kangaeru

I see where you're coming from here, but then why does the U.S. force third world nations to cut their subsidies for farmers? To a degree they are subsidized to offset each other, but it's also so they can carve up third world countries for staple dependance. How else do you explain the amount of food we export to Central and South America?

The WTO is run by a majority vote system. The larger your economy, the larger your vote. Considering the US economy (10,416,820 mil GDP 2002) is more than twice the size of the next largest economy (Japan, 3,978,872 mil GDP 2002), and is actually larger than the next 5 country's GDP's COMBINED (2 Japan - , 3 Germany 1,976,240 mil, 4 UK 1,552,437 mil, 5 France 1,409,604
6 China 1,237,145)

If you want to talk about EU countries, the US has a larger economy and therefore more voting power than Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Spain, and Sweden put together. The US's piece of the voting pie is 17-20%.

Your car example is true, but it works both ways. California IMPOSES those restrictions upon Japanese automakers, if the Japanese want to sell their cars there, they have to comply. California's decision to impose that law has NOTHING to do with capitalism--if the Japanese could sell cheap air polluting cars, that's what we'd be driving today, so you can thank democracy (or republic, whatever you want to call it) for that one.

Did you know international trade rules prohibit governments from discriminating against products on the basis of how they were produced? This means that foreign producers can use pesticides and other chemicals banned in the US on products coming to our markets. Even within our own domestic production, look at the genetic enhancements of cattle and other slaughterhouse livestock. They're given hormonal treatments to make them yeild more meat per animal--yum, cancer tastes good.

You're right, if you banned sweatshop made clothing, those people would get living wages. Who is going to ban sweatshop clothing? The only programs I know of have been grass roots movements at Universities throughout the country. It took sit-ins, protests, large scale student mobilization, and awareness campaigns just to get schools to stop. What kind of power do you have over Filene's, or JC Penny, or Abercrombie? You think these stores are gonna say, "Hey listen producers, we don't like the fact that you're abusing illiterate starving people thousands of miles away from us, we want you to give them living wages so the prices at which you buy from usl go up (or we'll take it out of our profits and you can redistribute it to the workers, for that matter)" Yeah, good luck parting that ocean Moses.


Just doin what I can.

The enthusiasm? Their leaders are enthusiastic, who wouldn't be?-- you get to chill with Bush at a summit some place nice for a few days, wine and dine, spit off the roof onto some dirty college students, and shop yourself around to multinational corporations so you can hook them up with sweetheart deals so you can be wealthy until the day you die. Ask Argentenians how enthusiastic they were in the 90's...right before their economy collapsed and their country fell apart. Oh, what caused it by the way? International banks saw instability in the economy so they whisked away 500 billion dollars one night by armored truck caravan. The Argentenian govt. flipped out, froze all bank accounts, which meant 95% of the country couldn't touch their life savings, while the 5% wealthy elite were able to draw from their off shore accounts. Hundreds of thousands of people stormed the streets with hammers, tin cans, whatever, and literally brick by break destroyed hundreds of banks.


Okay, here's what he could, and did, do.

1. Reduced deficits by cutting govt. spending --this came from education, health care, public works, and environmental programs
2. devalue currency and export more
3. liberalize financial market -- much more volatile short term investments which caused people to go into debt
4. increase interest rates to attract foreign capital -- sweet, now that interest rates are high, no one can take out affordable loans to buy shit they need! Hope you didn't get screwed on a short term investment or you're really in deep shit
5. cut price subsidies on staples -- we've been over what this does
6. weakened labor standards -- put downward pressure on wages and working conditions
7. Auctioned off government run businesses causing widespread privitization of essential institutions (utilities, public water, roads and highways--the street signs in Argentina had MasterCard logos on them--imagine seeing that when you're looking for your exit)

Comparative advantage is just when a country is more efficient at producing something, even though they might not produce MORE of it than another country.

If the US can make 500 liters of beer in an hour or 300 liters of apple cider, assuming the prices per liter are the same, a country which can make 60 liters of beer an hour or 20 liters of apple cider would have comparative advantage over us because they get more liters of beer per liter of cider they don't make, even though we make a lot more volume of both.

Yeah, I know how we can fix it. We have to allow third world governments to invest in public infrastructure. Education, public transportation, healthcare. Education is the most important thing--without education, these people will always just be cheap exploitable labor. When you focus on the important keys which make a society prosperous, a strong economy will come as a side effect--not the other way around.

I do appreciate capitalism. It's a great theory, you take two opposing forces like supply and demand and both will fight until equilibrium and maximum utility is achieved. Let's people work for themselves, go as far as their work ethic allows them, etc. I have NO problem with capitalism. The problem is that anomalies in the system crop up which are cancerous, and break the whole model.

Look at monopolies in the early 20th century. That was an unnatural form of capitalism, because, again, people in power were able to use that power to unfairly influence the market, offsetting the balance. How would you like living in a house on land owned by your company, as you pay off the mortgage to a bank owned by your company? You get paid enough to barely pay your bills...which go back to your employer anyways. That's what happened to some people back then.

It's the same thing now. The world's super powers are monopolies, they use their power to put third world nations in that same kind of dependant situation, where once you're in the hole there is no way out. The way to fix it is what I mentioned before--raising the quality of life of the public. You can't have a strong labor force when millions of people in your country are illiterate and uneducated. It does you no good to have schools, shopping centers, etc, if no one can afford cars and you don't have any cheap public transportation like busses or trains. Build up all those things and then strong economies will crop up as a by product of doing all the other stuff right.

I won't even justify answering any of that, as you're completely wrong on every point. Let's stop tacking on these pot shot comments tothe end of our posts hmm? So we can actually debate this cleanly?

If you're so intellectually superior, why don't you try disproving me without using these tired baseless biases?

Thanks in advance.

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