It's is interesting to see how far the current administration's economic policies have strayed from free market principles.
"To no one's surprise, the World Trade Organization issued a final ruling yesterday that the Bush administration violated trade laws when it slapped onerous tariffs on an array of steel imports last year. The tariffs, as harmful to the American economy as they were to foreign exporters, were a political gambit, aimed at scoring points in such key electoral battlegrounds as Pennsylvania.
The W.T.O. ruled against the tariffs last July, rightly finding that Washington had failed to make its case for the "safeguard" action. The Bush administration could not prove that an unexpected surge of imports had hurt the American steel industry. It did not help that the industry had been suffering from self-inflicted woes for years and that imports were actually declining in the immediate two years before the tariffs. Yesterday's ruling was against the appeal of that judgment.
The Bush economic team reportedly opposed the tariffs from the start as had the Clinton administration but was overruled by White House political operatives. "
