"Ed Huntress" writes:

Firstly, never follow these trends to the "ultimate end." There are always
counterforces in an economy. That's why economics is about as predictable as
the weather.

You don't want to *restrict* India's growth, or China's. You
want them to grow as rapidly as possible.

Also, in a petroleum-based economy, there's the question of how
fast we can pump oil out of the ground when 1.4 billion Chinese
suddenly want as much of it as we do. This is offset by increases
in efficiency every time the price goes up, and reduced efficiency
every time the price goes down (SUVs).

Until recently China's economy was mostly coal-based, just
because they have a lot of it (I don't know if that's still
true). They were still using steam locomotives just because they
burn coal instead of oil. I don't know about India. We also have
a lot of coal, but we have a bad history with coal miners'
unions (apparently they don't like getting killed on the job).

There is no "free trade," and pretending that there is will do some
structural damage to our economy and our society as a whole, now that we
have enormous trading partners, like China and India, that are both
relatively poor and technologically capable. At the same time, conventional
protectionist measures won't solve anything in the long run, or even in the
medium run. What we need is some new ideas.

But conventional free trade measures won't help us either.
New ideas are in short supply.

The idea of limiting imports to the amount of exports is not
traditional protectionism, because it doesn't target specific
products. The problem is that it doesn't guarantee that we'll
have anything to export. But it might limit or slow down the
damage-- ie, if we're going to get hit, we might at least soften
the blow, until someone comes up with a better idea.

It reminds me of the "opium wars", when England was smuggling
opium into China to balance their tea imports. The problem was
that England didn't have any legal products that China wanted to
import (but you can always create a market for drugs). The other
option for England would have been to stop importing tea from
China (which they eventually did, after they learned how to grow
it in India).

Certain Central American countries are doing the same thing to us
with Cocaine, and it's keeping their economies alive. Winning the
"drug war" would mean bankrupting several other countries. BTW
some people claim that this wouldn't work if only poor people
used cocaine, because there wouldn't be enough cash flow.