Higher Prices and Bailouts Too!

Its a bit curious how the trade war with China plays out.

As a source of cheap labor they were able to get many companies to offload some of their labor intensive operations.

In exchange China got access to certain technology and to be honest copied or reverse engineered much of it, enabling them to make the same or similar product cheaper than the original.

This wasn't that different than what happened in Japan years ago.

It was in some ways part of the game they played but, the China market is huge and when they provided it with cheaper (stolen) tech gadgets, our tech companies were unhappy.

Now the theft of intellectual property is a complex issue.

Ultimately it leads to lower prices for the consumer as the knock offs create competition.

So we protect the property so the companies can recoup their investment.  It doesn't work well outside of our borders, at least not in some countries and this accounts to some extent for our high drug prices as we let the OEM effectively charge whatever they can get away with.

Stealing is bad and should be punished.  One might want to investigate the laws related to intellectual property and see if they protect consumers too.

This was at the heart of the dispute as Chinese products, many of them knock offs, were lower priced than those of US companies.  So the Government imposed tariffs to make them more expensive.

China retaliated and hurt farmers in particular so we decided to bail some of them out.

So we get to pay more and see our taxes help other victims of this policy.

We are also trying to stop a major tech company form importing or exporting to this country.

One thing that many of us, in either party generally agreed to, was that Government involvement in business was often clumsy and ineffective.  Think that still holds true.