Can't like your post twice, so I decided to quote it instead. It's exactly true. Globalists are opportunistic cowards. The guy can't separate politics and business when it's convenient, but when China or Saudi Arabia are involved, then suddenly he goes mute.
If globalists are "opportunistic cowards" then what are protectionists? I call them deluded.
Despite all the bluster, we are not likely to find out the hard way about the downsides of protectionism. It has conseqences Trump and his fans don't like to see mentioned or discussed. But Congress is hearing about that from its constituents already. We will not be able to export what we do now, for instance. Which is why midwestern Congressmen look askance at the idea of rejiggering NAFTA: we export a lot of grain to Mexico.
Protectionism is not a one way street where we put walls (tariffs) on imports but keep exporting stuff as always. That is not how it works with trade wars. Globalism is here to stay. The world is not flat, countries and companies do not operate in vacuums without risk of impact by adverse reaction to their trade policies by other entities.
The trick is how to make globalism serve ordinary people better. As far as I know, no one ever suggested that a rising tide would lift all boats as fast as it jacked up the profits of the owners of capital. It's not like we haven't known about this for decades.
Whatever the fix is, it's not going to be rooted in protectionism. To work, it has to be rooted in education, in better fits between industries' needs and graduating students' skill sets, in apprenticeship programs and paid internships.
For us to sit around and blame China for existing -- as a source of labor, as a potential market-- is just plain crazy. The human consequence of auomated manufacturing will hit China too. The difference, as far as I can tell, is that China's more likely to make use of it faster than we are. There's some food for thought: China will have to come up with a way to employ, or at least pay, more people for less work than their labor force is currently providing, even in these times of western demand for cheap human labor. See the western companies don't care if China automates that labor. They're automating everything they can too.
We are all ultimately in the same boat on this gig. We have to figure out how to educate a workforce that will be better suited to new job requirements than to the jobs being handed off to robots. To the extent there's a gap and we still have too many people for the jobs that need to be filled by humans, we have to train people to acquire skills in fields they can enjoy as avocations, so that we don't all end up so much like what we're trending to now: societies sitting around in front of computer and TV screens all day and all night when not working.
Anyway we'll never get there by levelling complaints about globalism as if it were something we could pick up and drown in the bathtub. That is not going to happen. We have to keep making it work better to serve more of us, not just owners of capital. For Tim Cook to speak as he did in China does not seem out of line to me. China is not just a cheap labor source for us. It is a huge potential market for American companies. China is aware they they cannot press too hard on the protectionist button either. You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. That's an old kitchen saying, but it holds true when a CEO is pitching ideas in China, too.
