Trade and China

Here's the Register's editorial on the U.S. decision to seek redress with the World Trade Organization for certain Chinese policies that arguably interfere with open trade. I'm not sure if it's appropriate or not, but better a WTO complaint than unilateral sanctions of some kind. It can be easy to forget that it wasn't so long ago that Japan was known for sending cheap trinkets to the U.S., but its economy matured (and then went into something like senility, though it seems to be recovering some). Free trade policies offer the most flexibility for letting the people who do the actual trading deal with changing conditions in other countries' economies rather than having the government set a rigid policy that will be outdated in a few years -- or maybe as soon as it's enacted.