I’m a strictly amateur blogger. I support my family as an engineer. I don’t need your money, but there are a lot of talented and highly educated people who live on the hairy edge of poverty blogging.

Phoenix Woman, who I’ve known since our Table Talk days, gives a good reason as to why:

The reason that there are so many great bloggers is that there are so many highly-educated, highly-talented throwaways. People who for reasons of cost, or health, or because their conscience was better than their management’s have been stripped of their jobs, replaced by foreigners, sent into humiliated exile in their own land. And, again, this is by plan. The H1-B (and other visas) have been used to drive down American wages and working conditions. The oversupply of scientists, engineers, and other highly-skilled people is deliberate, bipartisan, and planned at the highest levels of government.

The conventional wisdom for the past 25 years has been cheap labor economics, and the subsistance level bloggers are just one symptom of people who have done what the conventional wisdom says to do, and have been shafted as a result.

While free trade is a good thing in the abstract, a bad free trade deal is worse than no free trade deal.