Free Trade, Fair Trade

I believe in freedom. If I want to buy some consumer goods from China, I should be free to do just that. If I want to sell consumer goods in China, I should be free to do just that. If I want to make consumer goods in China and sell them in the United States, I should be free to do that. If I want to make consumer goods in the United States and sell them in China I should be free to do that.

The government should not subsidize my manufacturing of consumer goods in either country. There should not be tariffs against the importation or exportation of consumer goods from or to either country. The currency transfer, taxes and labor laws, environment laws, trademarks, copyright, trade secrets and other laws should be similar.

Just as the fifty states have somewhat different rules I would expect the US and China to have some variation in the rules too. In general they should be quite similar.

If they have a 25% tariff on an imported consumer product than we should have a similar tariff, in the say, 20% to 30% range. If they lower their tariff, we should lower ours. If they raise their tariff then we should raise ours. Free trade is a good basis in understanding between free peoples. When one side manipulates their currency, restricts imports, restricts consumer sales, violates copyrights, trade secrets and trade marks, as Communist China does to the United States, then trade is neither fair nor free. We are in a trade war with Communist China, but the American side is not fighting back. We need to develop a trade policy now to eliminate our trade deficit with China by either selling them more consumer products or reducing the importation of Chinese products to the United States; that’s the view from the Hysterical Right Wing.