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Was a man who didn't love a wall.
Do you wear clothes Kieth? Do you live in a house?
Do you live in a city of walls? There are always
payments. And something is always being taken from
another. You are making the same argument against tariffs that the
Christians make against abortion. It isn't natural and it is against
life. Well of course but so is civilization. Systems are
never pure and you decide the consequences and decide what the good is that you
will get. There are a great many more goods than just economic ones
and that is what you don't address.
As for the Industrial revolution?
Yes it would. We stole from the Soviets because they were the
competitors and they did the same for us. If there wasn't
competition across borders there would have been another type.
What do you think all those wars in the 18th and 19th centuries were
about? The 20th century was the mean one, the one about
patronization and race. You yourself made the point about
novelty and the need to invent things. We have a lot more to develop
and control than just dollars and dollars have proven a very poor measure of
value. That is why we have the mess with aesthetics that we have and
the mess in your educational system as the aesthetics have declined since the
1960s and your blessed Liverpoole gang. Before they were
through they were writing second rate choral music as well and now we have Sir
Phantom of the Opera. Now that is a decline in
education. But he is the highest payed composer in the history
of the world. That must mean that he is the greatest right? He
has the most monetary value. Culture for Dummies
anyone?
Ray Evans Harrell
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Saturday, May 31, 2003 2:47
AM
Subject: [Futurework] Enslaved by Free
Trade?
In the following article in this week's New
Scientist, George Monbiot makes a case for governments to defend new
industries from foreign competition. It's a plausible case but a fallacious
one.
If a government decides to protect a particular new industry by
giving subsidies to it or by erecting tariff barriers against homologous
imports then a price has to be paid. Either taxes have to be raised or
customers of the imported products have to pay a higher price than otherwise.
In both cases one favoured industry is being subsidised by penalising the
others. A government had therefore be totally confident that the industry it
is protecting will have a more profitable future than the others. But that is
something that governments are incapable of doing. Indeed, as we have seen in
the last decade or so, even shrewd venture capitalists are not capable
either.
The fact is that in both a free market or a controlled market
(over the longer term), customers decide on the fate of its economy, not
governments, nor even entrepreneurs as a generality. The reason for the
economic success of any highly prosperous country is always due to a
microscopically small number of individual entrepreneurs at any one time. But
no-one can choose in advance who are likely to be the seminal entrepreneurs,
and the best thing a government can do is to encourage all of them and wait
for the seminal industries to emerge.
If Monbiot wants to prove that
state support for new industries by countries such as Japan, Taiwan and South
Korea was the reason why they were successful, then how does he differentiate
this effect from the adoption ("stealing") of technologies from existing
practitioners?
As to giving examples of countries which have succeeded
by stealing the technologies of others, Monbiot only mentions Switzerland and
Holland. But this has, in fact, been widespread. Ever since the Renaissance
when people risked their lives in stealing the secrets of the latest silk
spinning machines from the Italian city states and taking them to the rest of
Europe, the whole of the subsequent industrial revolution could only have
taken place by means of new techniques being stolen and transmitted like
wildfire from one country to another (America being an important recipient) no
matter how much the manufacturers tried to confine them in their own premises
or cities.
If present-day patents and intellectual copyright had been
as strongly in force two hundred years ago as today -- or as the
developed countries and large coportations would them to be -- then the
industrial revolution would simply have not happened.
Keith
Hudson
>>>>>
ENSLAVED BY FREE
TRADE
George Monbiot
The founding myth of the dominant nations
is that they achieved their industrial and technological superiority through
free trade. Nations that are poor today are told that if they want to follow
our path to riches they must open their economies to foreign competition. They
are being conned.
Almost every rich nation has industrialised with the
help of one of two mechanisms now prohibited by the rules of global trade. The
first is "infant industry protection": defending new industries from foreign
competition until they are big enough to compete on equal terms. The second is
the theft of intellectual property. History suggests that technological
development may be impossible without one or both.
Britain's
industrial revolution was founded on the textile industry. This was nurtured
and promoted by means of ruthless government intervention. As the development
economist Ha-Joon Chang at the University of Cambridge has documented, from
the 14th century onwards, the state systematically cut out competitors by
taxing or banning the import of foreign manufactured products and banning the
export of the raw materials to countries with competing
industries.
Only when Britain had established technological superiority
in almost every aspect of manufacturing did it suddenly discover the virtues
of free trade. It was not until the 1850s and l860s that it opened up most
markets.
The US, which now insists that no nation can develop without
free trade, defended its markets just as aggressively during its key
development phase. In 1816 the tax on almost all imported manufactured
products was 35 per cent, rising to 40 per cent in 1820 and, for some goods,
50 per cent in 1832. This gave domestic manufacturers a formidable advantage
in their home market. The US remained the most heavily protected nation on
earth until 1913. Throughout this period, it was also the
fastest-growing.
The three nations that have developed most
spectacularly over the past 60 years -- Japan, Taiwan and South Korea -- all
did so not through free trade but through land reform, the protection and
funding of key industries, and the active promotion of exports by the
state.
In South Korea and Taiwan, the state owned all the major
commercial banks, and this allowed it to make major decisions about
investment. In Japan, the Ministry of International Trade and Industry
exercised the same control using legislation. All three used tariffs and a
number of clever legal ruses to shut out foreign products that threatened the
development of their new industries. They granted major subsidies for exports.
They did, in other words, everything that the World Trade Organization, the
World Bank and the International Monetary Fund forbid or discourage
today.
There are two striking exceptions to this route to development.
Neither Switzerland nor the Netherlands used infant industry protection.
Instead, as the economic historian Eric Schiff showed in Industrialisation
Without National Patents, published in 1971, they simply stole the
technologies of other nations. During their key development phases (1850 to
1907 in Switzerland, 1869 to 1912 in the Netherlands), neither country
recognised the validity of patents in most economic
sectors.
Switzerland's industrialisation took off in 1859, when a small
company based in Basle pilfered the aniline dying process that had been
developed and patented in Britain two years before. The company was later
named Ciba; more recently, after a series of mergers and splits, it became
Novartis and Syngenta. In the Netherlands, in the early i870s, two
enterprising firms called Jurgens and Van den Bergh "borrowed" a patented
French recipe and started producing something called margarine. They later
merged, and went on to form part of the company named Unilever.
Those
nations that are poor today are forbidden by trade rules from following either
of these routes to development. Their new industries are immediately exposed
to full competition with established companies overseas that have capital,
experience, intellectual property rights, established marketing networks and
economies of scale on their side.
"Technology transfer" is encouraged
in theory, but forbidden in practice by an ever fiercer patents regime. Unable
to develop competitive enterprises of their own, the poor nations are locked
into their position as the suppliers of cheap labour and raw materials to the
rich world's companies. They are, as a result, barred from advancing beyond a
certain level of development.
There is no sound argument for permitting
rich nations to protect their economies. But there is a powerful case for
permitting the poor ones to follow the only routes to development that appear
to work.
----
George Monbiot's book The Age of Consent: A manifesto
for a new world order, is published on 16 June by
Flamingo
Keith Hudson, 6 Upper Camden Place, Bath, England
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