Re:Outlaw Chinese Steel
by gscott on Wednesday May 04, 2016 @12:24PM
(#11629454)
Huffington Post begins to sound like Trump supporters?
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huffington post is probably as far left as you can get in an online publication
Some of Trump's ideas are pretty far left also.
For example, he proposed taxing vehicles imported from Mexico by semi-American companies like Ford. That's not exactly the free trade GOP party line.
http://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/politics/elections/201...
Re:Outlaw Chinese Steel
by dragonwriter on Wednesday May 04, 2016 @03:36PM
(#11631062)
Protectionism is neither "left" nor "right", its essentially an orthogonal axis. There are dissenters from the broad neoliberal trade consensus across the left/right spectrum. (Generally, the main dissent on the left favors international trade agreements, but favors stronger common labor, human rights, and environmental protections that are common in the current international regime, with tariffs as a fallback if they can't get these kinds of deals; the dissent on the right is more likely -- like Trump -- to see tariffs as a tool more directly to deal with trade imbalance, to see it about a weapon for "winning" trade.)
Not everything that disagrees with the dominant position of the Republican Party is "far left".
I believe now that labelling free trade as right-wing was a ruse all along used by the GOP to sell free trade to their voters. I see the rise of Trump as a sign that voters see through the ruse.
There has been bipartisan support on Capitol Hill for TPP and TTIP. Free trade hasn't been particularly left or right recently.
Free trade has a place but I don't believe anyone expected the Chinese government to subsidize industry to the scale they have. Now they have this massive industrial economy and such scale it frightens me personally. They can at any moment start churning out military hardware, bombs, planes, ships and they have people who work for very little money and are relatively happy doing so. We have given up our manufacturing, economy, and know how to the Chinese and some day I am sure we will regret it all for short term profits. Currently the Chinese are planning to build a military base on a disputed island 120 miles away from the Subic bay submarine base. Unless if we elect Trump we might as well roll over dead and just bring our military home and let China do anything to anyone while we stand by.