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Subsidies (like tariffs) are America's way of exercising economic sovereignty in a globalized economy. Without them, America cannot compete on price due to labour, land, and other operational costs.
And you'd think Republicans (and conservatives and free-marketers in general) are okay with the high unemployment. It forces workers to accept lower-than-usual pay and removes a lot of the leverage that unions have when it comes to bargaining power. Maybe the recession will act as a long-term correction to the bloated average pay that Americans receive compared to the rest of the world. American workers, after all, are overvalued in many respects.
I guess they criticize Obama because he's "ruining it." He wants to preserve the quality of life for the average American, and that's just ruining it for the free-marketers who would have otherwise stood to benefit from a "correction" to the American labour force.
Let the market fix the economy. Let American workers earn less, and everything else will fall into place. America's wealth has been too spread out to be sustainable. Let wealth flow where it should: to the hands of the few.
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Knowing that death is certain and that the time of death is uncertain, what's the most important thing?
—Bhikkhuni Pema Chödrön
Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
—From "Burnt Norton," Four Quartets (1936), T. S. Eliot
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