Leading by Example, by Bill Richardson: on Free Trade

Communism is teaming up with corporations to open up China

There are few areas at which communism is more efficient than capitalism, but one is ruining the environment. It took the US capitalist free-market economy hundreds of years to achieve the same levels of environmental destruction that China, at its current pace, will achieve in about 20.

China’s economic officials predict that China will build another coal-based electric-generating unit every week for the next decade. Why would China decide, on its own, to use more expensive, climate-friendly, carbon-clean technologies? Especially when it sees the US refusing to adopt carbon limits and expanding its own carbon emissions every year?

We must find a way, not only to agree with China and India on the technologies, energy investments, and emissions limits that will create some future security for our climate, but also to assure them that they will have the energy they need.

No such thing as completely free market; so regulate

If China can fairly make shirts cheaper than Americans, we’ll need to make something we’re better at making. But if the Chinese shirt is cheaper only because their workers make sweatshop wages and the owners pour chemicals into local rivers, we can’t go along.

I’m not sure a lot of the advocates of free trade understand the difference between free & fair trade. All goods cost something to make, but it matters what gets calculated in the cost: whether it’s raw materials, or human rights, or the cost of defending oil transport routes, or damage to the environment.

In the real world, there is no such thing as completely free trade. All trade needs to have regulatory sideboards to prevent a cost-reduction competition via the exploitation of people and the environment.