Un-Free Trade

"I think I would be in favor of free trade if it was really free, but I don't think that it ever has been. " - TWB - 7/31/18

I never said that I was for what they call free trade, I said that I would be for free trade if it really was free, which it isn't.  As for that scrip stuff, all I was trying to do there is suggest a way to achieve balanced trade. Not that I care that much about it, but people have been complaining about our trade deficit since I was a little kid.  They could solve it if they really wanted to, so apparently they don't really want to solve it, they just want to complain about it.  I have said before that Red China is like Face Book, everybody complains about it, but they still do business with them.

I did look up NAFTA on Wiki back when Trump started talking tariffs.  All I could find was that Mexico was allowed to keep some of its tariffs for a specified period of time, which has long expired.  It didn't say whether or not Mexico dropped those tariffs when they were supposed to, and I don't remember it saying anything about Canadian tariffs. I've since read in the newspaper that Canada has some kind of tariff on milk, which might be what Trump is talking about.  Okay, there was something about improving people's working conditions but, again, it didn't say whether or not those working conditions ever actually did improve.  If Mexico and Canada did in fact improve working conditions for their people, they must have made up the difference by de-improving working conditions in the U.S.  I don't think anybody would argue that U.S. workers are better off now than they were before NAFTA was passed.

 I still call it "Red China" because I'm still pissed about the way Nixon kissed up to the Red Chinese and threw Taiwan under the bus.  Before that, the Red Chinese were padding around in their rice paddies and throwing a revolution every 20 years or so, while Taiwan was growing prosperous, largely because of U.S. trade policies.  That's how it's supposed to be, the good guys are supposed to prosper and the bad guys are supposed to languish in poverty.  There ain't no justice in this world anymore!

That National Geographic article told about how the European worms ate up all the leaf litter and exposed the soil to erosion.  It also said that, before the Europeans showed up, the cleaver Indians used to periodically rejuvenate the soil with controlled burns.  If that was true, there shouldn't have been a lot of leaf litter for the worms to eat, if earthworms really ate leaf litter, which I don't think they do.  I have picked a lot of worms in my life and, while it's true they may be found under damp leaf litter, I think it's the moisture and the decomposed leaves that have turned into black dirt that they're after.  Worms ain't got no teeth, just a little hole at the intake end and a little hole at the output end, so I don't know how they could manage to eat whole leaves. 

One thing I noticed on that land use map was that it doesn't show as much desert as I would expect.  Much of the land they ascribe to raising cattle is probably semi-arid scrub grassland that isn't good for much else, and some people might classify that as desert land.  Also, much of that grassland is leased from the federal government, so it should be counted as federal land.  I have read multiple times that the feds own about half the land in this country, most of it west of the Mississippi.