For all the right-wing hysteria about President Obama being a socialist, the president is actually quite a centrist and even a corporatist. Depending on one’s values, this is a good or bad thing obviously. When it comes to the new climate change “cap-and-trade” bill passed by the House of Representatives, Obama has demonstrated that he is not the shrill who attacked free trade on the campaign trial.

Free trade is very important not only for America, but even more so for developing countries whom need access to Western markets. In that spirit, Obama is absolutely right about the tariff provision in the “cap-and-trade” bill. I was interning on Capital Hill when the bill was first brought up [it was filibustered in the Senate] and right then I knew that the tariff clause was bad news.

The bill’s writers inserted a provision that would mandate tariffs for countries that fail to equal America’s efforts on climate change. This is the wrong way to create incentives for countries. First, it is unfair to developing nations. America is a rich country and can afford many efforts to curb emissions. But developing are, alas, still developing and that means that they will continue to burn emissions. It is immoral to force a poorer nation to suspend development and spend money on curbing emissions [rather than build schools and roads] in accordance with the levels of the richest nation in the world. The developing world needs to be part of the solution to global warming, but using a punitive measure that will only make them poorer because they fail to pass the emissions test is the wrong approach.

Further, the tariff provision is susceptible to abuse. I can already see it: in some future date some American company will whine about competition from some developing manufacturer and then they will lobby some Congressman to place tariff on the developing country. The Congressman will manipulatively state that he is only pushing for tariffs not because of competition concerns, of course, but simply because the developing nation is need meeting emissions standards. The tariff provision will be misused by unions and business because such a mechanism has power and where there is power there will be corruption.

So Obama is absolutely right to voice concern about the tariff provision. As he told reporters, “At a time when the economy world-wide is still deep in recession, and we’ve seen a significant drop in global trade, I think we have to be very careful about sending any protectionist signals out there.”

So much for being a socialist, Obama is a thoughtful centrist.