And therein lies the rub. If Obama has sold out to Wall Street and the Republican establishment has sold out to Wall Street, only lunchpail Democrats (and Scott Walker?) are left to inquire after the interests of the middle-class. If we are shipping jobs abroad and importing illegal immigrants to fill jobs at home and neither Obama nor the Republican establishment is looking out for displaced American workers, that practice produces losers.
We see here the danger of accepting a general principle of failing to make room for the exceptions. Free trade implies a reasonably even playing field and if a free-trade society competes with the mercantilist society, dislocations in the former are inevitable because they are the whole point of the mercantilist policy. Now the fair trade country might believe that it is overall profiting by hollowing out a portion of its economy, for example the rust belt, to advance a different sector of its economy, for example artistic content spawned in Hollywood.
But the workers in the rust belt will simply have to pay a price for the prosperity in Bel Air. If Hollywood is better organized to pour campaign contributions into Washington than are the workers in the rust belt, K St. representing Wall Street which invested in Hollywood, will get its way.
If the nations on the other side of the agreement from America are China and India, the purblind rigid etiquette of political correctness forces our legislators to ignore the human capital being produced in engineering schools in these lands and especially to publicly ignore the human surplus being created in our universities in African studies, women's studies, etc. In other words, we cannot rely on our displaced workers being able to transition from a Rust Belt economy to a cyber economy and riots in our inner cities are periodically producing stark evidence of this reality. Community organizers cannot succeed unless there is social pathology and our policies are creating this pathology and that includes our trade policies as well add the war on poverty.
If China is advancing its students according to a brutal merit based regime and we are advancing ours in order to make everyone feel good, the progression is inevitable and the more we progress in this direction the more difficult it will be to inflict the pain necessary to correct course.
Trade on an international level involving nations in various stages of democracy and development is extremely complex and fraught with winners and losers. To entrust these matters to a communist and to a bought and paid for Republican establishment is the act of supreme folly. It is equally an act of supreme political folly for Republicans to miss this opportunity to tear the Roosevelt coalition asunder and render conservatism a majority political force for a generation.
