THE FELLA BEHIND THAT TREE :

Outrageous Steel (Cont'd) (The Washington Post, August 8, 2002)

The steel lobby never ceases to amaze. Not content with the protective tariffs extracted from the administration earlier this year, steel is pushing forward with a raft of anti-dumping suits against 20 U.S. trading partners. The suits claim that foreign producers are damaging American steel makers by selling at unfairly low prices.

If the steel lobby wins these cases, the trade tribunal that presides over them will be discredited.

Even if the tribunal stands up to the steel lobby, this episode will have done damage. Once an anti-dumping suit makes it through a preliminary hearing -- and this is a low hurdle -- imports that come in while the suit is in the works are liable for retrospective tariffs if the suit later prevails. This liability chills imports; it has the effect of a tariff even if no tariff is ultimately imposed. The upshot is that domestic lobbies can hit foreign competitors with quasi-tariffs however spurious their legal arguments.

Free trade, though not a constitutional value, is an eminently worthwhile value, one that if applied universally could conceivably usher in an unprecedented era of rising global prosperity. It is probably even the case that many less-developed nations could maintain their current trade restrictions even as more developed nations drop theirs (ours), without doing too much harm. And it even may be the case that so long as there's a general trend towards liberalized trade that some developed nations and some industries with the developed world could be less free without the whole system coming a cropper.
Posted by Orrin Judd at August 8, 2002 10:17 AM