FOLLIES: Robert Zoellick's Mad, Mad, Mad World

TradeAlert.org ^ | Wednesday, November 19, 2003 | Alan Tonelson

[Willie Green]

For education and discussion only. Not for commercial use.

This week´s hemisphere-wide trade talks are most unlikely to produce significant progress, and one reason just has to be the manifestly delirious ideas with which U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick is approaching the meeting.

Here´s how Zoellick expects the Miami talks to proceed – at least, based on his November 17 op-ed piece in The Wall Street Journal. Most of America´s hemispheric neighbors will begin the talks with trade barriers that are “much higher” than U.S. barriers. Some of them even enjoy “one-way trade preferences offered by Congress.”

These countries will then proceed to give up these advantages and agree to “level the playing field” with a free trade agreement, in the process creating “large gains for U.S. exporters in exchange for our smaller reductions.”

Here´s the GLOBALIZATION FOLLIES prediction:  Zoellick will propose this course of action.  It will be greeted with the Spanish (and Portuguese) equivalent of “Say wha?” And for the rest of the week, the crowds at South Beach will be increased by about 35 delegations-worth of sun-bathers.

(Source: “A Free Trade Boost For Our Hemisphere,” by Robert B. Zoellick, The Wall Street Journal, November 17, 2003)

Alan Tonelson is a Research Fellow at the U.S. Business & Industry Educational Foundation and the author of The Race to the Bottom: Why a Worldwide Worker Surplus and Uncontrolled Free Trade are Sinking American Living Standards (Westview Press).

[LibertyAndJusticeForAll]

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