Heads Up!! "Obama Ready to Defy Base in Order to Advance Trans-Pacific Partnership"

[OrwellwasRight]

226. The Industrial Revolution didn't create the middle class.

It created millions of poor, politically oppressed city dwellers who lived in miserable conditions, not "middle class" lifestyles. Again, I implore you to read The Jungle for a view of pre-regulatory America. Bleak House is also good for the British version. Only when they demanded and got political rights, which led them to demand and get protections like old age pensions, food safety laws, universal education, eight hour workdays, workers compensation programs for on the job injuries, and the like, did we ever get a middle class. IT was laws and regulations that protected the interests of working families that creating the middle class. Undoing the New Deal won't get you a great society. It will get you the Great Depression.

Your answer is a non-answer. Yes, you like some regulations, but not ones that you deem "trade barriers." Well, which are those? And who gets to decide? Because under our trade agreements, companies that don't want to meet a country's standards get to decide. Is that OK with you? Do you really think that a slaughterhouse that doesn't want to be bothered to track where its stick comes from should have the right to call country of origin labeling a "trade barrier"? Is his right to be lazy more important than the consumer's right to know? If you are defending the current trade rules enshrined in the WTO, NAFTA, etc. -- then it is clear you don't support regulations at all because all of the following have been declared illegal trade barriers: a program to ensure that shrimp harvesting doesn't kill endangered turtles; dolphin-safe tuna labeling; country of origin labeling for food; a ban on clove cigarettes to prevent kids from getting addicted to smoking; a denial of a permit to build a hazardous waste processing facility. And the following are being challenged: an increase in the minimum wage; plain and graphic tobacco packaging; the building of an additional bridge between Detroit, MI and Windsor, Ontario; a requirement to clean up polluted land.

It's not just post-War Japan that developed though market protectionism, so did all of Europe and all of North America. The US had high tariffs, stole IP, and pretty much did everything China is doing today. And guess what? It worked. It made us wealthy.