Quote:
Originally Posted by Paul McSwizzle
Reading Marx, Capital, and the Madness of Economic Reason now.
also have The Ecology of Freedom by Bookchin up next on my list. Looking forward to that one.
microbet, you mentioned in one of the other threads that your views on trade differ from most of the board. Could you recommend a book on trade that has helped shape your thinking?
I reviewed this itt
Bad Samaritans - The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism - by Ha-Joon Chang
So, that, although by then it was more agreeing with things I had already read. Those were more on history and politics or articles. Joseph Stiglitz would be another economist. A lot of my formative reading was about NAFTA and CAFTA.
Basically
Free Trade is really not what the free trade deals are as they still have plenty of protection for the powerful nations
Protection of infant industries has been key in every developed economy when they were developing and developed economies always always try to force currently developing economies to drop protections.
Little or no protection is probably best between developed economies like US to EU.
We should allow/encourage protection and subsidy, help with subsidy, of industry in the developing world rather than increasing their debt which is the current tool used to force them to keep their markets open and their raw materials and labor cheap.
"Free Trade!" is really "America First!". I guess that's fine for a nationalistic zealot, but the liberal suits of this world like to think they are doing God's work when they open up Honduras' markets to some healthy competition (though still, read the fine print, there's always plenty of protection for influential US industries).
Dunno if I'm coining this term, but 'liberation economics'.
The biography of Henry A. Wallace I reviewed itt thread was good in a way too. People often attribute the success of the global green revolution to economic policy when technology should be given most of the credit and neither the technology nor the economics were liberal (in the free market neo-liberal sense). And a final thought I've mentioned before is that the invention of the intermodal shipping container is overlooked as a, or perhaps the, key contributor to the explosion of global trade, rather than economic policy.
Last edited by microbet; 03-04-2018 at 01:38 PM.