Thats what protectionism is. The government deciding that some jobs are more worthwhile than others and redistributing wealth to those special interest groups at the expense of others. Worst of all, protectionism is regressive. It places proportionately more of a burden on those with lower incomes.

There are two angles to fight poverty. One is to concentrate on the income side. While nobody is overtly anti-job, I think there are ways of increasing personal income and ways of creating jobs that most Republicans would dislike such as direct subsidies and make work jobs. A minimum wage falls into the misguided, but well-meaning category. Protectionism does too.

A second angle to fight poverty is to increase buying power by decreasing prices. What does it mean to be poor if you have a place to live, enough to eat and have cable tv? Cheap prices are the free trader's welfare system.

Sugar is the poster child for free trade issues. One famous case study is the move of the lifesavers plant from Michigan to Canada. Here are some of the factors involved in the decision to move from a progressive viewpoint:

Boyd said a recent survey by his firm indicates Life Savers will pay nonunion workers in Mount Royal about $12.50 an hour--$3 less than their counterparts in Holland. With the Canadian government picking up the tab for health coverage, the savings come to about $6.5 million a year.

"Labor costs dominate the equation," Boyd said. "They account for at least 70% of all operating costs. . . . That's the real driver in the site selection process."

Workers and city officials remain convinced that the culprit is sugar. They blame the closing on a combination of federal tariffs, trade quotas and loans that benefit U.S. sugar beet and sugar cane farmers by keeping the price of domestic bulk sugar at 21 cents a pound, compared to 6 cents on the international market. That makes a big difference to Life Savers, which uses 113 tons of sugar a day. Each Life Savers candy is 95% sugar.

Last year, Brachs candy cited high domestic sugar prices in announcing that it would close its 77-year-old west Chicago plant and move 1,100 jobs overseas, one of several candy-makers to do so. Kraft isn't saying how much it will save on the crucial ingredient. State and local officials estimate it will be $6 million a year.

Sugar prices may not be the only factor in this decision, but one thing remains clear. American consumers are over paying for sugar. Since a person can only consume so much sugar in a year (the 2001 average was 64 lbs of sugar and 81 pounds of corn sweeteners), this represents a regressive redistribution of wealth. The poor consumers of the US, of which there are many, are directly subsidizing the US sugar industry, of which there are few. Do you know anyone who works in the sugar industry? Do you know anyone who does NOT consume sugar?

Another example are the steel industry protections that Bush enacted in the middle of his last term in order to score points in politically valuable Pennsylvania. The result? A huge loss of manufacturing jobs further down the value chain in states like Ohio, which became the swing state in the election. It turns out that there are far more workers in the industries that use steel than in the industry that makes it.

Here is the thing, as consumers, we are all downstream in the "value chain." Protectionism harms the economy as a whole in order to favor special interest groups with political muscle.

That doesn't sound very Republican to me.

• Let's Tax These Bubble-Driven Windfall Profits talks about an oil bubble.
• Regulation Begets Regulation tackles gas price regulation as well. popular subject these days with the capitalists.
• Improving Access to Advanced Degrees suggests subsidizing education rather than tourism as the path to economic growth.
• Sexist swedes reveals how regulation intended to help women in the workplace has unintended consequences.
• How the Internet Helps Pricing Efficiencies talks the internet and the used book market.

Enjoy.

Its not uncommon to hear the slippery slope argument against banning guns. Whats next? Banning knives?

Well, today, I ran across this recommendation to ban kitchen knives in Britian to reduce stabbings. Yikes! Where does the slippery slope lead after this?

"Stay away from my girl, or I swear I'll fetch the comfy chair!"

• Bush should sign the highway bill looks at the benefits of the US highway system and suggests that this years highway bill would pay for itself in increased commerce and efficiency. The problem is that the highway bill doesn't necessarily only apply to highways. Instead, this bill seems to contain severe pork. (See this analysis)
• Until reading this post, I had no idea that the court had declared these kinds of tax incentives unconstitutional. Good for the court. Bribing businesses to relocate is not only wasteful of public funds, but unfair to the businesses that don't participate.
• And finally, Corporate Welfare and climate change. Innovation, not regulation is required for any realistically sustainable environmental effort.

For decades, liberals scoffed at federalist arguments that the people of Wisconsin or Wyoming understood their own needs better than a distant Congress. They brought more and more power to Washington, over-riding state legislatures and imposing mandates on every nook and cranny of governance.

Now those chickens have come home to roost. Republicans run Washington, and they're using the federal power that liberals built in ways that liberals never envisioned.

I think there is definitely a long term re-alignment of power in the US. Perhaps issues such as isolationism, fiscal responsibility and states rights can really only belong to an opposition party.

A surprisingly large fraction of what you read in newspapers and magazines consists of such press hits: stories that, though not false, are there because someone paid for them to be ... PR is the news equivalent of search engine optimization

John Stossel talks about PR from the perspective of a reporter in his book Give Me a Break. As a consumer reporter, he was targeted with PR from law firms trying to get him to run "XXX is bad" type stories in order to prepare juries for yet-to-be filed lawsuits.

Do you trust the links at the top of the search engine results? Do you trust the story at the top of the news? It would seem to depend on the topic. Stossel made me distrust "XXX is harmful" stories. Now Graham makes me question the "XXX is great" stories. I guess you have to ask "who stands to gain" whenever you see something in the media.

To prove my point, you might examine my link to John Stossel's book more closely.

The war on Iraq was justified with WMD, but I always felt that the primary benefit of attacking Iraq would be to break the status quo in the middle east. There is a recent Colin Powell interview which discusses the motives of regime change versus WMD.

In the short term, there were some shifts in jobs. However, in the long term, overall employment was unaffected, wages went UP, not down, and productivity soared.

I like this as an example of outsourcing because it is free of some of the emotional baggage associated with other forms of outsourcing. The work is staying in the United States. The jobs were "low paying" to begin with, although they are clearly taking advantage of geographic pay differentials. Nobody is going to think that a career "order taker" can't get a new job. And everyone has gone through the drive-through at McDonalds.

Brand Autopsy highlights some of the benefits of this change. This drive through is faster, presumably they can pass cost savings on to the customers, and the company can handle more customers in the same period of time.

So next time you hear someone ranting about the evils of outsourcing (say Lou Dobbs), what you have to remember is that consumers benefit more from lower prices and efficiency than workers lose. Far more people eat at McDonalds (billions served) than work there.

Consumers (thats you) are the hidden victims of anti-outsourcing efforts, whether the product is fast food, automobiles, or software.