> It does Americans, not the rich or the poor not anyone, any good if the Chinese can use the fruits of our agricultural R&D for free.
It does the Chinese a bit of good. Arguably, it's bad for some residents of the USA but humanity probably benefits overall. I have no sources for this claim.
> I can drive over to Ted Turner's land in Montana and pitch a tent, and it'd probably be weeks before anybody noticed. But that doesn't mean he doesn't have a right to eject trespassers from his land.
We do have Squatter's Rights, but those usually take most of a decade to kick in. Do you think the laws around GM should have longer statutes of limitations?
> The Chinese can grow corn as easily as we can.
They have more of all of the same resources as we do - land, raw genetic material (crops), smart people, research facilities. But they apparently can't innovate. Why not? We should look to protect our innovative abilities, more than we protect their products.
> It does the Chinese a bit of good. Arguably, it's bad for some residents of the USA but humanity probably benefits overall. I have no sources for this claim.
The DOJ and FBI don't exist for the benefit of humanity. The American government is (and should be) solely concerned with advancing the welfare of Americans. Anything else would be an egregious violation of the social contract.
> We should look to protect our innovative abilities, more than we protect their products.
It's inevitable that China will develop the same ability to innovate as us. R&D success is ultimately a function of money and time. But in the meantime, they don't need to develop or ability to innovate if they can simply copy the results of our innovative process as we make them.
> The American government is (and should be) solely concerned with advancing the welfare of Americans.
Opinions might divide on this one, but a case can be made that it would advance the welfare of Americans if the rest of the world didn't see Americans as total a-holes.
> But they apparently can't innovate. Why not? We should look to protect our innovative abilities, more than we protect their products.
What good does our ability to innovate do, if the Chinese are there waiting at the end of the process to scoop up the fruits of those labours and use them free of the investment cost that it took to create them in the first place?
>It does the Chinese a bit of good. Arguably, it's bad for some residents of the USA but humanity probably benefits overall. I have no sources for this claim.
Like all trade, if the Chinese feel they can benefit from the fruits of foreign technology they're welcome to it. But not for free.
You bring up a good point that I've been forgetting, and it hasn't been mentioned. I'm going to assume that the Chinese companies named in the article have approached Monsanto for a business deal, and have been turned down.
The fact that you can't come to an agreement with a supplier (of anything) doesn't mean you can just rip them off. It means you pony up more cash or do without whatever it is they were selling. China is flush with dollars these day.
No, I'm skeptical that China approached them. (They could have, and been rejected, but from the article, it didn't seem like China was operating that way.)
> They have more of all of the same resources as we do - land...
I'm not sure that China has more arable land than the US does.
> We should look to protect our innovative abilities, more than we protect their products.
Unfortunately, that's open source. (That is, the recipe is quite public.) Fortunately, very few societies seem to be willing to copy it. (Unfortunately, we seem to be willing to slowly degrade it...)
It does the Chinese a bit of good. Arguably, it's bad for some residents of the USA but humanity probably benefits overall. I have no sources for this claim.
> I can drive over to Ted Turner's land in Montana and pitch a tent, and it'd probably be weeks before anybody noticed. But that doesn't mean he doesn't have a right to eject trespassers from his land.
We do have Squatter's Rights, but those usually take most of a decade to kick in. Do you think the laws around GM should have longer statutes of limitations?
> The Chinese can grow corn as easily as we can.
They have more of all of the same resources as we do - land, raw genetic material (crops), smart people, research facilities. But they apparently can't innovate. Why not? We should look to protect our innovative abilities, more than we protect their products.