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Three proposals of yours that a true free trader would support:

1. Get rid of government subsidies for offshore investment of US companies. OPIC is the first such program which should go but support of World Bank programs that subsidize the outflow of Capital would be another.

6. Scale back unnecessary regulation including the tort system. Institute a cap on punitive damages, limits on class action suits, and limits on liability to the actual percentage of liability with no plaintiff able to collect if said plaintiff was involved in the commission of a felony at the time of the alleged tort or was more than 49% negligent in the alleged tort. Note that the loser in a frivolous lawsuit shall pay the attorney fees of the winner. There are many other regulatory structures that also need to be included that need to be included such as repealing the Family leave mandate, getting rid of OSHA etc.

12. Decrease the punishing levels of taxation on companies and eliminate the double taxation on corporate dividends.(snip)... Eliminate all IRS provisions that inhibit free use of independent contractors by businesses for example section 1706.

Please explain "section 1706"

Section 1706 of the IRS code was inserted into the tax reform act under Reagan in a late night conference. It was cosponsired by Moynihan and Packwood. What it does is remove the common business practice rule for determnining who is a contractor and who is an empoyee for electricl engineers, computer programmers, sysatems analysists, draftsmen and a couple of other professions so that instaed of what at the time was the cheapest and most efficient way for companies to hire independant contractors to perform these task on a contractual basis there needed to be an intermediary who actually paid the money to these peopel or teh company had to hire them as employees. The tax liability was placed on the consuming company if the IRS in a subsequent audit were to find the employees were not "independant contrcators" under the rules.

Now this was added at just the time the big seven accounting firms were purchasing a number of the smaller IT consulting/contract service companies.

Three proposals of yours that a true free trader would support:

Now lets get this clear this will only work as a package deal anything less does not have a prayer of even really getting noticed. NBow clearly I am not an absolutist regarding Free Trade I believe as Adam smith did there are four sound reasons for Tariffs and I even go along with David Riccardo's principles about tariffs being justified because of absolute advantage. I did not include that justification in my tariff proposals. I further did not rule out a revenue tariff even though I am not at this time advocating same. Said revenue tariff would be in place of income taxes but IMHO would raise insufficeint revenue by itself at any level that could be passed.

Now most of my fous in teh discussion has been on Chinese tariffs but as of February 5, 2003 the following statement of fact is included in the following link. “India’s tariffs are today, more than ten years after the beginning of economic reform, the highest in the world, except for those of Pakistan, according to the World Bank.”

LINK

Now what we have is not Free Trade we have Unfree trade. We have a trade war where some are advocating unilateral disarmament on our part. IMHO it makes about as much sense as a person advocating eliminating our armed forces on December 8, 1941 so we do not have to fight with the Japanese.