Do you support Free Trade ?

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No, I do not.

I support a planned economy, with external trade controlled by the state and only in manufactured goods, so as to increase efficiency and the quality of life for everyone. There is no need a country as large and resource-rich as the USA should have to trade basic goods like staple foods and common metals beyond its borders. It is simply inefficient.

Exchanging ideas and information, however, I fully support, as it benefits everyone.

I support this and I say ruveyn for president in 2012

Your comment is full of fallacies, but I'm just going to skim through it.


No, competition increases efficiency, not central planning. When businesses are in competition they have incentive to become more efficient, or they will be out-competed. State-run monopolies have no incentive to be efficient beyond the fear of the state's citizens rioting. Yes, I know, "corporations are after profits and profits only". But in order to make a profit, they have to provide a better service at a lower cost than their competitors, or they will lose customers to their competitors.


What the actual f*** are you talking about? Societies trade resources because they have an abundance of one resource and a shortage of another. If one society has an abundance of food but no metal ore for tools, and another has plenty of metal ore but they are on the verge of famine, it is in both their interests to trade goods, as it improves the quality of life for everyone. Humans that lived tens of thousands of years ago used to have traders that would travel many miles across hostile terrain, such as the alps, in order to trade simple resources. They wouldn't do that if it was as inefficient as you claim.

God forbid!

ruveyn

Demanding higher wages than their labor is worth is the main cause.

ruveyn

A market economy may be more efficient than a planned economy, but the inverse is also true. Furthermore, it is not the case that competition needs to increase efficiency, as an alternative is rewards for hard work and creativity and punishments for laziness. Central planning as occurred in the USSR, for example, was not inefficient because it was planned but because of the vast amounts of corruption in government and an extreme overprioritization of heavy and military industry to basically everything else. In addition, a core flaw with the Soviet system is that it had no efficient system of incentives to work or be creative.

And planned economies do have some quite phenomenal advantages over market economies. For example, in a planned economy, it is not the people that make the decisions of where resources are allocated, but a planning committee (at least in a centrally planned economy, which I am assuming to be the case in this post.) This could prevent huge wastes of food, as American agribuisness consistently does in letting crops rot to prevent them from getting to the market and "flooding" it or in their use of soybeans as cattle feed instead of the far more sustainable and efficient direct use. This could also allow the state to deal with serious issues and major priorities more easily by concentrating resources on a project, such as industrializing, working on finding vaccines for major diseases or sending a manned mission to Mars.

And, as you said, profits and profits alone keep enterprises in a market economy afloat, thus forcing everyone to cater to the whims of the masses as opposed to the whims of trained planners. Without the factor of profits, an planned economy can systematically prioritize more important things, such as furthering the general welfare, for example.

And, as there is no concentrated lobbying of industry groups, the government can easily have less corruption.

I am not denying that trade has existed in almost every society throughout history: What I am saying is that there is no need to trade for goods that one can already produce; I did not even really deny that trade is necessary, just that I want it to be controlled by the state.

Finally, if market economies are so much more efficient, why is it that, for most of its existence, the USSR had no homelessness, while the USA has never had such a period in its entire, longer history? If the distribution of resources really is so much more efficient, than why does Cuba have a higher literacy rate than the USA, despite being far poorer? For that matter, why do we even have poverty of any kind in the USA, if the market is so wonderful at distributing resources? Or why do we have so many unvaccinated people in the USA, when Cuba has a far lesser proportion, as did the USSR with the contemporary USA since the end of WWII? Are market economies really better, if in a country as rich and powerful as the USA, we have so many people lacking the basic services and necessities of a comfortable life?

Have you ever seen what they called a 'home' in the USSR? I'd rather be homeless in the USA.

You mean Khrushchyovkas, at least during the Khrushchev Era? Being that I want to live in a hexagonal dome microhouse of about 23 m^2 with my future girlfriend, I see living in a Khrushchyovka as perfectly fine. Indeed, they have proved more durable in many areas than contemporary American housing. BTW, I saw some Khrushchyovkas in Mongolia on the tele and I was surprised how nice they were.

The people were also basically slaves in the USSR. Better to be a homeless person and free, then be in a shack as a slave.

All this talk about the Soviet housing system is beside the point: No one has even attempted to give a good argument against my rhetorical questions, preferring to talk about how horrible Soviet-style housing is/was.

Now, again, if people are so much better off in the USA, why do we have homelessness?

These are the rhetorical question-arguments that I see people avoiding by putting down Soviet-style housing; on the Soviet housing system I have a few, final, words: A Khrushchyovka for 1 person has more space than that in many parts of Tokyo, where people often live in microapartments. Khrushchyovkas are cheaper, due to their prefabricated production, and more durable, due to their concrete construction, than most houses I see here in the Central Valley of California, USA.

And last but not least, I do not deny that the USSR's housing system was flawed in many ways but this was not really due to the inherent design of the housing blocks but rather to the incredible corruption and decline the USSR faced when Brezhnev came to power, starting the Brezhnev Stagnation; this supports my proposition that the USSR did not have its flaws in its economic system but rather its political system: When Lenin was in power, great strides were made in women's rights and the government, if harsh, was more authoritative than authoritarian and certainly not totalitarian, as can be seen in the great freedom artists enjoyed under Lenin's rule. By contrast, under Stalin, the government rapidly became totalitarian as the megalomaniac attempted, with a sadly great degree of success, to purge his enemies and maintain power via hunger, the Gulag system (which only existed under his rule) and an extreme cult of personality. Khrushchev made great progress in a short period of time in what is known to scholars as the Khrushchev Thaw, but just when the USSR's economy was about to overtake the USA's as the most powerful on Earth, political issues did away with Khrushchev and the Brezhnev Stagnation, in part a time when Khrushchev's reforms were undone and also a time of economic decline and, as the name suggests, stagnation that, by the time Gorbachev came to power and tried to save the USSR, it was too late.

Thus, the Fall of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was economic only in relation to the political causes that led it to the fall of the Soviet planned economy, not the system, for all its flaws, in and of itself.

I don't know. You and your girlfriend should move to Cuba for a year or so and report back on your findings.

We have the freedom to succeed or fail.

Imposing protectionist trade policies is like setting up a website devoted to only one religion and making it difficult or impossible for people of other religions to post there. Eventually, those other people will go off and have their own discussions elsewhere and enjoy the new ideas and perspectives that a "free-market" discussion provides. Meanwhile, the religious people will have only themselves to blame when their conversations stagnate from too much of the same old thing.

Free markets promote innovation and new ideas, while closed markets promote the status quo - this is why the Japanese pulled ahead in electronics and auto sales while the Americans were still trying to promote 1960s technology in both consumer goods and automobiles.

You are still avoiding the question, though at least you admitted that you did not know the answer, which is being honest (unless, of course, you do have the answer and are refusing to give it for some reason.)

And, after studying about the island country and watching Henry Louis Gates' "Black in Latin America" on PBS, I would love to go to Cuba but the stupid embargo and my family's lack of disposable income keeps me from doing so.

Yes, I know Cuba has many problems, but with its tiny amount of resources it seems to be doing better than American society would be if it were transplanted to such a situation.

Short answer is; yes, I support a man's right to freely trade with other men on a voluntary basis. In a centrally planned economy, an individual has no right to property, thereby becoming the subject of the "central planners".

In response, to your question about homelessness: it is an individual problem, to be solved by the individuals facing that scenario, not central planners.