Three Cheers for Obama Taking on Al Capone

On Friday, Obama slapped a punitive tariff on Chinese tires. The Chinese Ministry of Commerce immediately said it “strongly opposes” Obama’s tariffs, and called the measure “protectionist.” The move and countermove immediately made it into the headlines of major media over the weekend.

Then on Monday, Beijing made headlines again, announcing its own investigation into U.S. automobile and poultry imports into China. Analysts have been throwing around the word “trade war” to salivating journalists and have now put Obama’s tariffs on the defensive. This is unfortunate.

What most media reports on both sides of the political spectrum have failed to take a real look at is the deeper reason why Obama might have created the tariffs. Instead, journalists have taken the shallowest and easiest route to explaining Obama’s motive, taking his words at face value—as if a politician should be taken at face value. As stated in his declaration, Obama’s official motive is a dry regurgitation of policy on protecting U.S. workers interests and not losing jobs overseas:

“certain passenger vehicle and light truck tires from China are being imported into the United States in such increased quantities or under such conditions as to cause or threaten to cause market disruption to the domestic producers of like or directly competitive products.”

Now the media reports seem to ask: “A trade war over the disruption of tires!? Is the President trying too desperately to improve his plummeting poll numbers?”

This view misses the real issues that are coming into play. Consider that the most well known gangster in American history, Al Capone, was eventually brought down by authorities not on charges of murder, racketeering, prostitution, or any of the other heinous crimes he committed. No, instead they simply got him on tax evasion. The means to get Al Capone, as completely anticlimactic as they may have been, were completely justified. It was a clever way to get the guy that everyone knew was bad anyway.

Fast forward 80 years, and now, President Obama is going after a modern Al Capone, the 60-year-old Chinese communist regime. Now, Obama is using tactics no less anticlimactic than tax evasion but doubly justified.

Historians have shown that the Chinese communist regime has killed as many as 80 million of its people with various political movements. Even if they’re only half right, that's still far more than were killed in the Holocaust.

Today, the regime continues to jail, torture, and kill people whose religious, political, or social views are different from its own.

The good working conditions that people here have guaranteed by the U.S. government don’t exist over there, and if such a labor movement were to push for it, the movement would be completely and bloodily dismantled by communist authorities.

Further, this super structure of communist oppression is guarded by the state-controlled media that give the appearance of freedom, but simply tow the party line.

From the perspective of a human being and an American it makes total sense to give products, made in America, not China, as much preference as possible. The real question is, why isn’t America taxing more goods from China?

The answer, according to the prevailing economic mumbo jumbo, is protectionism. Protectionism is the thing that stifles free trade with foreign countries and supposedly led to the Great Depression. Yet, the economic fallout of the past year, has shown that if trade is too free and unregulated it can also be disastrous.

It stands to reason the competing forces of freedom and regulation in the market should neither be snuffed out—as the current political climate has tried to do to protectionism—or totally embraced. But when it comes to trade with China, stifling the freedom of arguably the most freedom-hating regime in the history of man is exactly what the doctor prescribes.