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Originally Posted by fielderLS3

I beg to differ. Prosperity has certainly never been achieved by people who own nothing. THAT is the reason N. Korea's is the way it is. No one there is allowed to own anything privately.

Take any country thats relatively closed to foreign commerce and you're going to see a weak economy. Vietnam, Cambodia, Burma, even the red Chinese were completely stuck economically until they started trading with other countries and letting other countries do business there.

Originally Posted by fielderLS3

I'm all for doing business overseas, but that means selling products overseas, not selling assets overseas.

If GM had been sold to say the Chinese, name one thing that they could pack off to China that couldn't be replaced here by some industrious business and their ideas?

You think they're gonna pack up the Renaissance Center and move it to Beijing or what?

Originally Posted by fielderLS3

Businesses like GM and the many millions of others of every size and in every industry imaginable have been the sources of wealth that we have benefited from for so long.

This isn't going to be a popular thing to say but it is what it is. If anything, GM has spent the last 20-30 years destroying an obscene amount of wealth. Between monetary losses, depreciation and several other factors, GM made nearly $500 billion turn into a pumpkin over that period with nothing to show for it. If you're constantly pouring money into an enterprise that you don't know how to make money with, you're not doing anyone any favors. In fact, systematically destroying wealth is how you end up in Bankruptcy.

In fact thats what makes liberal bankruptcy laws so great for an economy. People can fail and the economic assets they were squandering can be transferred to someone who just might know WTF they're doing.

Originally Posted by fielderLS3

When ownership of these companies goes overseas, the wealth they generate goes with it. And when those overseas countries regulate their markets as to effectively prevent American companies from selling into their markets, very little of that wealth will ever find its way back to us.

Zero sum economics is a complete fallacy. There's not a fixed amount of wealth that flows back and forth from country to country such that when we gain $X, country Y loses $X.

That way of thinking hasn't been true since wealth was defined as gold and silver coins sitting in a chest in somebodies closet. Yeah, in 1780 when that was true, if you bought all your stuff from overseas, it was gone and not coming back but we don't operate that way and haven't in a long time.

In fact the whole value system of trade is based on the fact that wealth is created every time trade happens simply by virtue of the fact that each person is trading away something of less value than what they recieve.

We create wealth on a daily basis by the judicious use of capital to implement IDEAS. We use those ideas to find things that we do better than other people and maximize our utility and our wealth generating capability.

Thats why despite all the hand wringing about "we don't build anything anymore" we're still the largest economy in the world by far. Its not even true that "we don't build anything anymore." We're still the world leader in manufacturing both by $$$ amount and tonnage, we've simply ceded the market for cheap consumer crap that people see everyday on the shelf at Wal-Mart to people who work cheaper and focused on what we do best, namely high quality goods, precision equipment and large capital goods like industrial transformers and aircraft.

Originally Posted by fielderLS3

It doesn't matter to Joe US Citizen if his 401k's Toyota stock goes up if 1) another of his 401k funds owned GM stock and 2) he has no 401k because he lost his job to a Toyota employee. Unless you can make a living off trading stocks alone, you are going to need a company here that can employ you.

You missed my point entirely. The argument is always that "well the profits are going overseas" when they're not. If I as Joe Q. Citizen are part owner in Toyota, BMW, Siemens, whoever, then the profits are going to benefit me. Thats the nature of a global economy.

If you still think that creating a corporate state, being a homer and propping up entrenched national corporations is the right way to go thats fine. But recognize that the results are not all they're cracked up to be. The Europeans have been doing it for 50 years and the result has been relative stagnation and high long term unemployment...