Word: foreign
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...hatches to let the turtles swim away. Congress has adopted such a ban, but the WTO forbids it; member nations can't block imports on the basis of the way they are produced. The organization may also eventually forbid American "antidumping" laws that bar the import of low-cost foreign steel. Those laws are important to American unions. The WTO used the same logic in siding with the U.S. against European nations that wanted to prohibit the import of American beef fed with hormones that Europeans believe may be unsafe...
...couple of reasons. First, the principle of free trade may be true, but it's not obviously true. In fact, it's counterintuitive. If a factory shuts down because of a flood of cheap foreign products, how is that good? If middle-class Americans find themselves competing with foreigners being paid practically nothing and living in squalor, how can this send Americans' standard of living up and not down? If another nation is willing to pollute its air and water in order to produce goods for sale in the global economy, how can America join that economy and still hope...
...able to save a few bucks on a new sweater are not likely to realize they are enjoying a bargain as a result of global trade or to take to the streets to defend their right to a cheap sweater. Or suppose the U.S. slaps a tariff on foreign sweaters and the foreign country retaliates by raising a tariff on something we're selling them--the people who would lose their jobs aren't even identifiable for sure, though for sure they exist. Likewise the people who lose jobs because shoppers who have to pay more for sweaters have less...
...considering all these things--the risk of losing your job one way minus the risk of losing it another, the extra money you make if your industry is shielded from foreign competition minus the extra money you pay for goods and services that are protected--that you reach the conclusion that on average, free trade benefits us all. Yes, there are various economic theories about circumstances in which all this may not be true, but their authors win prizes precisely because the circumstances are unusual. In general, the numbers work irrespective of what policies other countries follow. They just...
...Organization become the global bogeyman? No earnest college kid ever hitched across the country to carry a picket sign against the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, the WTO's predecessor, although its function was similar. It took decades for the CIA, the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations to achieve their places in the pantheon of political paranoia. The WTO has joined them in just four years. And it is despised across the entire political spectrum, whereas these other groups symbolize evil only to one political extreme or the other...