The uproar about rescinding the steel tariffs is a bit misguided:

Reporting for duty yesterday at International Steel Group Inc. in Coatesville, Dave McLimans, a 16-year plant worker and union activist, was unequivocal about President Bush's decision to lift tariffs on foreign steel.

"It's a damned disgrace," McLimans, 57, said. "The tariffs have helped us a lot."

Like steelworkers around the country, those at the Coatesville plant - which employs about 550 union workers - said they feared losing income and jobs as a result of Bush's lifting the 20-month-old tariffs ahead of schedule.

The President's move was widely viewed as calculated to avoid a trade war with steel-producing nations and to win support from regions thick with automakers, appliance builders, and other steel-using industries.

No Dave, the disgrace is that we can't produce steel in this country at a competitive price with other nations. The unions are the primary cause of this. If you and your fellow union members really gave a damn, you'd reduce demands from the companies that employ you and seek to streamline operations. We are a capitalist country with free markets and free trade, If something can be aquired cheaper from a foreign source, it will be. If steel is more expensive to procure because of the tariffs, the costs associated with making products with that steel become more expensive. That means lower sales of those products and less employment for workers in those industries. More jobs will be saved by dropping the tariffs than keeping them in place and a trade war with the EU is not in the interest of anyone.

The move was forced upon us by international trade pacts that we signed onto. How can the President be a bad guy for not ratifying Kyoto and also be be wrong for abiding by a treaty that we have signed:

The White House made the announcement in the face of a Dec. 15 deadline by the World Trade Organization. The WTO had ruled that Bush's tariffs violated international trade law. The President faced the specter of $2.2 billion in retaliatory tariffs from the European Union on popular U.S. export goods ranging from oranges from Florida to Harley-Davidson motorcycles built in York, Pa., and in other cities.

We wouldn't want to be called unilateral and go against the progressive EU folks now would we?