Fair Trade

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Can we fix trade imbalances by enacting punitive tariffs against companies and countries? These are excerpts from a conversation on Citizen Tom’s blog. My counterpart here is not a bad person, but I certainly disagree that tariffs are the answer to trade imbalances, and I said so…

To the idea that “[t]he government did allow to US manufacturing

Comments

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You're describing China, of course, whose PRC owns much of the industry we deal with. Free trade does not mean writing the PRC a letter enabling them to visit and inspect our missile bases, as Bill Clinton did when he needed campaign cash in 1995.

I was involved, peripherally, in that transfer of missile guidance technology back then: I was one of the customers for whom the Long March III satellite with the Loral payload was being launched, and I'd had dinner with Bernie Schwartz, CEO of Loral, not long before that. Shortly thereafter, to stop the federal investigation, Schwartz became the largest donor to a presidential re-election campaign in history.

Here is an article from the time that so benignly describes all these doings as "just coincidence." Later, once Bush took over and the investigation restarted, Loral plead guilty to the technology transfer to China and was let off with a $20m fine.

I knew about the crash when it happened. I did not learn about Loral techs helping out their Chinese buddies until a few months later. It was exactly like the condemned engineer looking up at the jammed guillotine blade and saying "Oh, I see your problem."

===|==============/ Keith DeHavelle