Free Republic

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Commerce Secretary Don Evans vowed "tough" enforcement of U.S. trade laws on Thursday, one day before his department is due to make a preliminary decision whether to impose potentially massive import duties on wooden bedroom furniture from China. "We are going to continue to look American workers in the eye, all across this country, and tell them we are going to be tough when it comes to enforcing our trade laws and maintaining a level playing field with the rest of the world. And China is certainly right there at the top of the list," Evans said...

<p>You wrote in the Monday editorial "Bush's conservative support" that "the president showed why conservatives will support him in November: Because he is one of them." Unfortunately, he is not.</p> <p>Under President Bush, the Republican Party has become the party of big government. The government has grown bigger and bigger, with more agencies, bureaucracies and enforcement programs. This president and a Republican Congress have given us an 8.2 percent annual increase in discretionary domestic spending (that's non-defense, non-entitlement), far greater than anything during the Clinton administration or any other administration since Richard Nixon's. This administration has given us the largest new entitlement program in almost four decades. Mr. Bush has yet to veto a single spending bill.</p>

TORONTO — Lumber and plywood prices have shot up so rapidly in recent months that they are tearing the profit out of home construction for some builders and threatening to dent the booming housing market. Paul Kuszmaul, president of Kuszmaul Builders in Champion, Ohio, said the run-up in prices had left him unsure whether to push ahead with a condominium development in the Mahoning Valley, between Pittsburgh and Cleveland. Since January, he said, the cost to build each condo unit in the project had risen $4,000, largely because the price has more than doubled for oriented-strand board, a widely used...

A container ship makes its way through Hong Kong waters as it leaves the territory. China hit the breaks on a free trade drive in 2003, the US charged in an annual report.(AFP/File/Peter Parks) China hit the brakes on a free trade drive in 2003, jamming up the process in a bureaucratic mangle, the United States charged in an annual report released. China had removed many obstacles to commerce since joining the World Trade Organization (news - web sites) in December 2001, the US Trade Representative's (USTR) office conceded in a key global report. But "substantial barriers" remain, said...

Claim: Kerry Promoting Increased Foreign Tariffs to Alter Presidential Election By Jimmy Moore Talon News March 26, 2004 WASHINGTON (Talon News) -- A major taxpayer group is urging likely Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kerry to stop collaborating with the European Union (EU) to impose damaging tariffs on U.S. products being exported from key swing states in the upcoming presidential election. Americans for Tax Reform President Grover Norquist noted that Kerry has been touting his popularity among foreign leaders in recent weeks. However, Norquist said he was shocked to learn the extent some foreign leaders will go to remove President...

SHANGHAI (AFP) - China said it was "extremely puzzled" by Washington's complaint to the World Trade Organization over its tax system for domestic chip makers but said it is willing to work with the United States to resolve the dispute. The Ministry of Commerce has yet to receive any official documentation but said it was in touch with its US trade counterparts in hopes of finding a solution. "China has had several rounds of negotiations with the US on this issue and we have already made progress," commerce ministry spokesman Chong Quan said in a statement. He added, however, that...

By JOHN TORINUSSpecial to the Journal Sentinel Posted: March 14, 2004 Jerry Skoff and his fellow "patriots" at Save American Manufacturing (SAM) are having a grand old time. A couple dozen of them picketed a conference at the Italian Community Center Thursday by the World Trade Center Wisconsin on global outsourcing, winning coverage for SAM's position against trade agreements from three Milwaukee TV stations. Later that night, Skoff, president of Badger Metal Technologies, made his case to sympathetic ears at the Milwaukee Chapter of the Society of Automotive Engineers. "We are not economic isolationists," he said. "We believe we are...

For education and discussion only. Not for commercial use. Ha Noi, March 2 (VNA)- The tariff rates levied on six categories of iron and steel are cut to zero, according to the Finance Ministry's decision issued on Monday. This is the second such decision made by the Finance Ministry in three days in an effort to ease the domestic price hike. The first decision signed on Feb. 27 already halved the rates down to between 3 and 20 percent from between five and 40 percent. The decision was warmly welcomed by enterprises, saying they can now make massive imports of...

Govt decides to cut steel duties, producers to slash prices Press Trust of India New Delhi, February 27 In a bid to provide respite to economy from spiraling steel prices, the Government on Friday decided on major cuts in excise and custom duties and export incentives even as major producers including SAIL and Essar are understood to have agreed on slashing prices on some steel products by up to Rs 2000 a tonne. Aimed at increasing domestic supply at affordable price for high growth areas like automobiles and construction, the package was finalised at a high-level ministerial meeting chaired by...

Great Britain As the Dutch were removing medieval restrictions on trade in the 16th century, England was beginning to open its market as well. In the early part of the century, usury laws were no longer enforced, restrictions on the export of unfinished cloth were relaxed, and certain differential duties were abolished. Enforcement of remaining trade restrictions was also generally reduced. The result, according to historian F. J. Fischer, was "one of the great free trade periods in modern English history."14 Unfortunately, the initial era of free trade was short-lived. By the latter half of the 16th century trade restrictions...

A friend from Hawaii who is well schooled in free-market economics recently sent me an example of Lincoln idolatry that manages to distort and pervert both economic theory and natural rights philosophy. It is an essay entitled "Locke, Lincoln, and American Capitalism" by Lucas E. Morel, a political science professor at Washington and Lee University who holds a doctorate in "government" from Claremont Graduate School, is a "fellow" of the Claremont Institute, and is also associated with the neocon Ashbrook Center for Public Policy at Ashland University. He’s a card-carrying Claremontista, in other words. The essay is published as part...

<p>Since 2001, the United States has lost 2.8 million manufacturing jobs. Hello! Is anybody listening? This is a crisis. Our house is on fire, and few in Congress are paying attention. And, at the rate things are going, the only jobs even college graduates will be able to get will be in the service industry. That's political lingo for flipping hamburgers.</p>

DILORENZO IS ESSENTIALLY CORRECT that the tariff supplied ninety percent of federal revenue before the Civil War. For the thirty years from 1831 to 1860 it was eighty-four percent, but for the 1850s as a decade it was indeed ninety percent. But the idea that the South paid about seventy-five percent of tariff revenues is totally absurd. DiLorenzo bases this on pages 26-27 of Charles Adams, When in the Course of Human Events, but Adams comes up with these figures out of thin air, and worse, appears to be measuring the South's share of exports, and then transposing that percentage...

<p>There is one subject that truly separates professional economists from everyone else. Nearly all economists -- conservatives and liberals alike -- agree that free international trade is good, and the freer you make trade the better. But polls often show the public at large supports trade barriers.</p>

NEW YORK (Bloomberg) -- China will impose anti-dumping duties of as much as 55 percent from Wednesday on cold-rolled steel imports from Russia, South Korea, Taiwan, Ukraine and Kazakhstan. Russia will be subject to tariffs of as much as 29 percent, Korea 40 percent, Ukraine 49 percent and Kazakhstan 48 percent, based on a Sept. 23 statement by the ministry. Unidentified producers in Taiwan face the highest levies, of 55 percent. The tariffs are retroactive to September 2003 and will last for five years, the Chinese Ministry of Commerce said Tuesday.

TORONTO (AP) -- Canada appeared poised Friday to reject an American proposal to end a long-standing softwood lumber dispute. Canadian trade minister Jim Peterson plans to inform his U.S. counterparts Monday that the provincial governments will not sign off on the deal, which had aimed to resolve a trade disagreement, his spokesman said. Last year, the United States imposed stiff duties on softwood imports from four Canadian provinces after accusing Canada of subsidizing the industry. Canada called the duties unwarranted and protested to the World Trade Organization and a NAFTA dispute panel. In December, the U.S. Commerce Department proposed giving...

The European Union and Japan plan to raise tariffs on American imports after the United States missed a World Trade Organization deadline to repeal a law handing domestic companies millions of dollars in customs duties, according to officials. Japan and the European Union will notify the trade organization on Monday of their intention to increase duties on unspecified products, according to an official at the Japanese Ministry of Trade, Economy and Industry, and Arancha González, the European Commission's spokeswoman for trade in Brussels. "The purpose," González said, "is to reserve our right to retaliate and protect the interests of our...

US Shrimp Fishermen Seek Tariffs on Thailand, China, Vietnam, India, Ecuador, Brazil VOA News 31 Dec 2003, 20:17 UTC U.S. shrimp fishermen are asking Washington to impose tariffs on shrimp imports from Thailand, China, Vietnam, India, Ecuador, and Brazil. In petitions to the U.S. Commerce Department Wednesday, fishermen's groups accused those nations of selling shrimp in the United States at unfairly low prices. Members of the U.S. shrimp industry say their business has been devastated by foreign competition much of which is farmed shrimp. The American Seafood Distributors' Association says new tariffs would hurt U.S. consumers and are a bad...

<p>President Bush’s recent decision to eliminate the steel tariffs couldn’t have been easy to make, but it was the correct decision. With the European Union threatening to retaliate and the domestic industries that use steel shedding jobs, something had to be done.</p>

The Case For Tariffs-Only?by Gary North For over two centuries, one of the most useful litmus tests of economic rationalism has been the tariff test. Does a would-be economist support tariffs as the way to national wealth? If he does, he is probably a crank. Probably is not absolutely. Personally, I think tariffs are excellent as stand-alone revenue-generating devices. Why? Let me count the ways. First, tariffs are sales taxes imposed on imported goods. The key political fact about sales taxes is this: they are flat taxes. They cannot be used to extract more wealth from one taxpayer than another....