they shop or work. I don't think anyone could seriously function that way. And to quote again the Adam Smith Dobbs thinks would be on his side: "What is prudence in the conduct of every private family, can scarce be folly in that of a great kingdom," (Wealth of Nations, p573).
I just found out Dobbs' has a Harvard degree in economics. How can this be?
Tim, you're accusing him of believing the nonsense he spews. I think a lot of it is schtick. He's a broken record, with the same thoughts spewed out mixed in with the same selected statistics cherry picked day after day. Send it over to Kitty Pilgrim when he needs his oxygen. But he's found his niche, and advertisers will pay for a few hundred thousand regular viewers.
I think Brad is right. The benefits of unfettered trade are internalised in every competent economist's mind. I might not know much about economics, certainly not as much as someone with a degree in the subject from Harvard, but I do know Ricardo's Law of Comparative Advantage. It should be mother's milk to Dobbs. That he persists in espousing his narrow mercantilist views is due to nothing other than the general ignorance of the public and his ready access to a bully pulpit on CNN.
>"I just found out Dobbs' has a Harvard degree in economics. How can this be?"
Harvard most likely outsourced exam grading.
Workers are not like toilet paper that you can just flush when you have bowel movement. I know that mainstream economics views workers a just another imput in the production stream. Fortunately, we have people like Lou Dobbs who actually give a hoot about the (vanishing) middle class: those people who actually have to work to support their families (as opposed to those who sit on their fat asses cashing dividend checks). Job security is important to most of us. The security of tenure in well known in academia as well. No doubt you turned it down when it was offered to you.
Job security is certainly important to me (I'm a working stiff, too–or will be until I can sell my novel), Trumpit; but you seem to be arguing for some sort of nonexistent right to it. If I my employer decides to get rid of me tomorrow (which, given the state of things, is not unlikely), why does he not have to right to? Whose company is it? Not mine, and certainly not yours.
So I'm supposed to concern myself about the wellbeing of American workers, but not the poor, downtrodden workers of Mexico, Vietnam, or India? My immediate reaction is "how chauvinistic!", but then I realize that Trumpit and Lou must be right, my only economics degree being from UCLA. Starting tomorrow, I'll dump my Ford and insist only drive cars made here in Massachusetts, fueled with gasoline extracted and refined here as well. Ditto with computer, television and cell phone. I'm also going to start looking seriously for beef raised and slaughtered here as well; I need to keep close tabs on my balance of trade with Iowa.
Trumpit: Sure, some people get screwed in a free market, but in the long term (a ten-year period) free markets do better for workers than a market where politicians control who works for whom and how long.
Trumpit
If you want to treat workers like flushed toilet paper, put them in a command economy. If you are poor in those economies, there is a good chance you are starving.