How is the free market working out for you now that your competing for jobs with India?

Yes, Bill Clinton destroyed the workings of the free market when he signed NAFTA and issued a record number of H1b visas. Bill Clinton started the "giant sucking sound" of jobs leaving the country, and Obama is doing nothing to stop it.

http://finance.yahoo.com/tech-ticker/the-u.s.-midd...

The Middle Class in America Is Radically Shrinking. Here Are the Stats to Prove it

"the globalism and "free trade" that our politicians and business leaders insisted would be so good for us have had some rather nasty side effects. It turns out that they didn't tell us that the "global economy" would mean that middle class American workers would eventually have to directly compete for jobs with people on the other side of the world where there is no minimum wage and very few regulations. The big global corporations have greatly benefited by exploiting third world labor pools over the last several decades, but middle class American workers have increasingly found things to be very tough.

Here are the statistics to prove it:

• 83 percent of all U.S. stocks are in the hands of 1 percent of the people.

• 61 percent of Americans "always or usually" live paycheck to paycheck, which was up from 49 percent in 2008 and 43 percent in 2007.

• 66 percent of the income growth between 2001 and 2007 went to the top 1% of all Americans.

• 36 percent of Americans say that they don't contribute anything to retirement savings.

• A staggering 43 percent of Americans have less than $10,000 saved up for retirement.

• 24 percent of American workers say that they have postponed their planned retirement age in the past year.

• Over 1.4 million Americans filed for personal bankruptcy in 2009, which represented a 32 percent increase over 2008.

• Only the top 5 percent of U.S. households have earned enough additional income to match the rise in housing costs since 1975.

• For the first time in U.S. history, banks own a greater share of residential housing net worth in the United States than all individual Americans put together.

• In 1950, the ratio of the average executive's paycheck to the average worker's paycheck was about 30 to 1. Since the year 2000, that ratio has exploded to between 300 to 500 to one.

• As of 2007, the bottom 80 percent of American households held about 7% of the liquid financial assets.

• The bottom 50 percent of income earners in the United States now collectively own less than 1 percent of the nation’s wealth.

• Average Wall Street bonuses for 2009 were up 17 percent when compared with 2008.

• In the United States, the average federal worker now earns 60% MORE than the average worker in the private sector.

• The top 1 percent of U.S. households own nearly twice as much of America's corporate wealth as they did just 15 years ago.

• In America today, the average time needed to find a job has risen to a record 35.2 weeks.

• More than 40 percent of Americans who actually are employed are now working in service jobs, which are often very low paying.

• or the first time in U.S. history, more than 40 million Americans are on food stamps, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture projects that number will go up to 43 million Americans in 2011.

• This is what American workers now must compete against: in China a garment worker makes approximately 86 cents an hour and in Cambodia a garment worker makes approximately 22 cents an hour.

• Approximately 21 percent of all children in the United States are living below the poverty line in 2010 - the highest rate in 20 years.

• Despite the financial crisis, the number of millionaires in the United States rose a whopping 16 percent to 7.8 million in 2009.

• The top 10 percent of Americans now earn around 50 percent of our national income.

Giant Sucking Sound

The reality is that no matter how smart, how strong, how educated or how hard working American workers are, they just cannot compete with people who are desperate to put in 10 to 12 hour days at less than a dollar an hour on the other side of the world. After all, what corporation in their right mind is going to pay an American worker 10 times more (plus benefits) to do the same job? The world is fundamentally changing. Wealth and power are rapidly becoming concentrated at the top and the big global corporations are making massive amounts of money. Meanwhile, the American middle class is being systematically wiped out of existence as U.S. workers are slowly being merged into the new "global" labor pool. "

"Capitalism and Free Markets are going to spell the death of this nation, simply because we as Americans can't compete with the rest of the world since they are cheaper than our labor" That's pretty true, but do you think it will remain that way indefinitely? I don't. It didn't here. There was a time when American labor looked more like what China is today. You don't think China will follow a similar path that we did, with workers demanding better treatment and more rights? I think they will. It might take 100 years. But they will. And when they do, the world will gravitate towards an even footing. Capitalism is not focused on maximizing profits at the expense of everything else. Some people who are capitalists do that, but that's not a central point of capitalism. Capitalism is only concerned that private individuals own the means of production. You can take issues with greedy people, but blaming their greed on capitalism is not well placed. It is human nature that can be greedy, not capitalism. Points 1 and 2 you list are really, sadly, our only short term options. If I had to pick, I'd choose #2.

So we should cut out India and hope the loss of a market with a billion people will help employment in the US?

Not sure which world you are living in if you think that will be positive for US employment.

The US is having problems competing in the Global Economy. This will get much worse before it gets better.

I've never seen a free market.

I'll have to assume that you were just as pissed when Carter refused to increase tariffs on steel imports in the 70s which in turn destroyed the steel workers unions in Pa.