Paul Krugman has written a very interesting op ed piece in the New York Times.

The piece is good as far as it goes. He recognizes the problem for American workers when the U.S. imports a large amount of manufactured goods from low wage countries.

One quote that I would like to focus on is the following:

Although the outsourcing of some high-tech jobs to India has made headlines, on balance, highly educated workers in the United States benefit from higher wages and expanded job opportunities because of trade.

I find this statement to be rather ironic. In the article he admitted that he had not foreseen the negative impact of free trade on American manufacturing workers. He is now missing the impending impact on American knowledge workers.

Outsourcing of high tech jobs is happening in India, China, and many of the former republics of the Soviet Union. It is only a matter of time before the impact on knowledge workers becomes as severe as the impact on manufacturing workers.

I was just glad that I was able to retire from the high tech industry before the impact became too severe.

I do agree with Krugman that ending free trade is not the ultimate answer.

I think we need to start by allowing U.S. trade negotiators to discuss labor rights, environmental, and safety issues in all future trade talks. The Republicans in Congress during the Clinton administration passed laws preventing this. It is about time we changed these rules.

These changes may not be sufficient, but it is a start in the right direction. As with any negotiation, it is never clear that one can get what one wants out of the deal. However, you are certainly not going to get something if you don’t even ask.

Dennis Kucinich has his own web site called www.kucinichtv.com.

One event announced on this web site is:

Join Gore Vidal, Dennis Kucinich, and David Swanson

On Sunday, January 6, from 8-10 p.m. ET, you can participate in a forum on “Separation and Balance of Power” live video streamed at www.kucinichtv.com

This program will will feature live audience participation along with questions received by email from the viewing audience. If you are in New Hampshire, please join us live at 540 N. Commercial Street in Manchester.

Follow this link to see why I am liking John Edwards more and more.

The Huffington Post had a an item about Ron Paul and the Civil War.

The item linked to a video on Talking Points Memo showing Ron Paul’s appearance on Meet The Press.

The comments on TPM were very enlightening about what was and wasn’t true about Ron Paul’s remarks.

Since I only have commenting privileges on The Huffington Post, I left the following comment there:

One can put together self-consistent philosophies, like Ron Paul has done, without those philosophies having anything to do with the real world, like Ron Paul’s don’t.

 

Reading the recent book “American Creation: Triumphs and Tragedies at the Founding of the Republic” by Joseph J. Ellis, is very enlightening about the issues of slavery, Federalism versus Republicanism, and the paranoid nature of Thomas Jefferson.

 

It is also instructive that George Washington was also a Virginian who owned slaves, but he was a Federalist not a Republican.

A lot of the paranoia displayed by Ron Paul can be seen in the Republicans of Virginia at the time of this country’s founding.

 

Of course it may be true that Joseph Ellis is not an unbiased observer. However, if I am to believe his interpretation of Jefferson and probably Madison, it makes me think that they just did not understand issues of macro-economics just as Ron Paul fails to do.

 

They believed in the agrarian way of life and could just not understand the economic issues that drove Hamilton and Washington to see the need for Federalized economic policies. Does that also sound like Ron Paul?

My wife was mis-educated in the same Texas school system as Ron Paul. She thinks the War of Northern Aggression was about states rights, too. (This is the term for the Civil War that I learned from my Southern colleagues when I was in the Army.)

In the feedback on my post I learned, among other things, that Ron Paul did not get his mis-education from the Texas school system. He is originally from Pennsylvania.

At the time of the writing of my comment for The Huffington Post, I had not read the final chapter of American Creation. This final chapter was about the Louisiana Purchase.  It was amazing to see how relevant this chapter was to the discussion of Ron Paul’s misguided thinking.