The free market is not a cotton-candy fluffy idea that makes everything wonderful for everybody. It's just the most practical way of dealing with market forces in an economy, and in the long run, results in more overall stability and prosperity than command economies do.

Market forces are as real and unforgiving as gravity. That there are hundreds of millions of people who can do a Ford employee's job for a lot less money is a fact, and at some point, market forces are going to force the issue. Many nations try to seal themselves in a "bubble," using trade barriers and other mechanisms, but this is putting a cork in a hole where there is ever-increasing pressure on the other side. When the cork lets go, it just gets worse.

In the blue collar world, and increasingly in the white collar world, we are seeing a natural correction after years of being insulated from the rest of the world by circumstance, post-war conditions, and a huge fraction of the world's population locked in collectivist and/or Third World hellholes that were no economic threat to anyone.

The U.S. spent decades after WWII inside its comfortable bubble. Japan and Europe were struggling out of destruction and the remnants of totalitarian systems. Russia and China were entombed in collectivist systems that couldn't compete with anyone. Africa and the rest of the Third World were mostly just trying to stay alive. We were pretty much the only game in town, and our industries got fat and lazy. You would think U.S. car companies would have learned something from the first Japanese onslaught years ago.

Now nations like China are feeling their way into market systems, and the word "profit" isn't a crime any more. India is driving into a high-tech society. Japan is doing just fine, thanks. We used to make fun of the Yugo, a piece of crap turned out by communist industry. What happens if China someday turns out a damn good car for a low price? You going to make it illegal?

The rising tide is raising boats. The problem is, there are billions of boats, and they're all over the world. The world where the a worker could do menial labor for a high income isn't there any more.

Nobody said this was going to be painless. But trying to apply the usual liberal economic band-aids is just going to postpone the inevitable.

I wish I had an easy, pat answer for transitioning to a world where everyone is, or wants to be, middle and upper class. The long-range issues were obvious years ago, which is one reason I have been pushing the idea of large-scale use of space resources and energy since the early 1970s.

As someone who has been as comfortable in this bubble as any other American, I don't have to like it any more than anyone else, But pretending it isn't real isn't going to help things.

It's interesting that liberals have no problems visualizing these principles when you're talking about an ecosystem. The idea that a government organization could go in and "manage" a rain forest, weeding out some species, encouraging others, deciding which were the "good" ones and which were the "bad" ones, would be considered ridiculous due to the immense complexity of the natural system. Yet a world economic system, which is far more complex because human individuals are like a system with six and a half billion species, could somehow be managed from a building in Brussels, or Washington D.C.