Re:Bah! government help = bad (Score 1)

I agree with most of what you said but I wonder if you (you seem to), or more importantly those reading your post realize the current situation.

Government interference with the market is bad.

True but our government only appears to support this policy when in fact they do everything possible to make sure this is not the case from our rigid control of the IMF, World Bank, and the WTO, to bailing out the airline industry. From what little I know of economics we are nothing close in reality to free trade or most of the efficiencies of free markets Adam Smith or your Intro to Economics textbook preached about. Some things like bread are as close to purely competitive as possible, but in many other arenas the United States passes laws to ensure an oligarchy ( A non price competitive industry where only a handful of players operate). This is why we are not likely to see changes in things like software patents, and the breaking up of certain monopoly operating system providers or the government pressure to use vendor neutral standards.

This could be for many reasons from protecting your friends business, to ensuring unnatural growth, to attempting to get the best deal for America; but on the most part it is the case.

If people want to keep a strong U.S. software industry we need to things like encourage domestic competition instead of hamper, increase eduction, and adopt new trends like open source UNIX like operating systems to increase productivity. Make the U.S. a place where new software tech is done first because we make it easy to innovate and have the best schools. Otherwise any successful tariffs or incentives will only shift the costs around and create another industry were trade rules are unequally applied.

Huge subsidies that distort the trade in agricultural products is bad, and it is killing Africa (literally).

To clarify for those who do not know what the U.S. does is subsidies African nations to produce cash crops making the farmers economic success tied to U.S. import value instead of producing food which they could put on a truck and go sell it. Is this what you are talking about?

For good measure we also steal there biodiversity by patenting gene sequences they have been using for hundreds of years.

Every one should read http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0971 394253/104-0559969-3167147?v=glance for a good look at things we do that really hurt other people in the world.