(DOWNLOAD) "More Than Zero: Why Won't People Who Love to Make Zero-Sum Arguments About the Economy Apply Their Own Lessons to Government Spending? (From the Top) (Essay)" by Matt Welch * Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: More Than Zero: Why Won't People Who Love to Make Zero-Sum Arguments About the Economy Apply Their Own Lessons to Government Spending? (From the Top) (Essay)
- Author : Matt Welch
- Release Date : January 01, 2010
- Genre: Reference,Books,Religion & Spirituality,Politics & Current Events,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 63 KB
Description
ANYONE WHO HAS expended energy arguing for free trade, market competition, and the open exchange of ideas has repeatedly encountered the same obstacle: zero-sum assumptions misapplied to dynamic, nonlinear phenomena. Almost anywhere you see statism advancing--in economic policy, national security, even the basic conditions for free speech--you can bet that underneath there's a faulty zero-sum argument. All complicated matters of life, according to this way of thinking, can be reduced to a simple binary scale: Press your thumb down on the bad end, and the good one will go up. So when President Barack Obama slaps a 35 percent tariff on Chinese tires, as he did on September 11, he does it in the name of ensuring that (as he put it in a campaign promise) "China is no longer given a free pass to undermine U.S. workers." In this yin-yang formulation, there is a single pie of domestic American tire consumption, and China's slice is growing bigger at the expense of domestic producers. Forget the over-all U.S. economy, with its 99.9 percent non-tire-industry workers (and its government-owned, money-hemorrhaging auto companies), all of whom are happy to take advantage of cheaper tire prices. And forget a once-starving country that has catapulted more human beings out of poverty within a generation than any nation in the history of the world.