Balanced Trade

Don't over-depend on other countries for critical skills
Use gradual attrition rather than sudden decimation to shrink a local profession or industry.
The government helps people after floods and earthquakes. Economic disasters should not be treated any different. They are just a little slower in their rate of destruction, but not quantity of destruction.
Don't accept lopsided trade. Countries should not be allowed to "dump" products or services into the US without opening up their markets and visa workers in kind.
Trade deficits risk a nasty bubble (upon poppage). We should actively encourage consumption on the part of our trading partners.

I believe in "balanced trade". It is not safe to have one country dominate an entire industry anyhow. Don't put all your economic eggs in one basket. In balanced trade some protection of local industries is done, but not enough to totally shut out competition. And, industries could be allowed to shrink at the rate of natural attrition (deaths, etc.) rather than sudden slash-and-burn. For example, the government could require that US schools training programmers require the student to sign a warning about the field (so that tech schools can't overhype the field), and after a few decades it will die (or shrink) a natural death by attrition. The field is retired, not killed.

This is pretty far off-topic, perhaps some programmer/software examples would help.

Not sure what you mean. It uses programming as an example. It affects almost all software people in the US. Discussions elsewhere on wiki about the fairness or inevitability of offshoring keep pointing back to the politics and fairness of FreeTrade.

Not a US only issue; offshoring is a problem in the UK too. As for being self-sufficient and definitely not dependent on any one country for anything, the US does this much better than the UK already, hence you still have a car industry and profitable farming etc. -- JamesKeogh

Profitable farming? Much of it is subsidized.

Diversification

Naked trade and pure pursuit of comparative advantage is anti-diversification. Do we really want to become the marketing capital of the world and give technology to other countries just because it is cheaper to do physics and math over there? Diversification is good for individual portfolios, so it should be good for countries also. Places like Detroit that didn't diversify got burned, even though their automobile comparative advantage was top notch at the time.

CategoryEmployment, CategoryEconomy