Trade | A View from the Nest

Dr. Jay Richards tells a great story about his sixth grade teacher’s explanation of economics. One day the teacher came into class and gave each student a small toy…a silly putty egg, a whiffle ball, a set of Barbi trading cards, and so on. (This was back in the day when 6^th graders were still kids, not the mini adults parents send to school today.) The teacher said, “Each of you look at your toy and the ones around you. Then I want you to mark on a piece of paper how much you like the toy on a 1 to 10 scale. A 10 means you love it and you wouldn’t trade for anything you see. A 1 means you hate it and would trade for anything else. Everything else means you are somewhere in the middle.” Each child submitted a number. The teacher added them up, and wrote the sum on the board.

“Now,” said the teacher, “you are sitting in five rows of five desks each. You may trade freely with any student in your row, but you don’t have to trade if you don’t want to.”

After a few minutes some of the students had traded toys, and the teacher once again asked them to write a number representing how much they liked their toy. Amazingly (if you are a zero sum believer) the sum of the numbers was higher. The toys were the same, but free trade had made the children collectively much happier.

The teacher then told the class they could now trade with anyone in the room as many times as they liked. There was pandemonium for a few minutes as the kids moved around trading, re-trading, laughing, and enjoying the exercise. At the end, the teacher added up their submitted numbers. As someone who believes in a free economy would expect, the last sum was much higher than the earlier ones.

One notable thing from this elementary school exercise is that there was nothing new added to the equation…no new wealth, in other words. The kids made themselves happier by creating an exchange on their own terms, without strict rules (government regulations), without intervention by the teacher or school board (bureaucracy), without someone taking away their toys (taxation) and giving them to someone else (redistribution). Imagine what the result might have been if, like in a free economy, new and better toys (new wealth) had been added to the exchange. Eventually, newer and better toys would have allowed every child in the room to mark his or her toy as a “10.”

Zero sum? Don’t believe it! Zero sum economics is one of the many canards invented by Marxists and adopted by Democrats whose main desire is to control all the wealth generated by the working people of America. Free trade coupled with invention will create more wealth and greater contentment for all.

Obama and the Democrats are wrong. American ingenuity and businesses do not steal dollars from the poor; quite the contrary, those once-lauded elements of the American experience actually create new wealth, which creates new jobs and opportunities for all citizens, which creates even more wealth!

Proving that they are not smarter than a 6th grader.

This is a view from the nest. What say you?

But those who are waiting for the Lord will have new strength; they will get wings like eagles: running, they will not be tired, and walking, they will have no weariness. _{Isaiah 40:31 (BBE)}

Along for the journey

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Only a liberal or a fool would actually believe all this green jobs non-sense coming out of Washington. If we are not now leading in the manufacturing of these products what makes O think that somehow we will become the leader? While he chases this pipe dream more American jobs are being lost, not because of NAFTA or CAFTA but because of environmental mandates.

There is one sector of our economy that was doing well until “O” and the EPA shut it down, and that was domestic oil production. Here is a market that will actually create good paying jobs and benefit the US economy more than any of these green initiatives pursued by Obama. Or how about coal and nuclear? These are two industries that would definately bear the mark MADE IN AMERICA if we were actually allowed to produce our own energy.

There is a lot of green leaving this country and a good bit of it can be laid right at the feet of the environmental wackos and the liberal agenda.

Amplify’d from blog.american.com

President Obama, the Congressional Democrats, and environmentalists around the country keep talking up the idea that implementing new environmental regulations that raise the costs of energy, goods, and services is going to trigger a jobs boom of one sort or another. “See, when folks lift up the hoods on the cars of the future, I want them to see engines stamped ‘Made in America,’” Obama said in an August 16 speech at a Wisconsin plant. “When new batteries to store solar power come off the line, I want to see printed on the side, ‘Made in America.’ When new technologies are developed and new industries are formed, I want them made right here in America.”

But as the upcoming closure of America’s last major incandescent lightbulb factory shows, such claims are generally bunk. Even the Washington Post, not exactly famous for its conservatism, points out that while the Obama administration pledges 800,000 “clean energy” manufacturing jobs by 2012, “the number of manufacturing jobs in the United States has been shrinking for decades, from 19.5 million in 1979 to 11.6 million this year, a decline of 40 percent.”

Rather than setting off a boom in the U.S. manufacture of replacement lights, the leading replacement lights are compact fluorescents, or CFLs, which are made almost entirely overseas, mostly in China. Consisting of glass tubes twisted into a spiral, they require more hand labor, which is cheaper there. So though they were first developed by American engineers in the 1970s, none of the major brands make CFLs in the United States.

This is no surprise to anyone who has (unlike the president and his allies in Congress, apparently) ever bothered to think about the difference in labor rates, worker-safety regulations, environmental regulations, and raw material costs in Asia. Apparently the understanding that Chinese manufacturing is simply less costly than ours is beyond the grasp of liberal politicians in America. Unless Americans are willing to work with Chinese labor rates and workplace and environmental standards, or to enact destructive trade barriers, our new green energy devices, whether lightbulbs, windmills, solar panels, or what have you will be manufactured in Asia.

Oh, and about those “Made in America” batteries, Mr. President? “Advanced battery manufacturing currently is dominated by China, Japan, and South Korea, together accounting for 98 percent of the market in 2009.”

Read more at blog.american.com

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