Suicide by Free Trade

The American Conservative ^ | April 12, 2004 | Pat Buchanan

[Willie Green]

For education and discussion only. Not for commercial use.

They are calling it “the jobs issue.” For 43 straight months, manufacturing jobs have disappeared. One in six has vanished since Bush took his oath. Now Americans are alarmed over reports of the outsourcing of white-collar jobs. It is an issue on which the presidential election could turn.

And what has been the response of the candidates? Kerry is denouncing executives who move plants overseas as “Benedict Arnold CEOs,” and Bush is echoing his father´s rants against “isolationism and protectionism.”

“Some politicians in Washington want to build a wall around the country and to isolate America from the rest of the world,” said Bush in Ohio. “The old policy of economic isolationism is a recipe for economic disaster. America has moved beyond that tired defeatist mindset ...”

Both candidates and both parties seem clueless about what is going on and what to do about it. For Bush Republicans and Kerry Democrats both backed NAFTA, GATT, the WTO, and MFN for China.

There is this difference, however. Republicans are principled free traders, while the Democratic Party, as a wag put it a while ago, is simply a gathering of warring tribes that have come together in the anticipation of common plunder.

Democrats worship power. They will do what they must to get it. Thus they have begun to drop the free-trade mantra and play to the populism of the people. And they have tapped into the public mood. USA Today cites a University of Maryland poll that reveals that, “among Americans making more than $100,000 a year, support for actively promoting free trade collapsed from 57 percent to less than half that, 28 percent.” This is the first time this has happened.

If President Bush is going to spend eight months as a traveling salesman for free trade and a crusader against “protectionism,” as his father did, he is inviting the same result his father got.

An opportunist is to be preferred to an ideologue who will not entertain the idea he may be wrong and that the philosophy in which he was schooled and devoutly believes may be irrelevant to the new era. Like companies that continue to make products no one wants to buy anymore, parties that persist in policies that are visibly failing—like LBJ in Vietnam—end up being abandoned.

If the GOP persists in this free-trade fanaticism, it is courting suicide. For the policy is not working in the eyes of the people. And if Republicans insist the returns from global free trade—a disintegrating dollar and a merchandise trade deficit of $550 billion a year and rising—are good for America, folks are going to conclude that Republicans are too out of it to govern.

Given that the GOP today controls both Houses of Congress and the White House, this may sound alarmist. Yet GOP dominance today does not approach what it was in the 1920s under Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover, before the wipeout.

If the GOP does not offer ideas to halt the de-industrialization of America and the hemorrhaging of blue- and white-collar jobs, it is going to wind up on a landfill.

The problem with the columnists and think-tank scribblers who make up the intelligentsia of the GOP is not that they believe in free markets but that they worship them. They believe that if NAFTA, GATT, the WTO, and MFN for China mean production goes overseas, the market is telling us where production ought to be. And the voice of the market is to be obeyed, because that is the voice of their god.

When Reagan, a devout free trader, saw the U.S. auto industry sinking, he did not let ideology interfere with a rescue. He imposed quotas on imported Japanese cars and saved Detroit, though he was denounced for apostasy and heresy.

Free-trade Republicans are like militant Christian Scientists who prefer to let patients die rather than call in a doctor—which is fine, as long as you´re not the patient.

Americans believe that the interests of U.S. workers and their families come ahead of what may be good or best for the Global Economy. For years they have seen industrial jobs disappear. Now white-collar jobs are being outsourced. They want to know what Bush and the Republicans are going to do about it.

If the president´s answer is to echo his father and denounce opponents as “isolationists and protectionists,” he risks ending up like his father, a one-term president.

Indeed, if the issue is jobs, Republicans ought to be thrown out. For not only are they not creating them, they have no idea how to stop exporting them. In their hearts, some of them think it a good thing. They are like the doctors of old who sincerely believed bleeding the patient was the way to get rid of the disease because that is what their textbooks and wise men told them.

[Willie Green]

ping

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[Joe Bonforte]

Yes, that free trade stuff is so awful. Why, just last week, a company left Nashville - for South Carolina.

We ought to do something about it. After all, when we buy stuff from South Carolina, we're just subsidizing their ability to take jobs away from us.

In fact, I think we Nashvillians should stop buying stuff from Memphis, too. If we need it, we should be forced to make it right here. After all, that will save our jobs, rather than give them to the Memphis residents.

Now that I think about it, when I buy those groceries and appliances, it's just taking away jobs in my family. My sons could be growing that food, and maybe even manufacturing appliances. Yeah, that's the ticket. We shouldn't be trading with anyone at all. It just takes away jobs.

[TheDon]

How embarrassing for Pat...

[holyscroller]

My husband's Boeing Job just went to China, never to return. What brilliant free trade solution do you have for us, since Seattle is in a world of hurt since the dot com and Boeing jobs are now gone?

[MNJohnnie]

YAWN, 308,000 new jobs in March and STILL the same old tired ranting about Free Trade. Doesn't the Economic Isolationists Right ever get tired of screaming the same old failed rants over and over and over?

Same question still waiting to be answered. Why should the American Consumer be made an economic serf to uncompetitive American Businesses, overburdesom governments and out of control Labor Unions? THAT is what all this fearmogering and hysteria about Free Trade and jobs is REALLY all about. Since they cannot compete various Labor Union and failed American Business Groups want the US Government to step in and FORCE you, the American consumer, to buy their inferior goods and services. They would rather you be subjected to their political well being then allow you the liberty of getting the BEST goods at the BEST price. The Economic Isolationists have been screaming the same siren song since the 1920s yet none of their doom and gloom predictions ever come true? WHY? Because they represent the last gasps of the economically doomed. The death rattles of the modern day equivalents of the Ice Delivery man and the Buggy Whip manufacturer. Business faces the same challenges that all living things do, Evolve or die.

[MNJohnnie]

If you husband has been outsources by Free Trade, why isn't he using the two years of retraining and unempoyment benefits offered by the Department of Labor to retrain for a new job?

[BrucefromMtVernon]

Down with Adam Smith! "Free Trade" is a farce; it has nothing to do with Freedom! So-called free trade is much in keeping with the teachings of Karl Marx, a known champion of free trade. "Free trade" is a concept developed by Dutch East India Company thinkers(?) such as Adam Smith, et. al. Both Bush (a free trade Republican) and Kerry (a free trade Democrat) are economic morons. Both candidates support NAFTA, FTAA, and the usual globalist insanity which masquerades as an "economy".

[narses]

Gov. Locke and the Green Party types that run our state chased Boeing away. Thank them.

[Joe Bonforte]

My husband's Boeing Job just went to China, never to return. What brilliant free trade solution do you have for us...?

For you individually? Any solution for you may indeed be tough. There are certainly losers in the creative destruction fueled by free trade.

But the alternative is far worse. Shutting down free trade means fewer jobs created in new industries, higher prices for the goods we buy, lower growth so that we all suffer from stagnant economies...

Are you asking for the whole country to pay the price for your misfortune? That's not an attitude I associate with Americans. That sounds very European, and in fact, they have all the symptoms I just described above. Yeah, their existing jobs are protected all right. At a cost of an economy that is danger of meltdown.

Same story with Japan. They had all kinds of rules protecting domestic industries, and ran a huge trade surplus selling to America, et. al., through the 1970s and 1980s. They were the poster child for "managed trade". After three decades of such protectionism, their economy collapsed and still hasn't recovered.

So you have do better than anecdotes or sob stories to attack free trade. The absolute best predictor of the economic health of a society is how open its trading system is with the rest of the world.

I understand that this is hard to take when you're the one losing a job. But there's nothing that guarantees anyone a job doing a certain task at a certain rate of pay, and there never has been in a free country. If you have the blood of the American spirit in you, you face the adversity and overcome it with your own individual solution, instead of whining about it.

[genghis]

free trade makes us all rich. LLok at the countries that have little trade(n.k. and cuba) poor. Look at HongKong a lot of trade and rich.
Africa poor, I realize it is a troubling devlopment, but it is necessary to generate wealth.
Think if there were no trade what so ever, we would be living in caves.

[Joe Bonforte]

Down with Adam Smith! "Free Trade" is a farce; it has nothing to do with Freedom!

Right! How dare someone equate buying what I want from whomever I want to buy it to "freedom". Everyone knows what freedom is - the right to go to the polls and vote for one of two clowns to run our lives for the next four years.

[holyscroller]

"If you husband has been outsources by Free Trade, why isn't he using the two years of retraining and unempoyment benefits offered by the Department of Labor to retrain for a new job?"

I know it was foolish on his part, but he took it very personally. He loved Boeing, and was far more loyal to them than they were to him and his fellow loyal co-workers. Unfortunately the stress took its toll, and he had two strokes. He is now incapable of being retrained for anything. Of course we shouldn't worry about that. The main thing is the global economy and the fact that it's more important that Boeing make a profit and the execs get their obscene salaries thanks to the cheap Chinese labor. Right?

[genefromjersey]

Has anyone noticed that the people who support the export of American jobs - ( Let's be honest with ourselves and stop calling it "Free Trade" !) - are those who benefit financially from it,and those whom they've persuaded it is a "good thing" ??

The corporations that export jobs,and create massive pollution want you to believe something wonderful is happening when we exchange skilled machinists' positions for janiorial and fast-food "opportunities"; and they bestow lavish rewards on any of the "conservative foundations" corrupt enough to slide their message-like a spoiled onion- into a "sandwich" of genuinely conservative and/or patriotic thought.

I've been conservative longer than most of you have been alive,and have learned to despise these "hitchhikers" .

[1rudeboy]

Down with Adam Smith! "Free Trade" is a farce; it has nothing to do with Freedom! So-called free trade is much in keeping with the teachings of Karl Marx, a known champion of free trade.

It's tough to imagine that you could type that without bursting out in laughter.

[Rate_Determining_Step]

dot.com jobs never counted. They were make-work BS. Oceans of "companies" never made a dime and never had a product to sell. The only thing I'm bitter about is that they stole so much press ink during their 5 year run from real companies that had products and profits (how boring, I know). I'm so glad most of them are dead.

Acting cool and drawing a paycheck from some idiot burning through venture capital does not constitute a job. Never did and never will. For the two years it did, you can just chalk it up to collective insanity.

If you're looking for a ready-made individual "solution" as you put it for your Boeing job, you're asking the wrong institution. Free trade is just that. It's not free job.

Thankfully, long gone are the days when you had your father's job who had his father's job, etc. For anybody to expect that to be the case is just living in a dreamland.

My words may sound harsh, but they're just a reflection of reality. Learn, adapt and lookout for #1. Don't suspend your quest to become marketable no matter how gainfully employed you may be.

If you want to know the real reason jobs are now dynamic, just look at your neighbors. We all demand the most value at the cheapest price. How many people yearn for the days when no one worked on their own plumbing, but called a (union) plumber? Remember union auto mechanics?

As a DIY car nut, I have scads of bookmarked web links of companies (small businesses) that I work with that absolutely would not exist if the old labor structure was in place. They simply wouldn't survive in that choked environment.

So, this long rant is in favor of voluntary association (aka Free Trade). However, freedom has a down-side: You are free to fail. Work hard and smart and chances are you will not.

Best of luck,