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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: craig crawford who wrote (252320)	5/1/2002 5:07:50 PM
From: Neocon	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

The utter lack of cogency may be illustrated thus: O'Neill only became a famous, rich athlete while scoring with every groupie he could. Then he fell in love, got married, and settled down, and now where is he? Out of sports, a has- been, with an auto franchise in Westchester, New York. See, scoring with the chicks had nothing to do with his success as an athlete, and settling down had had nothing to do with his retirement. Similarly, you have to make a case that mercantilism was good for Britain, and free- trade was bad, you cannot merely make portentous associations......

To: craig crawford who wrote (252320)	5/1/2002 5:17:43 PM
From: DuckTapeSunroof	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

Your sense of history is a little muddled: By the time GB made a turn towards relatively 'free trade' (much towards the later half of the 20th. century... in fact, not really significantly until Maggie Thacher's '80s), there was no longer an empire. Their sense of 'free trade' is still compromised by the historical weight of mercantilism... they preferentially favor trade with their former colonial subjects. But that aside, there was little British 'free trade' before the '80s. There is little doubt that mercantilism favored the industries of the 'home land' over the interests of the colonists... but once those colonists got 'uppity' and desired to industrialize themselves mercantilism failed. A good argument can be made that only with the introduction of Maggie Thacher's trade-opening and anti-socialist policies did the economy of GB begin to advance again. An even better example would be the Irish.