I watched a news report a couple of years ago that shined a harsh light on China’s cyber espionage activities. It pointed out that China was so fastidious about copying the intellectual property it had stolen from networking giant Cisco Systems that the instruction manuals it created were exact replicas right down to the typographical errors Cisco had made.

The content stolen from Cisco presumably gave rise, in part, to Huawei, the giant Chinese telecommunications company that is selling its wares to countries around the world at price points that undercut Cisco.

One might argue that the Chinese forcibly created transparency.

We know transparency well. Transparency is a good thing. Any investor will say so. Transparency is one of the essential elements of a free society and a free economic market.

Another mechanism that fostered the free exchange of ideas and enormously aided the United States' climb into economic superstardom is technology transfer. Te