"Congress has changed American tax laws for the...."

"Congress has changed American tax laws for the sole reason that the World Trade Organization decided that our rules unfairly impacted the European Union.  I recall a congressional session in which, with hundreds of tax bills languishing in the House Ways and Means Committee, the one bill drafted strictly to satisfy the WTO was brought to the floor and passed with great urgency.

In one case, the WTO sided with the Europeans against American tax law, which offered tax breaks to American companies doing business overseas.  According to the European Union, the Foreign Sales Corporation program, established under President Reagan in 1984, is now an "illegal subsidy," a view that a WTO appellate panel shared  The WTO's Orwellian ruling declared that allowing a company to keep more of its own money through lower taxes was a "subsidy."  As a matter of fact, the program was moreover really just compensating (and only partially at that) for unfair U.S. taxes on corporations for profits earned overseas, a disability that our foreign competitors do not have to confront from their own governments. 

What this means, in plain English, was that high-tax Europe, upset at lower-tax America, decided that the way to level the playing field was to force America to raise her taxes.  Pascal Lamy, the trade czar of the European Union, actually visited with influential members of Congress in order to determine whether a new tax bill was being crafted to his satisfaction.   If Mr. Lamy, a member of the French Socialist Party, had been unsatisfied with the changes made to our tax code, he threatened to unleash a European trade war against U.S. imports.  In effect he was a foreign bureaucrat acting as a shadow legislator by intervening in our lawmaking process.  And to no one's surprise, Congress raced to comply with the WTO ruling that American tax rules must be changed in order to bring them in to harmony with "international law." -Pages 97 & 98 of The Revolution, A Manifesto

"...government intervention into the economy cannot be...."

"...government intervention into the economy cannot be assumed to be good and welcome and just. 

But that is how it is portrayed in too many of our American history classrooms.  It is not unusual for American students to find their textbooks telling them that injustice was everywhere before the federal government, motivated by nothing but a deep commitment to the public good, intervened to save them from the wickedness of the free market.  Alleged "monopolies" dictated prices to hapless consumers.  Laborers were forced to accept every-lower wages.  And thanks to their superior economic position, giant corporations effortlessly parried the attempts of anyone foolish enough to try and compete with them.

Every single aspect of this story is false, though of course this version of our history continues to be peddled and believed.  I don't blame people for believing it - it's the only rendition of events they're told of, unless by some fluke they have learned where to look for the truth.  But there is an agenda behind this silly comic-book version of history: to make people terrified of the "unfettered" free market, and to condition them to accept the ever-growing burdens that the political class imposes on the private sector as an unchangeable aspect of life that exists for their own good." -Pages 92 & 93 of The Revolution, A Manifesto