/biz/ - Business & Finance

>>14809338
Think of a thought experiment where there are robots just like you, or 100 clones like you. That would presumably be bad for your wages, but that is nowhere about to happen. Instead, what we are having are human beings being treated like robots and being paid little. This is happening in China and India. This talk about automation and technology is actually about globalization.

One of the signature achievements of the Trump administration has been to reopen this conversation about free trade.

We are incredibly far from a functioning free trade regime. We should expect growth and money to be flowing to where the return is the highest. We shouldn’t be having Chinese peasants saving money to invest in low-yielding U.S. Treasury bonds. (Thiel also made this point about the current account deficit in this discussion at Harvard.)

China has been stealing our intellectual property and conducting cyber-warfare, and China is an unusually dirty country dirtying up the planet. Trump’s 25% tariffs on China should be reframed as a carbon tax.

You don’t want people negotiating free trade treaties who are dogmatic about free trade. The worse job they do, the better job they think they are doing. You need people who are skeptical to be negotiating trade treaties, in order to get a better deal for the U.S. You don’t want them to be playing John Lennon’s “Imagine” in the background.

This is a political economy question. A General Motors executive once said, “What’s good for GM is good for America.” This wasn’t exactly true, but now money-centered banks are negatively correlated with the U.S. when it comes to trade. When money flowed from abroad into the U.S., these banks invested in subprime real estate, and this caused the 2008 financial crisis. Every time the current account deficit goes down, we have a banking crisis. Like when Michael Milken went to jail.