Logging back on to "park" this idea - re: protectionism. In the late 1920's and early 1930's, Stalin, who needed foreign capital to industrialize the Soviet Union, was unable to borrow money abroad because they had repudiated too many loans and otherwise proved themselves to be a bad credit risk. So what they did was speed up the collectivization of the Ukraine, force the entire population, essentially, to grow wheat, which they were not allowed to eat, causing a terrible famine, and then dumped it on the world market, collapsing wheat prices globally, which was one of the triggers of the Great Depression.
It's not well studied, perhaps because there are no reliable sources inside the Soviet Union as far as I can tell, and perhaps because the people who collected statistics in the 1930's were socialists or sympathizers. Certainly the famine, for generations, was only discussed by conservatives, e.g., Koestler's "Darkness at Noon." But there is no doubt that it happened.
So to say that dumping only hurts the country involved in the dumping is untrue. No honestly run company can compete with products produced by killing the people who produced them. An extreme case, but it proves the point. |
