Here, in brief, is the theory: If Joe the American sells blankets to Mary the American for $15 each, and if an opening to trade allows Mary to buy Chinese blankets for $5 each, then three things happen:
Of these, only the second effect is bad for Americans, and it’s got to be outweighed (or at least matched) by the first effect. The third effect is pure gravy.
- Mary is better off by $10.
- Joe is worse off by at most $10—because Joe can always match the Chinese price if he wants to, taking a $10 hit. On the other hand, he also has the option of getting out of the blanket business, which he’ll choose only if he prefers it to taking that hit.
- Frieda, another American, who might not have been willing to pay $15 for a blanket, picks up a Chinese blanket for $5 and goes to bed warm tonight.
That, in essence, is the argument for free trade. There are plenty of obvious objections, and plenty of somewhat less obvious responses—again, all easily found in textbooks. But if you’re going to argue that trade is bad, then this is the argument you’ve got to confront, because this is the argument on which the vast majority of economists rest their case.
I was listening to this book this morning and found this interesting. Notice how managed trade was bad for both nations. Three cheers for free trade.
In November, 1504, Isabel the Catholic had died; and Philip and his consort at once assumed the titles of King and Queen of Castile, in spite of the opposition of Ferdinand, who claimed the right of regency during his life-time. Both parties were anxious to obtain the support of Henry VII. Already since the accession of Philip the commercial relations between England and the Netherlands had been placed on what proved to be a permanently friendly basis by the treaty known as the Magnus Intercursus of 1496. Flanders and Brabant were dependent upon the supply of English wool for their staple industries, Holland and Zeeland for that freedom of fishery on which a large part of their population was employed and subsisted. In reprisals for the support formerly given by the Burgundian government to the house of York, Henry had forbidden the exportation of wool and of cloth to the Netherlands, had removed the staple from Bruges to Calais, and had withdrawn the fishing rights enjoyed by the Hollanders since the reign of Edward I. But this state of commercial war was ruinous to both countries; and, on condition that Philip henceforth undertook not to allow any enemies of the English government to reside in his dominions, a good understanding was reached, and the Magnus Intercursus, which re-established something like freedom of trade between the countries, was duly signed in February, 1496. The treaty was solemnly renewed in 1501, but shortly afterwards fresh difficulties arose concerning Yorkist refugees, and a stoppage of trade was once more threatened.
Source.
Here is a good example of the differences in math curriculums.
David Frum explains something the French get very right.
Last, the residue [from the nuclear power plants], the most radioactive material, cesium and other byproducts of nuclear fission, is bonded with glass - vitrified is the technical term - and transformed into a black glass that looks like obsidian and that never degrades. Even if smashed into pieces, even if ground into dust, the glass and waste will be bonded together. Trying to separate them, as our guide explained, would be like trying to grind the blue out of a blue-tinted glass.
The vitrified waste is also encased in the familiar steel thermos tube. The two kinds of waste, low-grade and high-grade, meet the same fate. If non-French, they are returned to the customer that generated them for storage. If French, they are kept at La Hague, almost 20 meters below ground, in a massive concrete vault topped by more concrete, accessible only through concrete topped tubes like that on which I stood as the story was told.
The tubes will be opened again and the metal thermoses removed when France completes the selection and preparation of a permanent storage site, a task scheduled for completion by the end of this decade.
Until then, however, they sit here, no trouble to anyone.
Nuclear waste conjures up images of ultra-toxic green sludge, one spill away from poisoning the planet. In fact, all energy production generates waste, including some very dangerous wastes: not only carbon dioxide, but sulphur dioxide and coal slag. The waste from fossil fuels typically evanesces invisibly into the atmosphere, but that disappearance from view does not render it harmless. If anything, the very invisibility of fossil waste enhances its harm, by deluding us into imagining that what has vanished from sight has vanished from existence.
Dr. VanDoodewaard wrote a history of the FRC churches. Published here.
Check out the address on this picture:
Hitchens makes three observations:
- There is nothing at all that any Western country can do to avoid the charge of intervening in Iran's internal affairs. The deep belief that everything—especially anything in English—is already and by definition an intervention is part of the very identity and ideology of the theocracy.
- It is a mistake to assume that the ayatollahs, cynical and corrupt as they may be, are acting rationally. They are frequently in the grip of archaic beliefs and fears that would make a stupefied medieval European peasant seem mentally sturdy and resourceful by comparison.
- The tendency of outside media to check the temperature of the clerics, rather than consult the writers and poets of the country, shows our own cultural backwardness in regrettably sharp relief. Anyone who had been reading Pezeshkzad and Nafisi, or talking to their students and readers in Tabriz and Esfahan and Mashad, would have been able to avoid the awful embarrassment by which everything that has occurred on the streets of Iran during recent days has come as one surprise after another to most of our uncultured "experts."
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