Hardly surprised yet still disappointing

[sanscouronne]

 http://www.economist.com/opinion/displayStory.cfm

Obama does with tires what Bush did with steel.  The Economist, who actually supported Obama's election, nails the issue on the head.  Not only is this unsound and unfair trade policy, it is the height of hypocrisy.  It goes against our national economic principles and against international

Comments

[fpb]

Here I disagree. Do you know that the Republican party was originally heavily protectionist (that includes Abraham Lincoln), that they described protection as "the great Republican and American principle", and that in nineteenth-century polemics, they actually said that the Democrats' support of Free Trade proved their anti-national and unpatriotic nature? That is not to say who is right and who is wrong, but a quick study of American economic history will show that there is nothing especially American about free trade principles. America only adopted them after it had developed an industrial sector capable of outproducing anyone else, and also after, thanks to World War One, it had turned from a debtor to a creditor nation.

[sanscouronne]

No, I know that free trade has hardly been the legacy of U.S. history, and I did not mean to imply that it was. I was referring to Bretton Woods onward U.S. trade policy.

[fpb]

It is easy to write that competition must reign, but there is no fair competition between the working class in a first-world country where even the lower classes must earn a minimum in order to be housed and live, and the workers in China where the purchasing power is completely different, the exchange is kept low by State chicanery, and there is no such thing as trades unions and freedom to strike. Bretton Woods was not about unrestrained free trade, and unrestrained free trade means a license to destroy whole industrial areas, as well as a race to the bottom in terms of standards and rights. I am not advocating Colbertism, but real competition is only possible between roughly equal groups.

[sanscouronne]

I'm afraid we will just have to disagree on this one. I fail to see how President Obama's actions benefit the American public as a whole (to whom he is accountable), much less the Chinese.

[jordan179]

Classic case of small but concentrated economic costs politically beating large but distributed economic benefits. American tire makers and their employees are a small group but stand to benefit greatly from preventing Chinese tire imports. Americans as a whole suffer, but only a little per individual. And as for the Chinese, they don't get to vote in US elections.

I wish more people understood the Law of Comparative Advantage better, because a lot of Americans who don't work in the tire industry probably think "We won something! We showed those foreigners!"

Sigh.