Sorry to hear of the abuse you are sometimes getting when people mistranslate “does not exist” into “should not exist” or else misinterpret an explanation for why things works the way they do into an excuse or exculpation or an apology for the same.
Oh, I have a thick skin. I guess what pisses me off most are the strawman arguments that willfully or ignorantly misstate my points so they can make their argument seem like a winner.
I'm being called everything from a communist who wants a global central government to control trade to making the same argument that Keynesians make about economies - when all I did was to note that neither were even close to the argument I was making. I was trying to say that America shouldn't sit back an take it and call that "free trade". Some people refuse to recognize that other countries do have barriers to trade and somehow us not responding to them amounts to "free trade".
On Facebook, I posted this:
Just let me ask, what do you suppose is free trade? Free means "without restriction" and trade means "exchange of goods or services". It takes two or more parties to exchange anything, so if only one of those parties places no restriction on the exchange but the others do, how is that free trade. It isn't that you can't have free trade, it is that you won't have it.
So many are twisting this argument to the point that if anyone questions the fallacy that free trade can just materialize out of vapor and anyone who points that out is a communist, it astounds me they don't see how dumb it makes them look. I've been accused of wanting a Harrison Bergeron world when, thanks to tariffs, currency manipulation and regulatory blocking, we already live in one.
Fair trade is possible - it only means we all operate under the same set of rules. You disadvantage me, I'll disadvantage you by the same amount. Once we are on equal footing, may the best product or service win.
When I taught my college level course on Terrorism and Political Violence my introductory lectures reviewed major sociological and psychological macro-level theories that tried to explain political violence but generally I was showing them that none of these theories held much water. But I found that most college students tended to confuse attempts to explain violent behavior with being attempts to excuse such behavior. E.g. if the ghetto dweller who is poor and uneducated (setting aside issue of causation versus correlation) commits a crime “therefore” he is less culpable due to his poverty and ignorance. I tried to stress that even if there were socio-economic explanations for recruitment into political violence that such explanations did not exculpate such criminals from blame. Getting this across to students who have been immersed in moral relativism by other teachers is almost a hard sell. It seems that they were convinced that crime was always someone else’s fault other than that of the criminal!
The messaging is definitely a problem. While we know precisely what President Trump wants on pretty much everything else, we don't know here. The mixed, contradicting messages make it even worse. I don't think we can do anything more than wait and see.
I agree. Wait and see is the proper reaction - hell, we have just been at this a week. The market is bouncing back and at last count 70 countries have come to the table. There are too many, a lot on our side, who want to see this fail.
Since the end of WW 2, our nation has helped the rest of the sovereign nations to grow economically. The complexity of the issues that are in play, of necessity, requires that our nation play our cards close to the vest for successful corrections. The incessant bleating about the long list of products that will be affected IMO underscores the fundamental danger that our economy and the financial well being of our nation. The 1%ers will survive, what is now underway means a return to thriving for the rest of us.
Sorry to hear of the abuse you are sometimes getting when people mistranslate “does not exist” into “should not exist” or else misinterpret an explanation for why things works the way they do into an excuse or exculpation or an apology for the same.
Oh, I have a thick skin. I guess what pisses me off most are the strawman arguments that willfully or ignorantly misstate my points so they can make their argument seem like a winner.
I'm being called everything from a communist who wants a global central government to control trade to making the same argument that Keynesians make about economies - when all I did was to note that neither were even close to the argument I was making. I was trying to say that America shouldn't sit back an take it and call that "free trade". Some people refuse to recognize that other countries do have barriers to trade and somehow us not responding to them amounts to "free trade".
On Facebook, I posted this:
Just let me ask, what do you suppose is free trade? Free means "without restriction" and trade means "exchange of goods or services". It takes two or more parties to exchange anything, so if only one of those parties places no restriction on the exchange but the others do, how is that free trade. It isn't that you can't have free trade, it is that you won't have it.
So many are twisting this argument to the point that if anyone questions the fallacy that free trade can just materialize out of vapor and anyone who points that out is a communist, it astounds me they don't see how dumb it makes them look. I've been accused of wanting a Harrison Bergeron world when, thanks to tariffs, currency manipulation and regulatory blocking, we already live in one.
Fair trade is possible - it only means we all operate under the same set of rules. You disadvantage me, I'll disadvantage you by the same amount. Once we are on equal footing, may the best product or service win.
When I taught my college level course on Terrorism and Political Violence my introductory lectures reviewed major sociological and psychological macro-level theories that tried to explain political violence but generally I was showing them that none of these theories held much water. But I found that most college students tended to confuse attempts to explain violent behavior with being attempts to excuse such behavior. E.g. if the ghetto dweller who is poor and uneducated (setting aside issue of causation versus correlation) commits a crime “therefore” he is less culpable due to his poverty and ignorance. I tried to stress that even if there were socio-economic explanations for recruitment into political violence that such explanations did not exculpate such criminals from blame. Getting this across to students who have been immersed in moral relativism by other teachers is almost a hard sell. It seems that they were convinced that crime was always someone else’s fault other than that of the criminal!
The messaging is definitely a problem. While we know precisely what President Trump wants on pretty much everything else, we don't know here. The mixed, contradicting messages make it even worse. I don't think we can do anything more than wait and see.
I agree. Wait and see is the proper reaction - hell, we have just been at this a week. The market is bouncing back and at last count 70 countries have come to the table. There are too many, a lot on our side, who want to see this fail.
Since the end of WW 2, our nation has helped the rest of the sovereign nations to grow economically. The complexity of the issues that are in play, of necessity, requires that our nation play our cards close to the vest for successful corrections. The incessant bleating about the long list of products that will be affected IMO underscores the fundamental danger that our economy and the financial well being of our nation. The 1%ers will survive, what is now underway means a return to thriving for the rest of us.