up with PyGUI!

[Alex Martelli]

Ville Vainio <ville at spammers.com> wrote:

> >>>>> "Terry" == Terry Reedy <tjreedy at udel.edu> writes:
> 
>     Terry> Also for political reasons.  The US has reactionaries, left
>     Terry> and right, who reject the idea that all people have a right
>     Terry> to participate in the global information economy.
> 
> I don't think that's exclusively an US concern - all industrialized
> countries have people who are concerned about outsourcing,
> globalization and generally losing their jobs.

True, but (for example) the British minister for eCommerce drew standing
ovations at a conference in India last February by reaffirming quite
intensely that Britain will never again try protectionism or subsidies
to save fading industries at the cost of taxpayer money and stagnation.

Apparently, Britain has been there before, and while no doubt _some_
people won't agree, there seems to have evolved a national consensus in
favour of an open economy -- that minister is just as much of a
politician as, say, US ones, but clearly he evaluates that this stance
doesn't cost him votes overall.

Other nations don't seem to be as far along on the curve.  The US, in
particular, seems to go for bipartisan verbal consensus against free
trace on every election year -- even administrations whose actual
policies were quite free-tradeish, such as Clinton's, seemed to feel a
need to appease protectionists with occasional bouts of rhetorics and
once in a while a highly visible trade row.

That's worrisome, because those who can't learn from history are doomed
to repeat it, and it sure seems, at times, that the US political
consensus hasn't learned, e.g. from the precedent of the Smoot-Hawley
tariffs, that beggar-thy-neighbor protectionism can be disastrous.


Alex