Nice. I knew you wouldn't let this one slide. Thanks for writing this up.

"While the article talked to several economists on the wisdom of using loans guarantees to subsidize exports, it never once mentioned reducing the value of the dollar as an alternative."

Is reducing the dollar really a feasible policy alternative?

The government - with the heavily subsidized assistance of lobbyists - has a wide range of policies that put it in a situation of picking winners and ATTACKING LOSERS.

The value of the dollar? Ye canna be baith grand and beautiful....
Missing a few degrees of freedom here. Dean asks Ben to print even more dollars to buy Euros or Yen to drive the dollar down. Tripling the base in a few years ain't enough? Anyway this is a surer way to get the inflation rate to the 4% or so that Krugman is begging for. Buying treasuries and keeping the money in reserves, i.e., keeping M1 low while the base has grown, has done nothing except to stocks and gold.

Euro was parity at inception, now it is up 30% or $$ is down 30% in 12 years. Of course Ben/Alans bubble in the mid 2000s had the $ down 60%.

Anyway I like my cheap wine and cheese.

Granting a patent in accordance with established legal standards, and without regard to likely commercial success, is not exactly "picking" winners and losers. That has to be dropped into everything, though, doesn't it?

Globally, professionals are pretty mobile. Real wages are much more balanced on a global scale for professionals. Substantially different than the vast spread between a farm worker in Thailand vs. a farm worker in California. Probably what, $1000 a year in Thailand vs. $20,000 or more a year in California. Salaries at Hong Kong Science and Tech, or Singapore Management, etc., are comparable (or better) than top U.S. institutions. Yet in Hong Kong Philipino maids are available for $100 a month or so. Can we hire maids in the U.S. for $100 a month? Which group is more protected?

Dean has our immigration bass ackwards. In fact most visas are granted to sponsored immigrants, like professors at U.S. universities. But there are still not enough. Nobody is sponsoring a lawn mower or a house painter. It is goofy of course that we spend $$ on college education for foreign students (foreign tuition at state schools is still subsidized) and don't let them stay here. Tear down that wall, Mr. Obama.

The first immigration protections (anti-asian, anti-irish) came about after 100 years of free labor mobility because of cheap labor, not cheap doctors. Similarly, worried about cheap labor, or simply racist, in the 20th century unions and trades in northern cities banned blacks from jobs. Immigration restrictions are labor related, not professionals. (Limited doctor licensing is similar, of course, under the guise of safety.)

I agree with that which unionmember said: It's picking winners and attacking losers. Rich, poor; native, immigrant- we and our policies are blinded by the assumption of profits only at another's expense.

Ours is largely a nation of immigrants or their descendants. Current immigration policies are an exclusionary farce. Migration management is the goal.

Rather than countries helping one another to achieve economic and social stability so that peoples are able to live "at home" and travel for study or leisure, our ossified thinking sees only defense and exclusion. Imagine the numbers of jobs created with global economic stabilization as the mutual goal.

The poorer countries in the EU are trapped in austerity "solutions" to their financial problems because they cannot adjust their monetary value. They use the same money with the same relative value that Germany uses. Greece can't lower the relative value of their money to increase tourist income. They may have to drop out of the Euro world, whatever the consequences to the rest of the EU or the world economy (read that as the US economy.) That is the problem with all the Soutern poorer EU countries, Greek, Italy, and Spain, not to mention several others. They didn't think it through when organized and agreed upon, but Germany and France are struggling with austerity programs intead of stimulous programs. Austerity doesn't get the economy going there anymore than it does here.