Dallas Blog

Free trade is a terrific policy, but it is effective ONLY when practiced on an even playing field, and therein lies the problem.

This is exactly what triggered the Great Depression. The Smoot-Hawley tariff act is considered by pretty much anybody who's done even the lightest reading on the subject to be at the core of what triggered the whole thing.

It was protectionist barriers that the US set in place that caused a worldwide backlash of tariffs and trade restrictions that ground world trade to a halt and destroyed businesses around the globe.

Even a letter signed by over 1,000 of the nation's leading economists of the time couldn't convince Hoover to veto the act. That's why he's famous for Hoovervilles. Make your reservations now. It appears that there may be a tarpaper shack in all of our futures.

Gee, I hope mine has Dish Network...

heh it seems like every single economic concept has the ability to spiral out of control.

Fisher is always entertaining and has a real way with words, although the crack cocaine metaphor does not really fit.

"Protectionism is the ___ of economics."

I think it has to be something that is good for you when you are the first and only one doing it, but bad when everyone else winds up doing it too. Or maybe I'm missing his point.

Fisher was on Fox Business today at 1:30 pm:

http://www.foxbusiness.com/video/index.html?playerId=videolandingpage&streamingFormat=FLASH&referralObject=3500376&referralPlaylistId=1292d14d0e3afdcf0b31500afefb92724c08f046&maven_referrer=staf

We are subjects, of course. We haven't been citizens since they started listening in on your phone conversations, opening our mail and e-mail, viewing our reading lists, etc., without court order. Even now, with a new administration alleging that they'll be more responsible with our civil liberties, they still think we ought to "move on" instead of prosecuting the people who turned us into subjects over the last eight years.

I understand your frustration over what Wall Street's done to us, how they've transfered our wealth and made it theirs. But like George C. Scott said in the Flim Flam Man: "You can't cheat an honest man."

And not to say that your father was intentionally dishonest, but we were all seduced by the easy money aspect of investing right alongside of the Big Boys, bellying up to the same bar, as it were, via stocks and mutual funds. And that was always Mordecai's contention (George C.'s character), that his whole game wouldn't play without people willing to spin the wheel and take the risk, even when they suspected that the game was rigged. It's like Las Vegas. Millions go every year to dump their money at the feet of Organized Crime, knowing full well that their chances of going home a winner are somewhere between slim and none. But still they go.

And on Wall Street, no matter how many fineprint disclaimers they put on prospectus', folks are still willing to Roll Them Bones.

Now, our collective fingers are burnt and we're mad as Hell. But, short of dusting off the guilotine and dragging them out into the streets for their comeuppance, there's nothing we can do about it. Because the very people who we are expecting to regulate and punish these guys, these guys who have made off with your father's savings, were bought and paid for by the folks we want them to bring down.

It ain't gonna happen. It's going to be business as usual. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer.

We are subjects.