Obama Can't Say the Word China (Forbes)

[Infohawk]

http://news.yahoo.com/obama-cant-word-china-210114302.html

Apart from violations of their trading obligations, the Chinese have a right to maintain mercantilist practices. Yet we have every right to counter them.
We are not countering them, unfortunately. Instead of dealing with these structural issues, President Obama talks about relatively unimportant ones, like the Japanese tsunami. At the same time, his Treasury Secretary, following in the footsteps of his predecessors, has refused to cite China for currency manipulation in his twice-yearly congressionally mandated reports even though that country clearly meets the statutory definition of a manipulator.

And the Republicans aren't much better. In fact it seems like they're pushing even more trade agreements that are probably not fair or free.

 

[Phokus]

the Chinese have a right to maintain mercantilist practices

Holy fuck, someone finally calls it for what it is... i've been saying that China is a neo-mercantilist state, but retard libertarians keep on arguing with me that China rose to power because they adopted free trade policies (no they fucking didn't).

Almost every poor country that became rich did so via heavy government regulation or tariffs on trade (yes, even the US).

From the 1800's through 1940's, America was a very heavy tariff country, and Alexander Hamilton popularized the American school of economics as our guiding principle to trade:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_School_(economics)

Japan and South Korea sent their students to America to study post ww2 and they adopted mercantilist/industrial policy trade policies to grow into modern economies (and their old business leaders REVERE Hamilton because of his influence), NOT free trade.