Every car here is a Toyota. Nearly ever moto or motorcycle is a Honda. I am taking hoards of these things. Yesterday I stopped in a Honda sales place and found out that a new Honda bike can be bought for about $500. I am not in the market, but I was wondering how people with a little fruit stand could afford one. I assume that used ones can be gotten for as little as $50. So, that led me to the question of why I can't buy one of these things and take it home at enormous savings. When I was young, everyone was going to Europe and buying a VW on the cheap and bringing it home.
This, of course, led me to make an attempt at understanding the concept of Free Trade. Everything I read about this subject added to my confusion. It is a good idea, but bad in practice. It is a bad idea but has some good parts. It is a way of further enslaving have-nots and stacking the deck for the haves. It doesn't exist and can't exist. The WTO and GATT and NAFTA are living examples of how these so called free trade deals screw everyone except the powerful.
Who decides what? We subsidize farmers in the USA so they can dump corn in Central America at prices that put farmers there out of business and then what do we gain? More hungry people needing to work in the USA so they can send remittances home so that their families can buy expensive corn so that we can pay taxes to make this happen? Too many questions. I do not understand what is my net gain. Nothing, I suspect. What is WalMart, Monsanto, Goldman Sachs net gain? Huge amounts. I would wager.
If any of you can explain to me what is going on, I would appreciate it very much. I hate being ignorant. I trust my gut feelings that there is perverse manipulation afoot. And I feel quite certain that the USA doesn't need more cheap junk to fill up our storage units. But, the concept of a level playing field has some appeal to me.
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