Nader attack: your posting

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Sat Jan 22 08:18:06 PST 2000


kayak3 wrote:


>I'll have to read some of his stuff. A couple of weeks ago I listened to
>the debate on trade that you talked about on your web site. It seemed
>that secretary of trade Aarons (SP?) really nailed Nader a couple of
>times during the debate while Nader continued to repeat the same old
>anti-corporate line without any effective rebuttle. Because of this I'm
>even more disinchanted with Nader than I was before the debate.

Yes, I thought Aarons did nail Ralph, esp on the question of how a consumer advocate could want to restrict trade, since that would reduce choice, increase prices, and encourage domestic monopoly. That's not a bad point, though not an unanswerable one, but Ralph's answer was meandering and weak. He said something about how restricting oil imports would make us self-sufficient, as if self-sufficiency were a self-evident virtue. And he said someething about how restricting pornography imports is a good idea too. It really pointed out how weak Nader's economic analysis is.

The crowd, of course, hated Aarons and loved Ralph, so by the applause meter, he won.

Doug



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