Williams and too many in this thread really don’t understand the concept of Fair Trade.
Fair Trade means nations competing on even terms in producing materials. Pick any product - a flat screen TV or a blue dress.
An American company must first pay a minimum wage, and then for competitive labor a fair and living wage. It must follow all environmental and safety laws. It must pay all local, state, and federal taxes. It can not hire child labor. It has to fund unemployment insurance, workman’s compensation insurance, product liability insurance,worker health insurance, and Social Security taxes.
The Chinese competitor he must deal with pays his workers a pittance, and cans them when they complain or get sick. It dumps all its waste chemicals and waters out in the back or in a nearby river, without treatment. Peasant children work in his factories. The state will handle what little unemployment, healthcare or retiremnt benefits are available. He doesn’t worry about lawsuits - they don’t exist in China. The government subsidizes his exports while penalizing an American competitor’s imports with taxes and unacceptable legal restraints.
Williams and his followers ahve two choices:
1. Make all import products be manufactured to the same wage, environmental, and social insurance standards that our government forces on the American producer.
2. Assess tariffs equal to the difference in the cost of production due to the burdens placed on American producers.
It is hypocritical for these elites to demand we do everything here to save the environment, the social contract, and the health and well being of the American workers, but ignore the slave-holding foreign polluters who are supplying the American market place.
Even some Mafia dons had issues with making profits based on the drug addiction proclivities of people.
You have simply replaced the “Soviet Man” with the “Chinese Man”. I assume you have faith in free markets, or am I mistaken? If you do, how can you possibly believe that an unfree market can out-compete a free market? China can only keep up its fake growth for so much longer, the government and the technocrats just aren’t smart enough, and never will be. I know you feel that government just gets in the way in America, how is China’s some magic all knowing/all seeing gathing of wonderful Obamas?