The KGB Oracle Forums General Public Discussion (SPECIAL ACCESS) KGB Political Debate Central China

China Confronts Mounting Piles of Unsold Goods.

China's economy is overheating, any day now they will get desperate enough and start dumping goods despite WTO regulations. This would be one of the few cases that sanctions and tariffs should be used.

Yeah, I cant say I care for "free trade" and I certainly do not care for WTO or global organizations.

My opposition to "free trade" is probably the biggest thing that sets me apart from many Liberty folk, who tend to be big into free trade.

I support free trade in principle, given that wealth derived from it proportionally distributed within society.

Not a free trade fan. Sinij, you should look into the ramifications of NAFTA on Mexican economy. Absolutely deplorable what that has done to their agricultural job market, and that is exactly what free trade does. It incites companies to relocate to the lower income areas and exploit the citizenry. I figured you'd be against that.

free trade incentivizes companies to exploit people, environmental regulations (lack of), evade taxes , empower despots, operate banana republics, and reduce first world economies to ruin by drawing all the cash out of them and into the symbiotes.

i guess im a protectionist, because i dont think a country can be great if it doesnt produce anything, but just lets the banks and speculators push piles of money around, and create mcjobs for the masses.

what method would you recommend for this redistribution? seizure of the means of production by the proletariat?

Progressive taxation would work just fine.

How would you feel about a flat tax for income, and value added tax for anything made outside the US?

Initial opinion - that would be a tariff and probably against WTO agreements. I'd have to think more about it as a concept, but considering how little is made in the US, and how easy to game such system by say, doing packaging in the US and claiming "made in the USA!" I would highly doubt such measure would be effective.

Here is interesting story for you. For a while US had a import tax on some cargo vans mad outside of US. Don't remember why or when, but Ford would import them with passenger seats then remove these seats and sell the van. Then send these seats back to where they were manufactured to get reused. The only jobs US got out of it is a production line that would remove pointless passenger seats from otherwise perfectly good cargo vans.

Second part - flat tax income is fundamentally bad idea. Even if you manage to create true flat tax, so everything you spend, down to licensing fees and municipal taxes always adds up to some X%, regardless of your income (a monumental undertaking, but lets say its possible), you still would have an issue with concentration of wealth and resulting corruption of power structures.

The only way to keep democratic society functioning as a true democracy is to prevent extreme concentration of wealth in too few hands. Yes, that means that society should strive to eliminate any and all ultra-rich.