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Sean Brady:  Anti-Trump Economics Professor Needs Schooling on Chinese Theft of American Intellectual Property

July 28, 2019

A New York City high-finance banker says President Donald Trump might actually be understating the extent of theft of U.S. companies’ intellectual property by China, despite what an economics professor claimed in a recent column.

Sean Brady, formerly of Credit Suisse First Boston, argues that George Mason University economics professor Donald Boudreaux mischaracterized the president’s claims about intellectual property loss to China in a recent article in TribLive.com, the web site of The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.

The economics professor noted in a column July 18 that China’s Communist government often requires non-Chinese companies doing business in China to share their intellectual property with Chinese companies. He called the practice “unfortunate” and “an in-kind tax” that hurts the Chinese people, but said it hardly amounts to theft. Actual theft of intellectual property, he said, is “overblown,” and doesn’t justify Trump’s tariffs on Chinese products.

But Brady counters in an article published Saturday, July 27 that Trump has never argued that forced sharing of intellectual property is theft, but instead has focused on less debatable examples of theft such as counterfeit products, pirated software, and stealing of trade secrets through online hacking.

The estimates Trump consistently uses for outright theft are actually on the conservative side, Brady says.

“Between a professor of economics at a prestigious university and President Trump, who should you trust to choose his words carefully, check his sources and quote reliable figures? The answer might surprise you,” Brady writes at TribLive.com.