Well it's bad when you buy a property but have no legal title to it and the person who sold it to you has lots of money then pays a high priced lawyer and treats you like a squater and ousts you from your property after you paid for it. That's the kind of scams that can occur without the property rights we have. To me in order of importance is politics, the rule of law, then economics. Without good transparent political systems and a decent justice system economic freedom and growth get hampered by the previous two factors.
The reality is that we have to increase trade in increments and excess farmers may have to find new jobs but quick changes to increase or decrease barriers both involve job changes. I'm glad during this recession the urge to increase trade barriers was resisted since countries have less internal buying and selling than in the 1930s so the unemployment rate on exporting countries would be frightful if we went in the direction we did during the Great Depression.
One benefit of lower prices is that consumers have excess money to buy other products and services which creates new jobs. The education system would have to adjust for those changes to help people to move from one industry to another. The average person I heard changes careers 6 times in their working career. For some people it may be higher. This is why employment insurance and individuals having a financial cushion to bridge those gaps are so important.
We just need to make the set of rules such, that we don't grant some people property rights just to have some other loopholes which allow big corporations and such to buy these lands and do the same again.
Well government, laws and economy occur at the same time, pretty much. And in pretty much every country there is all of those present (exceptions prove the rule), so the question is what is going wrong in some countries, and how could we overcome these troubles. A lack of laws, well, that could be overcome. A corrupt or totalitarian government. That's a bit harder to get by. Both a corrupt government and a poor set of rules and it's even harder to stimulate any economic development. But if the institutions are in place and fair we have a good starting point. Yet, they will not be able to gain any if they are dependent on countries that are not genuinely interest in their improving.
We also shouldn't be surprised that nowadays in many parts the Chinese are seen as the better and more honest trading partners than firms from the West. After centuries after failed promises and repeated exploitation it's no surprise there is a certain mistrust in large parts of the world.
No one wants to face more structural unemployment, so subsidies and protections are being kept up. After all, how many farmers are educated in such a variety of professions that they could transition easily? Ok, at least European farmers could start as traders on the stock markets easily, and other Western farmers, too.
But long-term, we won't get around rethinking our structures and to find ways to make trade more fair globally. Otherwise we will either be dealing with aid forever, or we are seeing those countries turn to China and the Near East.
If the benefit of saving on your daily expenses so you can buy your new flat screen more frequently goes at the cost of millions of other people, then I see these costs outweighing that benefit, but this is probably a question of philosophy. In Germany, we had a real wage deflation for the past 15 years. We also pay the lowest share of our income (4 person household) on food, 11%, worldwide. Yet, you will be hard-fetched to find people who say they have a greater disposable income for goods other than their needs for the reason of a scary wage development and the restructuring of employment, i.e. firing workers and re-hiring them on a low-wage basis. Unemployment officially went down, but we didn't have a real job growth. Most were just transferred into this kind of jobs, and to make a living they got some transfer benefits.
Only for a small number have the wages developed in a positive way. They are largely in the knowledge-based sectors.
Our politicians love to praise how knowledge, education and our innovativeness are our greates assets, and how we must invest in education. But it's more preaching than anything, as they are hardly increasing funding for education. They also expect you to be mobile and all, and flexible, but they don't really support you. Leaving aside that in Germany the mentality is totally different. Germans tend to stay in the area where they are born much more than people from other countries. And the politicians aren't even leading by example. Being civil servants (with life-time employment security, comfortable remuneration and very friendly pension schemes) they made a commitment to go where ever they are needed most. Yet, when it came to moving the government from Bonn to the new (yet old) capital of Berlin most of them refused it and complained how impossible it was for the state to ask of them to move 400km east. So now a number of ministries are still located in Bonn, the other half is in Berlin, and they, and their staff, commute. Idiots.
Or so it feels.
