I am not a "free trade denier". China uses slave labor. There will not be unions there, not because they are "barnacles" (which I agree they have become in the US), but because China is a Communist dictatorship that jails union organizers.

China does not follow ANY of the health and safety conventions that are taken for granted in the West.

Do you really believe that it is alright to have 6 year old children working in coal mines, like we did here until the union activities of the early 1900s?

The unions have come close to killing the golden goose, but that does not mean that everything use to be hunky-dory. As you noted on Rush's show, Toyota etc., set up shop in the South instead of Detroit to avoid the unions. But you did not note that they would not have started making cars here at all, if it had not been for threat of tariffs if they didn't.

Do you really believe that workers should be locked in sweat-shops, with no ventilation and no way of escape in case of emergency?

...It is only "free" trade if it is close to a level playing field. That does not mean union wages and benefits and work rules. But it does mean basic health and safety, and no forced labor camps. Surely, you would not say that Nazi work camps were OK? So, why are Communist Chinese camps?

...It is also important to remember that we have enemies. It is not wise to be dependent on any foreign nation for food or militarily sensitive industrial products. That is another reason that Japan was "encouraged" to build cars here. It doesn't matter, from a national security perspective, who owns a factory, but where it is located -- in times of emergency, factories can be nationalized. But if all of them are in the home of your enemy, you are screwed.

...I understand that you are an investments officer, and investments overseas are good for business. But there are considerations besides profit. National security is the largest of these other considerations. China views us as an enemy. It would be the honest thing to make your investors aware of this.

You are making two entirely separate arguments. One is an ethical argument about whether we ought to be doing business with countries that have poor labor conditions. I take the point; I suppose there would be some extreme, such as literal slavery, where I would draw the line. But in the case of China it is far from literal slavery. The people working in modern factories there are the lucky ones. They have come from farms where their lives were utterly hellish. At least now they have a chance for a reasonably healthy working environment, some wages (high by their standards), and the creation of skills that will serve them will in the future.

As to our ?dependence? on foreign manufacturing, let me state again what I said on the air. This country is at peak manufacturing capacity right now. We are simply not dependent on anybody for anything, other than raw materials we can?t get here, but couldn?t have anyway.

But let?s take it to extremes. Let?s say we had the opportunity to shut down our entire steel-making capacity here and import it all from China. Should we do that? Let?s say the answer from a military preparedness standpoint were ?yes.? In that case, should the Dept. of Defense take over the operation of steel mills? Should soldiers do the work? If there aren?t enough soldiers, should people be drafted to do it? Those are questions you?d have to ask, since the only reason for otherwise shutting down that capacity is that it is uneconomical on normal terms.

I thought you let him off pretty easy, especially on his strawman of child labor. He and other liberals like to believe there's an evil capitalist hiding in every shadow, forcing us into slavery-like conditions, but the fact remains that child labor stems from necessity, not industrialization's maliciousness. It's merely part of the nature of an impoverished existence. You and I, being smart capitalists who know how the world really works, understand that when a man and woman do not produce enough by themselves, their children have to help. Decades ago, American factories, coal mines, etc., needed all available workers, young and old, simply because of technology. Any individual worker produced just a fraction of what one today can, so like on a farm, a son would work with his father -- except industrial jobs guaranteed having enough to eat. Even the most idyllic agrarian life required the children to work (and hence give up schooling), and no matter how much everyone worked, there was a very real chance of not having enough to eat, if not starvation.

I make no value judgment either way, refraining from saying in an absolute sense that children should work or that the law should forbid them to work. But I will say that if it hadn't been for "child labor," my father may have well starved to death. He was 11 when the Great Depression officially began, and he sold fruit on the streetcorners of upstate New York. If he saw someone's walkway covered in snow, he offered to shovel it in the hope of earning a quarter. If he could have worked in a factory, he'd have jumped at the chance. When a bit older, he was a promising track star, but he had to work after school.

Once I read about Chinese urban laborers sharing beds in shifts. Three would take turns, because, of course, the conditions are so crowded. And you're right, they are the lucky ones. It's better than risking starvation in the rural provinces. In my mother's home country of the Philippines, children must often work because their parents cannot earn enough by themselves. The lucky ones, when they get older, get jobs at Manila call centers. American liberals consider that slave labor because it's below our minimum wage, but one of my online friends couldn't be happier.