October 06, 2004
Free Market Miracle #0007
Boeing and Airbus would probably see their state aid ruled illegal under global subsidy rules should the U.S. press ahead with a complaint at the World Trade Organization (WTO), a European Commission memo says.
WTO litigation may bring "mutually assured embarrassment", says the memo obtained by Bloomberg News that details a meeting with the U.S. on Sept. 16. It's "possible, perhaps likely, that [a WTO] panel may find that they both received WTO-incompatible subsidies" and "both have sinned and should stop".
We've covered this ground before. But the idea that state intervention in the economy is a "sin" is an interesting take on it. Here's more:
"Everybody in this is a sinner and has a long record of sinning, " said Konstantinos Adamantopoulos, a trade lawyer with Hammonds in Brussels. "If both are right, then they'd both see their forms of subsidy disappear."
By "everybody", of course, he means Boeing and Airbus, though taken literally, his statement is more less as accurate.
"Free Market" Capitalism does not work (on its own sick terms, viz., creating and sustaining profits for big business) and never has. Industries become and remain profitable only by constantly relying on the public dime (not only for subsidies and bailouts; but also imperialism, rigged "free trade" pacts, research and development, "intellectual property" laws and property "rights" laws and resource allocation generally, and so forth).
So if industries and their home governments would stop "sinning", then the global economy would collapse, and quickly.
The real sins -- apart from the "original sin" of Capitalism itself -- are that taxpayers have almost zero input into how their tax dollars are spent; and that, while the G-8 economies "sin" like they breathe, the Third World is decimated by IMF-mandated austerity programmes dreamt up by "free market" fundamentalists.
Posted by Eddie Tews at October 6, 2004 04:16 PM
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