We need a misery tax on unfairly dumped foreign goods which are destroying our manufacturing base and killing good jobs.

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Speculators successfully repackaged the idea of predatory pricing as "fair trade", spurred perhaps by the ideas of amateur economist Ricardo. His corruption of Utilitarianism proclaimed that a few layoffs are justified by lower prices for all. 

The old U.S. idea of protective tariffs -- fees -- for foreign goods was defeated. Common sense once told us that only such equalizing fees barred predatory foreign goods from destroying our manufacturing and causing our financial ruin. 

Tariffs are as old as the battle against unfair English Colonial law, and all the Founding Fathers expected them as a matter of course. No one would be crazy enough to do away with those protections, they might have said; it's a matter of national survival. 

Currently, there is no bar to "free trade" -- predatory pricing -- as U.S. businesses feel the "Force to Outsource". Industry after industry has been helpless before the forces of predatory fast-money speculators, who bankrupt them, one by one, for their personal gain.

Each industry has faced the test alone, been broken, and then fast-money artists moved on to the next victim. 

Honest U.S. lock makers, for example, found it impossible to continue making locks in this country, due not to "over-regulation" -- although there is that, too. What drove them to fire U.S. machinists, trainees, packagers, etc., was that they could buy subcomponents and, eventually, entire locks from outsource brokers. 

Thus, there is no longer a path to a good blue-collar job; no way to start as a drill press operator, learn how to run the lathe, then become a setup or NC machinist. 

These worthy occupations were killed by "make to print" dealers who take specifications and name a price; the outsourcing company then receives a flood of cheap goods. 

Each box of illicit foreign "Wal-Crap" masks a sea of misery: child labor, broken bones, amputations, sweat shop rules, political oppression -- a devil's brew of unheard moans, ignored cries and silent screams.

All that is visible are inert boxes of seemingly innocent outsourced components. 

Pretty soon, the outsourcing business, like Mattel, Maganvox, GM, Frigidaire, printers, toasters, clothing mills, etc., even phone banks and data processing, joins the club of what they think of as the "new reality", where they are "design shops" and simply dream up blueprints and tasks to send overseas for manufacture or performance.

Eventually, you couldn't find a sock, much less a shoe, that isn't "Made in China" or other slave-labor market. 

Now that's the FIRST step to ruin, the fantasy of "becoming a design shop" and not realizing that everything has changed, and our productivity is gone, flown away with the orders and the money.

The SECOND step is the worst: after learning how to make the goods, the foreign sweat shops decide that they can design, them, too, and thus undercut the higher-paid engineers, sales people, clerical staff, inventors, managers and whatever workers are still left. 

So the white-collar workers join their manufacturing brethren on the scrap heap of the unemployed and the unemployable. 

All due to the failure to protect domestic manufacturing. 

Instead of making things, smelting and bending metals, building value, our workforce is led into low-paid service and other nonproductive occupations. All of these workers are low-paid because they are overhead, adding little if any value. They depend on other people actually producing the wealth of manufactured goods. 

Eating at a restaurant once was recognized for its pretension to elegance: having servants make and serve your food, something you should do for yourself. But now, fast-food joints are the standard, an artificially created activity that adds no value to society. All of the workers in that occupation are acting out a pretense that their customers are wealthy enough to have their food served to them by liveried help. 

Retail stores serve a limited function of distributing what is made elsewhere. There is no production, no value added to the goods other than the convenience of nearby storage. Imagine trying to make a society that's sole value added is to distribute cheap goods made in China. 

Financial management and insurance companies also have little or no value added: there is no production in printing stocks, bonds and insurance policies, which depend on the value of goods produced somewhere else. 

We do still produce some computers, software, entertainment, cheap wheat and corn, scrap metal and other raw materials. There are industries like airframe manufacturing, cars and ship-building. That's about all we still make, and one reason Mickey Mouse replaced International Harvester in the Dow 30 Industrials. 

All our manufacturing is gone, gone to foreign shops that don't need to pay a living wage -- often, don't have to pay any wage AT ALL. Back to the 16 hour day, in terms of the labor that went into making the products we use. 

Even the few things we make are pretty wasteful or stupid.

Boeing's big value is to build airships that carry people who don't do anything productive, and it takes imported oil to run the airlines. Cars are a waste, because no car does a single thing toward building anything. And, it takes oil that gets paid for with borrowed money and then burned, we live in the pollution. Ship-building is mostly gone, aside from military shipyards: hardly any ships are registered to U.S. any more, the operators have fled to avoid humane labor laws and to avoid paying taxes on imports paid for with borrowed money. 

We do have entertainment venues, where we host rich tourists who sneer and gambol through the land, and we do send fantasy movies overseas for the delectation of the better-heeled. 

Raw material export is a loser; obviously, to buy fewer manufactured goods, you have to sell a lot more raw materials like Iron ore, Aluminum, Copper, scrap steel, Nickel, cardboard, paper, plastic, etc. The foreign shops make goods out of the raw materials, which are relatively much more expensive when they sell them back to us. Once, the U.S. used to have this advantage, back when we were a productive manufacturing country that imported raw materials and exported the world's best machinery and manufactured goods. 

In exchange for the flood of cheap goods made by foreign slave labor, we get lower prices. For each industry "broken" by cheaper foreign imports, perhaps the pain is countered by the pleasure of the many, and perhaps, if it's just a few industries that are destroyed, those displaced workers could find new jobs elsewhere. 

But Ricardo's puerile "calculus of pleasure and pain" fails if all the industries are destroyed, from the garment factories of South Carolina to the steel plants of the midwest, from autos, refrigerators, electronics, shoes, plastics, all the way to gypsum wallboard and trains.  

We are finding out the reality: the lower prices on imported goods means lower wages. 

Averaging out a good U.S. wage of $30/hour ($60,000 per year, about what it takes to live at our former "first world" standard) with 30 cents per hour (the third-world standard) requires, in the end, that we eliminate the minimum wage. 

Moreover, the lack of wealth produced by our now valueless workers is not sufficient to provide for a decent old age. You need about four active workers to provide for one retiree; that's a contribution of perhaps 10% for the lower retiree benefit. But if the active workers are only making $4/hour, or less, the retiree just cannot receive the kind of benefits that they are receiving now. 

We are already seeing the calls for eliminating the very few retirement plans left -- education and government -- which will go the way of GM pensions and former steel workers' retirement plan. 

The answer, amazingly, is very simple: Restore protective fees on unfair foreign manufacturing, a sort of "misery tax" that recoups the money saved by oppressing foreign workers. 

Thus, there would be no advantage in sweat-shops, no hidden misery in in the goods imported legitimately.

Authors Website: www.EV1.org

Authors Bio:
Promoting plug-in Electric cars and rooftop solar power.