Wal-Mart Rules, Mom and Pop Stores Hate America

[pvn]

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Protectionism is an attempt to stave off the need to adapt.

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Protectionism is a form of adaptation. Your "free market" is not the magical reference according to which everything must be justified.

And anyway, that is not necessarily what I am suggesting here. Why mischaracterize my argument?

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First off, I didn't say that's what you're suggesting. Again, in the part you selectively deleted from the quote, you see I'm asking you for WHAT you ARE suggesting.

I guess you can call "trying to freeze the status quo" an "adaptation" but it's stretching it.

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It doesn't work.

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It sure built up China in a hurry.

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Protectionism does not allow Chinese industries to outperform US industries.

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Who is the "American Consumer"? I am American, and a consumer, and I'm not in debt.

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What? The term as it is usually used implies the statistically typical American consumer, not you or anyone else in particular.

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Of course, such a person does not actually exist.

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What difference does it make if this person, whoever it is, is consuming "foreign" production or domestic? Debt is the problem, right?

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I keep clarifying that the major underlying reason for the budget shortfall is the issue: the unaffordable outsourcing of production.

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You keep repeating the same thing over and over, but you can't explain why. How does making widget X in location Z instead of Location Y make any difference?

Keep in mind that your typical, statistically average (mythical) wal-mart shopper doesn't make ANY of the items in the store, they are ALL "outsourced".

And note, you're acting like the "consumer" is the one doing the outsourcing, shooting himself in the foot. While outsourcing may certainly be bad for some individuals (even though it's clearly beneficial for the "average" person), those people are not choosing to outsource. I mean, I haven't seen any factory workers who themselves decided to send their jobs to China.

If Joe loses his job, and joe continues to spend money, the reason joe is heading for trouble is not that his job was outsourced - he would be in the *exact* same spot if he got canned for any other reason but continued to spend at his previous rate. The reason for his budget shortfall is quite simply that his consumption is outstripping his production. Period.

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if you can't afford something, producing it for yourself is not always the best solution to the problem.

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You're sending forth a veritable army of strawmen. Who cares if it's not always the solution? In this case it is a POSSIBLE solution to a very serious problem.

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In reality, this action only solves this particular problem in a statistically tiny number of cases. Most people have no idea how to make a pencil, much less the resources, machinery, etc to make them for less than a pencil company can - regardless of whether that pencil company has its factory in chicago or china.

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Since I'm bad at, e.g. building houses, I would probably spend more money building a house myself than buying one from someone who knows what he's doing (accounting for the value of my time, not to mention all the materials I would waste re-doing various parts of the construction).

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An absurd example. America has one of the world's most technologically advanced and fully specialized economies.

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Yes. I thought you said that was bad. Produce what you can, right?

And outsourcing stuff increases the available resources here for even more specialization.

That's the idea. Outsource so you can increase your net production by specializing.