A Good Fight

I love this story, mostly because you don't hear much about countries fighting our hypocritical trade policies - at least not South American (aka non-European) countries. But dammit, sometimes they should! And this seems like one of those times. So at risk of being called unpatriotic, Go Brazil! That's what the WTO is for - to force big powerful countries to play by the rules and stop taking advantage of less powerful countries. The only problem is that many countries do not have anything that they can retaliate with.

Trade Deficit

In case you wanted an objective analysis of the trade deficit and how we need to respond to it, the NYTimes has it.

So Touching

This story is very quaint and romantic. The small American farms in the mid-west are disappearing, and America's hard-working, traditional soul is going along with it. Or at least that is what we are meant to believe when we read about the loss of small agriculture in this country as a metaphor for the loss of American values. Unfortunately, this story tends to encourage the sort of protectionist policies that condradict the free trade spirit we force everyone else to get behind when it benefits us, at the expense of developing countires. The article comes to a perfect conclusion with the author suggesting that if Democrats could protect these dying farms, they might be able to steal these socially conservative voters from the Republicans.

This is something we cannot buy into. Compormising our principles to steal a few votes in unacceptable. Instead, we need to be willing to stand behind free trade even during the times when it doesn't benefit American workers. Our hypocricies are ruining the developing world, and articles like this one are putting phony sentiment ahead of sound policy.