I'm not sure if it was deliberate. I do agree with you about manufacturing being hosed while doctors and lawyers still have regulatory guild protections in place.

However, it should be noted that legal services are being offshored to India, document review. And lots and lots of foreign doctors do come to the US.

And fundamentally it is much easier to offshore manufacturing because you can send the finished product anywhere.

I doubt that it was deliberate, although this is the effect. The only solution that I see is to organize the workers in China and Mexico and raise their standards, and in the process raise hte price of their goods.

It's built into the system, no deliberate act needs to be performed each and every time. That, however, does not mean it's not deliberate. More likely it's like the stuff that Chompsky talks about, the stuff that his dumber critics generally think are conspiracy theories even though he explicitly says they're not conspiracies and points out why they happen: the people making the rules make them to suit people like themselves.

Duh.

So when these people make rules, and naturally they tend to make them to benefit themselves and people like themselves (simple self interest and doesn't even have to be deliberate). Others, not like them, get screwed while the people who make the rules are protected.

BTW, on the examples of outsourcing legal document review and "lots and lots of foreign doctors do come to the US"; last first: those doctors have to meet US job standards that aren't necessarily just medical standards, but which keep out perfectly good doctors until they meet these different, non-medical standards. The outsorucing of legal document review is largely taking jobs away from paralegals and such; all it does to lawyers is lower their costs and take away some of their domestic competition (paralegals) who lawyers have been trying to break for years.

Proof that you don't have to be a Libertarian to be glib. Don't you think software and drug patents might be necessary to keep people developing software and drugs?

Re: a ... I do not think it is necessary to have patent protections to keep people developing software. Because of it superior flexibility and lack of complex licensing Linux is rapidly becoming the most widely used server system world wide. It does not rely on patents and licensing, rather on the services exchanged and good will invoked between its players. Patents are only needed by those who can not compete in this field.

a,

there are much more efficient means to develop drugs and software. Look at the intellectual property section of our website, www.cepr.net

Out of sheer, morbid curiosity, I actually went to the CEPR site to find out what alternative they could possibly have thought of to copyrights. That's where I found this paper, which proposes the "Artistic Freedom Voucher". Basically, everyone in America gets $100 (or actually a transferrable tax credit, but same idea) that they can pay out to artists of any kind who are also registered with the program. CDs, DVDs, downloads etc. of those artists would be non-copyright, and thus near-free. What would stop anyone from just using the money to pay their friends and/or family (conveniently registered as artists) is anyone's guess. And what about people who prefer to opt out of the system, out of the crazy notion that they should be able to sell their creative work at a price of their own choosing? For them, there's some mildly Stalinist language sprinkled in, like "Creative workers are entitled to be compensated once for their work, not twice."

Qrazy Qat @ 7:30 p.m.

You don't know what you're talking about. I'm sitting right now in a room of about 40 lawyers doing document review. I have been doing this for about 8 - 10 years since I was downsized from my corporate job.

When I started the "going rate" for document review was $40/hr. with no benefits -- no sick days, no vacation days, no holidays, no nothing. Now the rate is $25/hr. (for fresh law school grads) still with no benefits.

Why do you think the wages have gone down? Hint: it isn't because of a lot of US paralegals.

And speaking of paralegals, no lawyer is trying to "break" paralegals. They are a significant profit center for law firms of all sizes -- from the one or two lawyer real estate firm with 10 or 20 paralegals to the mega firms; they all make money off paralegals.

The only lawyers who could possibly want to "break" paralegals would be the contract/temp types such as I, and we don't have the power to do any such thing.

I think an important hidden assumption of such "free trade" advocates is that the reason we must liberalize trade with other, poorer countries in manufacturing and unskilled labor markets is that the people in these countries are too stupid to do the more complex jobs requiring higher eduction. So we can let them do our shlep work, pay them poverty wages in this country, and feel good about ourselves as our head hits the pillow.
Direct, British-style imperialism may be dead, but the attitude towards the different colored skin peoples of the earth it engendered is alive and well. Take up the white man's burden!

Jack - I assume you only buy products manufactured by white people, then, to avoid coming off as patronizing.

And speaking of paralegals, no lawyer is trying to "break" paralegals. They are a significant profit center for law firms of all sizes -- from the one or two lawyer real estate firm with 10 or 20 paralegals to the mega firms; they all make money off paralegals.

As long as they're not independent they're okay, I'm sure; as long as they can't independently file papers etc., they're okay. This has been going on for a long time, lawyers trying to shut down paralegals' attempts to work as independent advocates in areas they are competent to perform services. You aren't aware of this?

I wish you would thrash the guy at the "New Yorker" who created a straw man argument about how "free trade" increases the buying power of the poor and working classes. He constantly refers to "free trade" rather than "trade."

Obama may not pursue trade policies that redistribute income upward with the same vigor as his predecessors.

may not be as vigorous in his efforts to redistrubute wealth upward, yer right...but if it were even imagined that he'd be inclined to reverse the flow, he wouldn't be where he is today.

While I disagree with much, I totally agree on the Intellectual Monopoly Protection (called property).
First, the moral reason to use violence against thieves is because, once a thief steals a car, the former owner doesn't have it. Civilization ends.

Copying is not the same as stealing.

Second, there is a social cost to enforcing the Int. Monopoly -- copy protection schemes, laws against low cost copies, etc.

Third, nobody owns 'the market'. WalMart doesn't, but neither did the 10 small stores that go out of business because WalMart offers cheaper stuff to customers. It's the business model.

Fourth, just because current business plans are based on Int. Monopoly, doesn't mean that other reward schemes could not replace the monopoly profits as innovation incentives -- although they may not fully, they may even be better.

Shared ideas might lead to faster innovation than profit-protected ideas; with companies spending a lot more on research relative to legal patent protection.

The US gov't, for example, could offer monthly, even weekly, awards for innovation.

Patent registration could qualify for significant tax credits, for instance.

I wish Hugo Chavez would pass a law saying his gov't would no longer respect copyrights on 1s and 0s, in any combination. I mean, why should some 10 or 01 or 101 combination or other be allowed to have monopoly protection?

Opec would really get a lot of support, possibly even from India and China, were it to lead in this now.

"wish you would thrash the guy at the "New Yorker" who created a straw man argument about how "free trade" increases the buying power of the poor and working classes."

YES! You may not believe this, but I actually had a guy argue with me that we needed to keep the flow of cheap foreign (often illegal) labor going even though it has pushed slaughterhouse wages to a fraction of what they were 20 years ago because poor people - including the slaughterhouse workers - benefitted by being able to buy "cheaper chicken". Forget housing, health care, education, etc - all the things that the lower wages make more expensive. Cheaper chicken rules!

What the neoliberals falsely call "free trade" is just a shift to a different kind of protectionism.

So-called "intellectual property" [sic] serves exactly the same protectionist purpose for TNCs that tariffs served for the old national industrial corporations a century ago.

It's no coincidence that the dominant players in the global corporate economy all follow business models that rely heavily on IP (software, entertainment), or government subsidies (armaments), or both (electronics, agribusiness, pharma, biotech).

If we had real free trade, meaning the elimination of all tariffs and trade barriers, all subsidies to trade, and all protections for TNCs, we'd probably be buying most of our goods from small factories close to where we live, producing for the local market. And so would the people of the Third World who are currently supplying sweatshop labor producing for the export market.

P.S. Note to "a": There are actually studies by F.M. Scherer showing that, by the admission of corporate leaders themsevles, some 80% of process and product innovations would have been developed even without patents, for the sake of competitiveness.

Pharma was supposedly the big exception, but I am skeptical on that count. Half of all pharma R&D is done at taxpayer expense, and most of the cost of developing drugs is aimed at gaming the patent system (doing enough testing to secure patent lockdown not just on the version of the drug actually developed, but on all major therapeutic windows).