Let China Subsidize Us

Just last month the steel industry convinced the U.S. International Trade Commission that imports that are subsidized by the Chinese government are bad for America. They claimed that China was using predatory pricing as a way to gain more buyers overseas. It may not be obvious when you read articles like this from the Wall Street Journal, but low prices are good. I'd be happy to let any foreign government subsidize my purchases. Many worry about the effect these low prices will have on the domestic steel industry, but it's better to think of this as a transition and not a loss. American has gone from stone to bronze, agrarian to industrial, and from manufacturing to higher skilled (and higher paid) service industry. This is called creative destruction, or the means in which capitalism replaces older production with newer, better production. When governments try to prevent this improvement using trade tariffs, like we just did with steel, is like "doing to ourselves in peacetime what our enemies to do us in wartime".