the IDIOT

continuing the “paul roberts is a blowhard” theme, let’s quote and expose his talk at the 2004 ASC more explicitly:

first, what kind of pompous jerk goes to the ASC at the mises institute and addresses the crowd, including rows of economists who could wipe the floor with him one-handed, with this beauty:

i continue to hope that i can help you get your mind around this problem, so that you can participate in the policy that will be forthcoming.

that wasn’t the only time the “you need to get your mind around this” ploy was attempted. worse, he wasn’t even the guy to come up with the theories he so altruistically spilled on the misesians.

enjoy this gem:

now, there’s no real point in telling me that free trade’s not based on comparative advantage, or that comparative advantage doesn’t depend on international factor immobility.

here i thought free trade was based on the power and necessity of liberty — the concept that no man, nor his labor, is the property of another. guess i’d better remove my mind from around that one!

there’s not much point either in arguing that the case for free trade is merely the willingness of people to make deals, because this is not the case; the case for free trade has always been that it brings advantages to the countries as a whole.

straw man, anyone? this is the crux of his entire talk. he established a new definition of “free”, framed the entire history of free trade apologetics in a box designed for him to trample, then went ahead and stood in front of a crowd of austrian economists and said that they were full of shit, because these dudes gomory and baumol had written some things that he found quite disturbing to the case for free trade! ROFL.

let me say this again. the case for free trade is liberty — exactly the opposite of his straw man. that people have used economic theory to debunk mercantilism on utilitarian grounds erases nothing of the principles required for happiness. is liberty not required for happiness? then fuck it all. otherwise, don’t even pretend that you’re going to subsume the primary with the destruction of the secondary.

i believe that free trade will always bring about the most wealth creation, for all countries, if for no other reason than that free trade does not mean indiscriminate trade — that great yet unspoken secondary straw man of dipshit roberts. however, let’s assume that gomory and baumol are 100% right in debunking comparative advantage. what then? how does this justify forcing your opinion on another man, as roberts cautions at the beginning of his talk we must do? his mantra: if you don’t do it, somebody else will. i wanted to stand up and stick that right in his gazoo. the nerve of some gasbag to spew that kind of drivel at the mises institute.

well here’s the ultimate noose that roberts pulled out to hang somebody with. (always be careful when pulling out nooses).

the definition of trade

now, let’s ask the question, “is outsourcing — is offshore production — trade?” or is it labor arbitrage? what is being traded? you know, trade always meant that england was producing something, france was producing something, they were engaging in trade if one had the advantage other the other, and they would win, and the loser then would reallocate to some other domestic function, the capital had to be mobile internally to move. labor would be re-employed in a new venture, and this would continue to work and continue to produce good results. but when a firm moves production offshore, what is it trading?

we often speak as if the loss of jobs is due to trade competition, but in these types of cases, no one is losing to a foreign firm, they’re just moving offshore. so i think it’d be better to call it “labor arbitrage”; you simply move to where the cost of labor is cheaper, because the capital and technology work the same anywhere. so if it’s labor arbitrage it isn’t trade to start with, so the fact that the free trade model has run into trouble, on the terms that i offer you, and on the terms that gomory and baumol offer you, it may be beside the point, if it’s not trade.

oh, thank you, kind sir, for letting me off the hook from the embarrassment that my theories were bunk.

this notion of his is pure evil from the eighth dimension. could the word “trade” be any clearer? exchange. i give you something in exchange for something of yours. this does not include services exchanged for money? why was this freak not booed from the hall for pelting listeners so with a straight face? and what a great thing that he supplied the cowering with a term that flows off the tongue: “arbitrage”. ahhhh. it did its dirty work though, as otherwise intelligent people were later heard agreeing with his bullshit and slinging “arbitrage” through the air as if it explained something.

not that it matters, since it was simply a rhetorical disguise, but what is the trade of goods except “goods arbitrage”, under his rather warped usage of “arbitrage”? a firm finds that it can get a better deal elsewhere, so it does. whence comes this foolish requirement that widgets must change hands — that material must cross borders in both directions or it’s not trade. if property is exchanged, then it’s trade; and my services are without question my property. so stop with the baloney bombs already. it means less than nothing; it’s distortion. it’s a mind fuck on the heels of an insult.

much has been said, in light of roberts’s dementia on trade, of his “great work” elsewhere. well flush it down a toilet and let’s move on. paul roberts is an enemy of liberty, and he has advanced his career by being a paid turncoat to which flacks can point as they paint trade in even more distorted terms than he does. to hell with the mercantilists and baby bombers who’ve left the fields of liberty and principle for their brief time in the sun.

is there some expressionless torture in hell for them? if so, can i buy a DVD of it when paul roberts finds out?

Tags: comparative advantage, england, france, paul roberts, ron paul, straw man, utilitarianism

Posted 20050424 21:17 under derailleur. Follow responses through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are closed.