I am? That’s news to me!

It’s a good rule of thumb in a lot of cases, but I’d hardly say it’s my philosophical perspective.

My point is that Don’s hypothesis presumes what he wants to prove. So does my hypothesis, but I don’t really want to prove the point. I only want to illustrate another extreme.We don’t have an ideally free economy as a matter of fact. A not so free economy can drive common wages down while concentrating consumption among a few. Nominally “egalitarian”, socialist economies actually do this in practice, ironically.

An economy can have this effect, and I don’t really know how much our economy fits my description rather than Don’s. It’s an empirical, not a theoretical, question.

Economics is not about what is imaginable–I can imagine 32 levitating midget Elvi in polkadot miniskirts successfully directing economic output and solving all economic problems. It is about expectations given the reality of nature and incentives. Fantastic scenarios aren’t a good reason for policy.

If you think the mutual enrichment that Americans and Chinese experience by trading with one another will somehow worsen ill will, then by all means, maintain vigilant intelligence and defense services. But it seems to me the best way to worsen relations and decrease the cost of Chinese antagonism is to close down trade.

If foreign labor deprives people of productive work, then so do machines. Automating a plant reduces the number of workers needed to produce the same amount. Much plant automation results in jobs being reduced to a few controllers and a maintenance crew.

But that is not the whole picture.

Machines and foreign labor both reduce the costs of inputs to American production and reduce costs to consumers. The other advantage, the one most often overlooked, is the advantage to consumers of having people direct their productive efforts toward other ways of satisfying consumer desires.

Low wage workers DO NOT increase productivity. Highly efficient machines DO.

So at least in theory the use of highly efficient machines can allow us to either have even higher standards of living or work fewer hours per day.

Adding to the pool of low wage workers simply brings down everyones wages except the few on the top. Thus everyone either has to work harder or have a decreased standard of living… the difference in wage loss NOT being made up by the availability of more cheap things.

Here’s another angle….

You can get to Utopia where machines do all the work for humans using machines… you can’t do so using human labor.

But would America be made poorer by this marvelous invention? Of course not. We’d be made materially much richer.

In the short term, airline pilots and others would be made materially poorer. There’s no use in denying that. We become richer only as these people become productive otherwise, so we may consume the new goods they produce, since we no longer need their former produce. That doesn’t happen overnight. You can imagine your miraculous, $1.99 transporter into existence instantaneously, but real economies don’t respond so rapidly.But let’s imagine a slightly different scenario. I discover the secret of this transporter, and I have a perpetual monopoly over its production. I don’t want to sell it for $1.99, so I instead charge users per trip. I don’t charge less than an airline for a trip from N.Y. to L.A. I charge more, but I still drive airlines and hotels out of business, as you say, because I charge less than the cost of an airline ticket plus a hotel. That’s still progress for my customers, of course.I can produce my devices for a dollar, so I become incredibly wealthy, but rather than reinvesting my incredible wealth in some new productive organization employing former airline pilots producing goods for consumption by others, I decide to hire them to build me a private castle and a pyramid for my burial. I also hire them to fly my personal fleet of 767s, which I buy at firesale prices, because I enjoy flying for its own sake. I pay my pilots less than pilots previously earned of course, because the supply of their skills now far exceeds the demand.That’s a ridiculous scenario, but so is yours. Where is reality on a spectrum between your ridiculous scenario and mine? That’s the real question, and these hypothetical scenarios don’t much help us to answer it.

I have no idea if that’s true or not. I think it’s very possible the programming industry would have emerged despite protection. But that’s besides the point. I’m not advocating protectionism here – I’m just wondering if Don’s argument fully addresses the protectionist concerns.

You have no argument with me on that – my point was simply that an allusion to the universally agreed upon benefits of technological development doesn’t begin to address those issues. I’m not MAKING protectionist arguments myself, I’m just laying them out and wondering about the extent to which Don addresses them.

Let’s take my example of an American firm in Lowell, Ma, hiring workers from Bangladesh and providing them with instantaneous teleporters they wear on their belt and cost $1.99.

They don’t move anywhere, diptstick, they teleport to work and teleport home. In essence they show up for work and then they go home, no different than anyone else today, only their home is 8,000 miles away in Bangladesh and they move instantly twixt the two. They would have no legal domicile here in the USA.

If the employer provided a cafeteria, the Bangladeshies wouldn’t even have to leave the factory, so who would give a crap about the local cultures, tribes, jurisdictions, nationalities, or local languages. It would be a place of employment, no more, no less.

I’ll grant you this, there would be issues, but the issues like the premise are just funny what ifs.

We can make a what if profitable, or we can make a what if a disaster.

Yes, people employed in transportation and travel and et cetera will have to find new employment. This is a good thing! Labor is a resource, and we now have a great deal of it available to do new things with. THAT’S where the gains come from when efficiency increases: applying the saved resources to new uses.

I’m not trying to be argumentative but I didn’t get that out of your post.

In the post I was replying to you wrote, “If we had transporters, we’d all be better off, if US workers could make, service and sell them. If US workers could not do that, because of labor immobility (geographical), then then the entire country would be in exactly the same situation as before.”

I believe that is a false statement. We would not be in the same situation as before even if American workers did not make, service or sell them.

And the reason is because of all the new opportunities such a technology would create. Or, more accurately, entrepreneurs would create.

Now, it may be that my father would have had a difficult time making such a transition. I think that is a legitimate concern. However, his son didn’t have any difficulty with the transition and neither did most of the children of all those other factory workers.

Yet, if the protectionists had their way, today I and most of my fellow programmers would still be working in a factory.

Understood properly, it is all the new opportunities Americans have which drive factory jobs overseas. The dependable workers who would have been factory workers 50 years ago are doing something else and are largely priced out of the factory worker market.