LOST at Sea

Cliff Kincaid of Accuracy in Media quotes our beloved Fred in his column today about the Law of the Sea Treaty, and the debate over ratification that went on recently at the Heritage Foundation:

In a release, [House Republican Whip Roy] Blunt declared, “More than 25 years ago, President Reagan refused to commit this country to a treaty that would’ve weakened our sovereignty at home, and rendered American companies less competitive abroad…We need all the energy we can get, whenever and wherever we can get it. Submitting ourselves to an unelected, unaccountable international ocean bureaucracy when it comes to distributing what American companies rightfully mine doesn’t strike me as a good thing to do―25 years ago, today, tomorrow, or in the future.”

At the Heritage event, Fred Smith of the Competitive Enterprise Institute used the question-and-answer period to make the point that UNCLOS “legitimizes a socialist entity as the best way to expand wealth for the world at a time when the World Bank and the IMF [International Monetary Fund] have totally rejected that.” He said ratification of the treaty would be foolish.

You can get the in depth background on the treaty from constitutional scholar Jeremy Rabkin’s paper The Law of the Sea Treaty: A Bad Deal for America, published last year.