Posted on 06/28/2014 4:12:12 PM PDT by blueplum
JENSEN, UTAH — It’s easy to find the largest Chinese-owned hay farm in the United States. It sits 189 miles east of Salt Lake City, on a stunningly scenic bend of the Green River. After driving past the only gas station in Jensen, population 400, a visitor crosses the river, turns left and is soon surrounded by a meticulously managed, 22,000-acre ranch, lush with green alfalfa.
Nearly all of it is destined for China. :snip:
Simon Wen Shao, a Chinese-born U.S. citizen who’s a co-owner of the Utah alfalfa farm, acknowledged that locals had acted warily when his company purchased the ranch. Friends of his farm manager, Frank Biggs, immediately chided Biggs for “working for the communists.”
Shao said those concerns had eased as his company had attempted to build ties in the community, buying new farm equipment and modernizing the ranch. One of his first steps was to rename the historic property “Escalante Ranch” after the previous owner had dubbed it “Thunder Ranch.”
“I think local people liked that decision,” he said during a tour of the farm. “It sounds better than Red Dragon Ranch.”
:snip:
Michael J. McKee, a Uintah County commissioner, said that many local growers recognized that foreign demand for alfalfa helped raise the price for their crop, aiding the county’s farm economy. Still, McKee acknowledged he’d heard from a few constituents who want “our land here to be held by American farmers.”
(Excerpt) Read more at fresnobee.com ...
I’m sure that it must have been some kind of personal situation.
30’ trailer, maybe . . . and not stacked too high.
No, Nixon started it.
That's right. Chine was a failure. Had the US left them alone, they would have amounted to nothing. But Nixon decided to throw democratic Taiwan, a western ally, under the bus and support communist China, an enemy of the US and of western civilization.
I guess he was influenced by dreams of all the little plastic toys and mass-produced junk that would be streaming out of chinese prisons/sweatshops. Or he was bribed. Or maybe his loyalties were elsewhere all along, like most of the presidents since.
” You’re the TOOL I was looking.... The companies I worked for made millions off of my talent and skills. “
Sounds like you were the tool. If the company made millions off of you, why did they not give you your share? Why did you keep working for them... who forced you?
Or, was your contribution only in your imagination?
they’re loving it. Each dam China builds means China gets ‘carbon credits’ which China turns around and sells to American companies. The neat thing for China is, they don’t even have to put water behind the dam to game the system. And all those empty cities? Carbon credits, baby, for energy efficiency, bring ‘em on! (Of course they’re efficient, nobody lives there !) The greenies are the carbon credit brokers - kind of like stock brokers only for carbon. The more nations like China build out wonky projects to ‘earn’ carbon credits, the more money the greenies get to pocket as middlemen. Just ask EGore.
I think they overlook the old saying that goes something like, don’t poop in your own front yard.
I am a free trader but more importantly a “fair trader”. We have let Japan Korea China dump all manner of products some adulterated foods and inferior goods as well as subsidized (steel) on our shores without retaliation. That has to stop
for China? oh, helltothe yes. Why should I give one=sided advantages to a country that exploits slave labor and pirates just about every product produced there (from hampers to milk) with a cheap knockoff that lasts about as long as a snowcone in July in NYC? Or that just plain kills? And then uses that money to not only buy up large swathes of land but to also militarize against me and my buddies like Japan and the PI ? Tarriff the vinegar outa them.
(and I’d also like to slap a ‘tarriff’ on those envirowackos who have no problem with the Chinese increasing their cattle herds, compliments of imported alfalfa, yet they’re waging an all-out (at times armed) war against our western rangestock/water rights.)
What’s the cost-per-bale to truck 140 bales 2000 miles?
So you don’t believe in a free market?
Do you then believe in a command economy or one controlled/directed by the State? The direction we’re moving must make you really happy.
Yes, I was a tool for the companies I worked for just like millions of my countrymen in the past. Are you suggesting companies don’t have any American workers, that we all should be temps? Look at all the competent IT workers that have been displaced by foreign workers. We have very recent articles saying most of the jobs in the last five years went to imported workers, that’s really not working out for the rest of us. I guess we all could go pimp some Mexican day workers out of a Lowe’s parking lot, that’s not my style.
According to this table, China has 55% of its land mass in arable, US 45%. I think this is referring to land actually being used to grow stuff, not land capable of growing stuff.
I have no idea whether AK is figured into the US number, which would throw it off considerable.
http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/AG.LND.AGRI.ZS
I do know there are HUGE tracts of land in the US that could grow crops that aren’t. Due to economics, mostly. For obvious reasons, you spend time, effort and capital on the best land first.
Sorry. Great misunderstanding here on what tariffs are, widely shared by neo-confederates who think we taxed exported cotton to oppress the South in the 1850s.
Fact: Tariffs are and always have been on imports, never on exports.
This is primarily because the Constitution specifically prohibits taxes on exports.
Article 1, Section 9, Clause 5. No Tax or Duty shall be laid on Articles exported from any State.
Oh, I believe in a free market. I just don’t think I have ever seen one in my lifetime. Why is it Americans always get the short end of the stick in these trade agreements. The trade imbalances are always against us by massive amounts.
You might want to go to Latin America and listen to the complaints about US getting the advantage in trade agreements.
You seem to define “free trade” as trade in which the US comes out even or ahead. What if the US comes out behind in the trade because US consumers choose, freely, to purchase cheap stuff made in China rather than equivalent products at a much higher price made in USA?
Let me give you a little example. Back in the 80s I worked for several years cleaning carpets. Had to wear leather work shoes or my feet break out, but the chemicals used for the cleaning wreck a pair of leather shoes in about four months.
At the time little was being imported from China, and I bought US-made Red Wing shoes for about $75 a pop. That’s $175 today per the CPI. A non-insignificant chunk of my not-huge income at the time. Today, Red Wing still sells roughly-equivalent shoes, for about $275.
Meanwhile, today I can go to Walmart and buy entirely functional leather work shoes for $30. Now they aren’t as well made as the Red Wings, and they aren’t as comfortable, but they’re functional. If I were still cleaning carpet, they’d still be destroyed in four months whether I wore the $275 pair or the $30 pair, so durability of the better-made US product is more or less irrelevant.
So the question arises. Should a low to moderate income carpet cleaner in MO be forced to pay 9x the price for a functional pair of footwear so a moderate income factory worker in MN can keep his job?
Extrapolate that across many items, and the standard of living for most Americans, especially those on the low end, goes way down.
For some obscure reason, a great many American sneer at lower prices. But would never dream of showing contempt for an increase in income.
Yet a 10% decrease in what I pay for a product is functionally equivalent to a 10% raise. Actually better, since I don’t have to pay taxes on the money I save on the cheaper product.
Just found the Red Wing shoes I used to buy 30 years ago online.
$200 to $275.
What’s the problem? The land is productive, the export trade is profitable.
Why should the paying customer be a problem
Jobs and profits...... they make the world go round
Antibusiness isolationists are an American problem
There's really no such thing as free trade in the libertarian economy sense. It's another one of those libertarian fantasies. Either the government regulates the economy, or cabals do. Or both.
These days it seems that we have to be amoral anarcho-capitalists to fit in. I wonder about these types. Would they have a problem if all the places at american universities were taken by chinese? They are, after all, willing to pay more. They can explain the logic of it to their kids. And would they have a problem selling nuclear technology, missiles, strategic R&D, etc? Recent governments have been giving it away to china, so you might as well get paid for it. Would this be a problem?
IIRC, back in the 1970s, the Cambodians sold all their rice to China, because the chinese paid more than the local cambodians (who had no money). So cambodians mostly starved, but by anarcho-capitalist standards it was the right thing to do.
Excellent idea to increase sales of American products, make them more expensive.
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