Posted on 03/05/2010 1:32:25 AM PST by bruinbirdman
The homosexual linguistic activists would include new words like dumbass in the Merriam-Webster dictionary, if they weren’t so busy with anti-family entries for media sponsoring, free traitor alumni and their anti-competition social programs.
Little tongue-in-cheek there. See my last two taglines before this one.
It’s the fault of homosexual linguistic activists that “dumbass” isn’t in the M-W dictionary. Good one.
Free trade simply applies this principle to nations. By allowing nations to specialize, productivity goes up, we all earn and so can consume more. Life is good.
The problem that we have with China is that we don't get the benefits of specialization because the Chinese (and our own government's deficit spending) aren't allowing the economic signals that would result in greater concentration on our respective competitive advantages to be transmitted.
The US is a powerhouse in agriculture, but the Chinese don't buy nearly enough of our pork, beef, poultry, etc., thus preventing further investment in these industries. The US is a powerhouse in R&D, yet the Chinese engage in industrial espionage on a vast scale, preventing payments for patents going to the research labs where they belong, thus sending the economic signals for the US to continue to specialize in R&D. The US is a powerhouse in aviation, yet the Chinese insist on building their own airplane industry from scratch, instead of sending economic signals in the form of money for Boeing et. al. to build more planes. The US is clearly the world leader in computer software, popular music, movies, video games and on and on, yet the Chinese pursue massive copyright theft as a matter of state policy.
The list could go on and on.
You can't have one country stealing your stuff and generally playing by mercantilist rules and call it free trade.
The US gets its own payoff here via cheap stuff at Wal-Mart, but we also pay a huge, albeit not immediately apparent, price. That is, we lose skills in manufacturing on a massive scale. Our predominance in our natural competitive advantages - most painfully, R&D - is undermined. Our artists and creative computer people are not paid and their skills atrophy.
This cheap stuff is like a drug. I'm all for free trade, but running over two hundred billion in trade deficits year after year after year ain't free trade.
It is crass mercantilism.
We need to insist that China stop stealing our IP and really throw their markets open to all of our agricultural products, airplanes, machine tools and so on. If not, then we need to cut them off until they figure out that free trade is in their interests, too.
Oh, and meantime we need to punish our pols for letting the Chicoms steal from the Chinese peasants and workers and finance our budget deficits.
Imported oil is a big part of that deficit. One might argue that we buy this oil at a cheap price, but with a real unemployment rate (including those who have given up) of 16-17%, we need to produce our own energy. And solar panels and windmills are not a good solution, at least not yet.
I am for research and improvements in new and traditional forms of energy. The problem is that the extreme left acts as if using carbon is sinful, and that extreme position hurts our trade balance and economy overall.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.