sentiments was actually easier to read you know adam smith both of but both of them you know in david ricardo's work in any case let's let's just start out with some definitions of free trade. well free trade means that there are no barriers for buying and selling goods produced good one nation in another country and in the united states that means that our markets are open to the rest of the world now the problem is when we use the term free trade this actually covers a situation that's not quite like that it means that our markets are open to the rest of the world but the reverse is not the case which is of course why we have such a trade deficit in other words there's no such thing as free trade in the real world or is on our side there is americas markets are pretty open to the rest of the world u.s. tariffs are about one and a half percent of the volume of foreign ports so if you want to say our trade is ninety eight point five percent free i could live with that but the real problem is going the other direction ok you you mentioned the word tariffs. again definitions what is a tariff tari

free trade is best basically what it comes down to which in theory is invented by a man called david ricardo in eight hundred seventy eight he was a british economist it comes down to the idea alternately that nations trade for the same reasons that people do for example you on your way to work this morning you could stop at a starbucks and buy a cup of coffee you could have made that coffee at home would take a certain amount of time a certain amount of effort certain amount of ingredients so you don't buy things and the analogy of course is for a nation you don't import things that you could make for yourself necessarily based on the fact that you couldn't do it for yourself but it's a question of the relative uses of your time so the idea of the theory of comparative advantage is if the united states imports something that means that our time our labor our resources would be better used doing something else so if we import cars from japan it's because not we couldn't make the cars first so if we're better off allocating our resources to say making airplanes instead in the theory where and

pretty straightforward stuff it's called cash for geezers it starts out with the theory of the david ricardo arguably the second or third most famous economist in history back in eight hundred seventeen laid out he called his iron law of wages and it basically says that when you get a lot of unemployed people wages crash and when the labor market tightens up and you've got more employers looking for workers than there are workers in other words when the thing then wages go up pretty simple straightforward stuff so the goal to raise wages which increases taxes is to reduce the workforce right to reduce the number of people looking for a job reduce unemployment by reducing the workforce so my suggestion is drop the eligibility age for social security to fifty five years old. right now it's sixty five dropping down to fifty five maybe even fifty what this will do is a couple things about first of all only about half of the seniors around will take advantage of it a lot of people like working after their you know in their fifty's and sixty's and seventy's but about half of would probably take ad