Free Republic

The United States and China have traded since the early days of our republic, but only recently has the scale of that trade become a political issue. More than any other point, Donald TrumpÂ’s rhetoric against outsourcing to China gave him the blue-collar Midwestern votes that made up his margin of victory in 2016. His election was a break with the generation-long bipartisan consensus that more and freer trade is better, whether the trading partner is a liberal democracy that respects the rule of law or a communist dictatorship where unfree people labor in unsafe conditions for government-suppressed wages.Even...

In the middle of California's Mojave Desert about an hour outside of the Las Vegas strip, business is booming -- literally -- as detonations reveal the lifeblood of America's technical security. Molycorp has begun mining again at its Mountain Pass facility after about a decade of inactivity, extracting valuable and concentrated ore that holds 15 rare earth elements, used in everything from cell phones to U.S. missile systems. In recent years, the Chinese have flooded, and thus cornered, about 97 percent of the world market of rare earth metals, and now thanks to high-tech demand and new Chinese restrictions on...