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Date Posted: 10:24:06 03/13/02 Wed
Author: FawnDoo
Subject: Past examples........
In reply to: Perceptor II 's message, "Pot, kettle. Kettle, pot." on 19:17:03 03/11/02 Mon

You're quite right Perceptor, there is a certain amount of regional bias involved in the news reporting. It is obviously an emotive issue for the parties involved, and the respective news agencies are slanting things to reflect favourably upon their home workforce/government.

However, it cannot be denied that this is an extreme moral turnaround on the part of the US government. To use recent history as an example, the British Empire used to practice something called "Imperial Preference" - that is, to protect the economy of Great Britain and tie the bonds of Empire closer, it would make it more expensive for the dominions, colonies and protectorates to import goods from non-Empire countries, thus making British products their only viable alternative. In time, the British economy fell behind the American, German and Japanese ones (we didn't modernize enough to keep up with the times) and to combat this, Imperial Preference was reinforced. If India wanted to buy cotton, we would make it a hell of a lot more expensive for it to buy it from France than to buy it from us. That way we still got our money from exports, we didn't need to modernize our factories and industrial technology.......everything was good in this deal for us.

And who hated this system the most?

The United States Government. Rightfully so - they were being blocked from selling goods they could produce and export in a rich market, all because a country that had failed to keep up technologically wanted to protect its markets. In fact, this was such a big issue for the United States that one of the conditions tied up in the Lend-Lease agreement of World War 2 was the abandonment of Imperial Preference and the adoption of a more open trading stance on the part of the British Empire. And this was no minor condition - this was one of the major conditions upon which the Lend-Lease act went ahead. The US, and I quite agree with them, wanted one of their major partners to stop an absurd protectionist policy and open up their markets to competitive economies on the up-and-up.

And sixty or so years later, the situation is neatly reversed. I don't doubt that there are compelling reasons - Bush would not be a good President if he did not empathize with his workforce and seek to protect them - but before such words as "humble pie" and past misdeeds are cast up on both sides, it might be handy to remember that not so long ago the positions were turned in a big way, and the policy the United States Government has adopted now is a moral anathema to the policy pursued by the United States Government in years past.

Like I said, this is an emotive issue. No-one wants to see anyone out of jobs in any country, but in business if nowhere else, survival of the fittest is the order of the day and protectionist measures like tariffs should not be mistaken as a life-enhancing boost for the affected home industry - rather, they are more like life support systems: an artificial extension of life which will, eventually, fail.

Let's just hope the bigwigs come up with some amicable way to bring this sorry business to a conclusion, eh? :-)

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