Posted on 12/03/2008 4:58:27 PM PST by LowCountryJoe
There's a growing anti-trade sentiment in our country. Much of the dialogue is grossly misinformed.
Let's try to untangle it a bit with a few questions and observations.
First, does the United States trade with Japan and England? Put another way, is it members of the U.S. Congress trading with their counterparts in the Japanese Diet or the English Parliament? An affirmative answer is pure nonsense. When I purchased my Lexus, I had nothing to do with either the Japanese Diet or the U.S. Congress. Through an intermediary, a Lexus dealer, I dealt with Toyota Motor Corp.
While it might be convenient to speak of one country trading with another, such aggregation can conceal a lot of evil, particularly when people call for trade barriers. For example, what would be a moral case for third-party interference, by either the Japanese Diet or the U.S. Congress, with an exchange between me and Toyota Motor Corp.?
Some might reason that since Japan places restrictions on U.S. products entering its country, an appropriate retaliatory measure is not to allow Japanese products to freely enter the United States. By the way, Japanese protectionist restrictions on rice imports force Japanese consumers to pay 3 or 4 times the world price for rice. How much sense does it make for Congress to retaliate against Japan by imposing restrictions on their products thereby forcing American consumers, say Lexus buyers, to pay higher prices? Should our rule be: If one country disadvantages its citizens we should retaliate by disadvantaging ours?
Since there is no moral argument for preventing one person from trading with another, anti-traders shift their argument to a patriotic appeal such as suggesting we're losing our manufacturing sector.
[There's more...complete with data. Refute if you can, Big Government-loving Protectionists]
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtontimes.com ...
free trade is essential to our recovery.
It isn’t about “Free Trade”. It’s about “Fair Trade”.
China manipulates its currency to undermine our economy and grow their own. If its not fair trade its not free.
Some industries gutted by “free trade”
Furniture
Textiles
Hardware
Electronics
Computers and periphrials
Motorcycles
Auto
Steel
Optics
Customer Service
Printing
Vegetable soritng
Shipping
Etc.
The entire deveoping world is also losing out to China.
Dude, my sarcasm detector is pegged right now.
“It isn’t about “Free Trade”. It’s about “Fair Trade”.”
That’s the mantra union protectionism. If you want to look at the moral aspect, the only way third world countries can pull themselves up is through free trade. Aid and unrepayable loans certainly don’t do the job. In every case, once a country start doing a bit better, through trade, their pay and living conditions improve, to the point of reaching, or at least approaching, parity. Japan in the supreme example. Once, “Japanese” was synonymous with “cheap” but now their products are highly valued and often more expensive. China is an excellent recent example of a country where living standards (and prices) are starting to rise. And, in the meantime, competition ensures that consumers are not held captive by monopolies and are not forced to pay exorbitant prices for inefficient products which are produced only because of trade barriers, or worse, by using taxpayers’ money to encourage production of things nobody wants (think of the European butter mountains). In the long term, this is both ineffective and unsustainable.
There is no such thing as “free trade”. There never has been nor will there ever be.
No, it’s central planners and various non-hackers that cannot handle economic liberty that rule.
Dazzle me, Glenn.
Not enough people can stomach other people making decisions with their own property and how they exchange it, I suppose.
If you have to ask...
Isn’t the call for energy independence a protectionost act? Is Walter Williams opposed to that?
It is a mystery to me why... it is regarded as a sign of Japanese strength and American weakness that the Japanese find it more attractive to invest in the U.S. than Japan. Surely it is precisely the reverse - a sign of U.S. strength and Japanese weakness. = Milton Friedman
“For example, what would be a moral case for third-party interference, by either the Japanese Diet or the U.S. Congress, with an exchange between me and Toyota Motor Corp.?”
The world doesn’t consist of nothing but morally equal economic actors. It consists of nation-states. And some of those nation-states are a national security problem for the United States.
China would be one. Walter Williams may think it’s fantastic that China is getting rich by exporting to the US, while the US borrows from China. I don’t agree.
Free trade is fine among countries with similar political and economic systems. Free trade with Canada is fine.
Free trade with China and Russia?
I’ll pass.
An example of good free trade is if I buy your product from China I give you a dollar in return. That dollar belonging to the USA is soon returned to the American market through a subsequent purchase. And as we continue trading, those products each country makes best will be in demand.
But in real life we have a major problem. The dollars the USA has given in foreign trade is not returning. Instead the funds have been buried through the purchase of land, corporate ownership and the financing of U.S. government debt. And the U.S. debt being the most harmful for it is the most inefficient allocation of funds into the US economy
.
I did business for years with a unit of Sumitomo. They lost money for a decade selling my product cheaper than they were buying it for. Eventually they killed the competition and then bought my operation out. Now they are the sole provider and have made it so hard for competitors to get into the field that they own it.
Huh? There is no such thing as free trade because there is no trade without some form of govt. intervention whether it be taxes, tariffs or simply using govt. printed money that determines the worth of the transaction.
Even "free trade" treaties carry some form of regulation.
Unless you are trading deer meat for vegetable with your neighbor there is always some form of govt control on the transaction.
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