Evidence for why Bolton should not be confimed

Not even close. Among developed countries, Canada and Iceland are both higher. Most European countries are about 50-80% of the US figure.Source: Page Not Found | World Resources Institute(nice searchable databse).Of course this is off topic. So my 0.02 on that:1) Bolton shouldn't be confirmed. He's not qualified.2) The UN is terminally dysfunctional.

This is why they are called "developing countries".You might just as well point out that, e.g. Japan has 12x the per capita consumption of Senegal, so it is only half as "evil" as the US, but still 12x as "evil" as Senegal.If you think third world poverty, disease, and despair are somehow virtuous experiences, you are welcome to move to Senegal.But I'm all about not having other's religious beliefs imposed on me.As to the UN... If possible, yes. However, having a country like Iran as chair of the UN Human Rights commission is certaibly a sign of severe dysfunction.Holmes is quite correct that many UN resolutions are hortatory in nature and not meant for serious implementation. Which is evidence for my point - a debating society has only limited utility.After all, we debate endlessly on this board, but how much of it becomes policy ? To paraphrase Disraeli, alliances are temporary, interests are permanent. We pursue alliances with those countries that have similar interests. The UN is hardly essential to do this. This may be necessary. However, the UN should be given a chance to reform itself - but it has manifestly failed as an international peacekeeping organization. There are constraints preventing this, as you've pointed out yourself, so it's essentially counterfactual. Personally, I don't much care about Western Europe - contrary to what has been presented on this board, I see it as an economically declining region, and I see future US interests as primarily with the dynamic economies of the Pacific Rim.

Well, it would be another thread.I'll grant that Europe does some things better (the trains run on time and are cleaner, there are less glaring extremes of wealth and poverty) but does many things worse (persistent double digit unemployment, slower productivity growth than the US or Pacific Rim, less flexibility in labor markets, looming structural deficits in entitlements due to unfavorable demographic trends that dwarf anything this side of the Atlantic)But it is another thread...start one if you like...

The shift of consumer goods manufacturing to low-wage countries is a megatrend that affects Western Europe and Japan as much as the US. It is an unstoppable trend and ultimately as economically beneficial a trend as the mechanization of agriculture at the turn of the 20th century. That transition like this one, certainly created short-term pain, but long term gain.CEOs are a favorite bete noir of many liberals, but a calculation of the ratio of their compensation to the total corporate losses due to uncompetitive practices reveals that this is largely a religious argument. If the CEOs took a pay cut to 100K...the textile jobs are still going to China. Sorry.

I don't agree. The future of American export demand is where there is going to be demand for capital goods (most American manufactures are now capital goods), and that is in the Pacific Rim. The EU is not where the action is going to be, with a declining and Islamifying population. Not a bad idea, but there needs to be an encouragement of capital goods demand in those countries. Bring on the foreign competition. Look at the auto industry. General Motors and to a lesser extent Ford are in trouble...and Toyota, Honda, Nissan and their suppliers are building plants in the US, and they aren't maquiladoras in wages or working conditions.

Here is a link to an Economist article on the topic that might prove interesting:Half a billion Americans? | The Economist The only case I can think of off hand where European firms have a substantial advantage is passenger rail technologies (and Japan is a player there). What others did you have in mind ?It is interesting that the presence of some Christian obscurantism would lead you to a conclusion such as "the US ... educational system is going down the tubes", whereas the presence of larger scale
Islamic obscurantism (such as observed in the Netherlands recently)would be ignored in favor of such statements as... About eight centuries ago. The recent record has been less than encouraging. Granted, such trends are not necesarily permanent; but they change rather slowly.

I was thinking of Holmes' discussion, i.e. technologies in which European firms totally dominate and US firms are effectively shut out
of the market. This does not appear to be the case for cellphones. Nokia has the largest market share, but Motorola is 2nd. Asian firms like LG and Samsung are also major players.Then there is the whole CDMA vs. GSM game...I'll have to look into some of Holmes' other examples when I have more time. He's probably right about the beer, but I think a bit of personal research may be necessary on that one...just to verify my impressions of course...I sense a bit of topic drift, where's Bolton in all this ?This message has been edited by paisano, 05-19-2005 06:33 PM