Choices

Free Trade Kommissar, Susan Schwab, laments that the Doha Round - geared for the further sell-out of the economic infrastructure of the Republic - is breaking down. I reckon that Brazil and India doesn't like the Bush Administration's Marxian trade policy and they're balking. Kommissar Schwab says that if nothing is done in 2007, Free Trade could be in limbo for "years".

Good God... I hope that she is on par in her assessment and not just engaging in typical free-trader alarmist, fear mongering...

Let's hope that '07 spells the year of the death of laissez-faire and it doesn't have a revival. It has been a disaster for the country and the world in general and it is high time that it is buried. There have been signs that globalism is cracking and the roll-back may be nigh. Let the powers that be not pussy-foot around about it: the solution is not to induce other nations to adopt free-trade(we're supposed to be 'good neighbors'), or set quotas and beggar thy neighbor and manipulate the currency - that's all been tried before. As stated in a previous comment in response to a poster, we've got to kick the living guts out of globalism, and the steel-toed boot to do it with is called tariffs. It is proven in economic trade history and it works. Devil may care if it sets off a 'tariff-trade war': look at our trade deficit and then ponder what other region on the planet has the consumer buying power of the United States of America?

Speaking of consumerism....if purist Free Market coupled with Free Trade is supposed to magnify "freedom to choose" at the Mall, how come one cannot purchase socks and underwear and most electronics that has the *Made in USA* label on it? As an economic patriot, most goods that I buy with Federal Reserve Notes I want them manufactured by American workers in the United States. This 'freedom' is taken away from me as a consumer to buy American. Instead, I can only get goods made in sweatshops in the so-called developing world. I may have 117 boxes of breakfast cereal to choose from at the supermarket, but if I insisted on 'Buying American' always, I'd have to walk about nude and not have a television or boom box and could not drive my GM truck(many parts are manufactured in Mexico). Instead of freedom, patriot consumers have no choice in the matter - we live under a tyranny of foreign goods on the shelves. True-blue economic patriots are naked and Luddite today. I'm a fraud since in public I am always dressed for the occassion.

Even if a flat tariff spiked inflation(Free Trade has hardly been a spectre of deflation either; look at the costs in Year One of FT, 1973, and compare to today) long term,that may spawn a private wave to have domestic goods manufactured cheaper than all the kitsch that we have to buy from China and other places. The tariff would protect infant industries; or should I state, jump-start re-industrialization.We would have "choice" with domestic goods and services competing with foreign ones. If some product is made better than the American one and roughly cheaper, the market will bear, right? That's competition. That's capitalism. That's choice in the marketplace.