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<blockquote data-quote="Supersoaker" data-source="post: 4781676" data-attributes="member: 88694">It sure would have been nice if some of the money from coal was used to retrain the workers to learn some other skills to bring in other industries. But that would have been communiss. What the hell, they still have bootstraps, eh?Of corse, some might say that that investment would have benefitted the country overall. But that&#039;s just crazy talk.One of the first thing that economists realized was that that international trade benefits a nation overall but there were definite winners and losers. For example, if Portugal and England start to trade wine and cloth, English winemakers and Portuguese cloth makers lose their industry. The optimal thing to do was to tax (oh, horrors!) the industry with the comparative advantage and use the revenue to retrain, re-equip the one that didn&#039;t.&nbsp; Or, you could just say &quot;screw them&quot; and end up with a country with a massive income inequality. Sound familiar?</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Supersoaker, post: 4781676, member: 88694"] It sure would have been nice if some of the money from coal was used to retrain the workers to learn some other skills to bring in other industries. But that would have been communiss. What the hell, they still have bootstraps, eh? Of corse, some might say that that investment would have benefitted the country overall. But that's just crazy talk. One of the first thing that economists realized was that that international trade benefits a nation overall but there were definite winners and losers. For example, if Portugal and England start to trade wine and cloth, English winemakers and Portuguese cloth makers lose their industry. The optimal thing to do was to tax (oh, horrors!) the industry with the comparative advantage and use the revenue to retrain, re-equip the one that didn't. Or, you could just say "screw them" and end up with a country with a massive income inequality. Sound familiar? [/QUOTE]

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