"Bray Haven" wrote in message
...
We aren't a sink-hole for your products, Randy. If you want unfettered
trade, then the thing we have to achieve first is *balanced* trade.

Ed Huntress

I'm curious as to how you can "achieve" balanced trade. Certainly not
with
protectionist tarriffs that almost never help(usually hurt).

The best plan I've seen is one that Gunner pointed me to a couple of weeks
ago, proposed by Warren Buffet in an editorial somewhere. It involves
issuing trade credits to countries that buy our products, which authorize
them to sell an equal amount back to us. I had been thinking in terms of an
offset system, which every country in the world that buys civilian aircraft
or military hardware from the US uses on us, but Buffet's plan has an added
benefit: The credits themselves could be traded on world markets, which
would have the effect of erasing some of the anti-competitive price
advantages that result from extremely low wages (China's, for example) that
are held down artificially by government manipulation.

Trade is (or
should be) a free mkt process. and a "balance" would simply be
coincidental if
it were achieved without interference.

Theory, theory. The US currently is running a $460 billion trade deficit.
Part of it is the result of other countries buying our Treasury bonds to
pump up the value of the dollar and to keep their currencies low, to give
them a trade advantage. Japan practically patented this method 30 years ago
and all of the Asian Tigers, plus China, have picked up on it. You can't
have free trade in such an environment. But enacting currency controls would
be a cure worse than the disease.

The theory of Comparative Advantage, which is the underlying idea to our
"free-trade" policies, is itself based on an assumption of perfectly
balanced trade. In fact, its arithmetic was worked out originally on an
assumption that trade would be all barter, or its money equivalent -- zero
balances of trade.

I know there's allegations of dumping
and subsidizing industries that supposedly provide unfair competition etc.
but
those allegations will always be there.

Dumping and subsidizing are, in theory, destructive only to the country that
engages in them. But the practice is quite different. They tend to be
market-grabbing techniques and they've been very effective.

However, as you say, they're hard to prove and they'll always be there. The
only way to short-circuit them that I've seen is something like Buffet's
plan.

The days when we could manipulate any
major markets are long gone and getting more so, as more countries come on
line
with all the same stuff we try to market. we may as well get used to it
and
try some American ingenuity rather than tarrifs to be more competitive.

We don't need tariffs. We need balanced trade. And we don't have to
manipulate anyone else's market. We only have to take some control of ours.

--
Ed Huntress
(remove "3" from email address for email reply)