Posted on 04/08/2016 5:51:08 AM PDT by Kaslin
For years, supporters of free trade have been trying to reach a bipartisan consensus on the issue. They've finally succeeded. Free trade is now unpopular in both parties.
Perhaps because I am a conservative, I can at least understand where most conservatives are coming from in their opposition to free trade. Overt displays of nationalism and patriotism (which are not the same thing, by the way) are not merely tolerated on the right, they're often celebrated. Conservative intellectuals openly extol American exceptionalism while liberal intellectuals tend to deride the notion. Virtually no Republican politician agonizes over wearing a U.S. flag pin.
Meanwhile, the left adores cosmopolitanism, the United Nations and what some people call "transnational progressivism," or "one-worldism." Conservatives tend to scoff at all of the above, preferring national sovereignty and the American Way.
Of course, this stuff can go too far. That "freedom fries" business was silly.
Beyond a sincere misunderstanding about how trade works, the emotional case against free trade on the right boils down to "America first."
That phrase -- a favorite of pointedly nationalistic Donald Trump -- has complicated historical connotations, but let's leave all that aside. According to the protectionists, free trade is bad for American workers and some American businesses. America should come first. So we should do whatever is necessary to prevent bad things from happening to Americans. If doing so is bad for non-Americans, that's not our problem.
I think the math on all this is wrong. Free trade is good for most American workers and all American consumers, not just the "one percent." Indeed, it is largely thanks to trade that the average American worker is in the top 1 percent of earners in the world.
The protectionists are also wrong philosophically. Countries don't trade with others countries; businesses and consumers transact with other businesses and consumers. Protectionism is corporate welfare by other means.
But the point is, I get where conservatives are coming from.
I'm more perplexed about where liberals -- and in Bernie Sanders' case, socialists -- are coming from. Last I checked, liberals considered themselves "citizens of the world." Barack Obama's famous campaign speech in Berlin (which was better in the original Esperanto) was all about the need to tear down the walls between nations. For the last decade, liberals in the Democratic Party and the media have invested enormous amounts of time and energy arguing that American citizenship is almost a technicality. The very term "illegal immigrant" is forbidden by most newspaper style guides.
Sanders says that he believes in "fair trade." What he means is that we can't be expected to do business with countries that pay their workers a lot less than we pay our workers. He suggested to the New York Daily News this week that we should have free trade only with countries that have the same wages and environmental policies as us, which is another way of saying we shouldn't trade with poor countries.
In practical terms, Sanders wants to keep billions of (non-white) people poor -- very poor. If America were a flea market, his policy would be akin to saying, "Poor people of color cannot sell their wares here, even if customers want to buy them."
International trade, led by the United States, has resulted in the largest, fastest decrease in extreme poverty in human history. Roughly 700 million Chinese people alone have escaped extreme poverty since 1980, and most of that is attributable to China's decision to embrace the market economy and international trade. Want to keep Africa as poor as possible? Throw up as many trade barriers as you can
SHOCKER....He missed it, again.
Under the uniparty, the US has become a fascist/corporatist state beholden only to the whims of big business.
American workers finally figured out that free trade allowed businesses to move their operations out of the country to get lower wage workers and lower taxes and left American workers without jobs and then those very same businesses exported their product back into the US sans tariffs to the American consumer.
Very well put.
“Arguments Against Free Trade Are Deeply Flawed
...because it’s not really free trade.”
Exactly, the US imposes tariffs on over 12,000 items. How many more do we need?
On trade and increasing legal immigration too much, Cruz appears as one of them.
“Free trade” people want a 2-tiered society... a handful of elites like George Soros and Mark Zuckerberg and a servant class of everyone else can just “service” the elites.
Trump & Sanders are doing well because more and more Americans realize this every day. Europe realized it a century ago, and while their answer is deeply flawed (and we are trying to duplicate it) people there expect a lot more from their elected officials. Not that they get it, but at least they’ll burn down buildings intended to house “refugees” and REALLY build walls.
The USA collects less than 1% on imported goods.
And the poor Mexicans are flooding the U.S.
Sure Jonah.
This is also the guy who thought arguments against gay marriage were “deeply flawed,” so we can see how jacked up his thinking seems to be.
It’s time for America to just say NO to the Free Traitors.
Just as is there is no such thing as a free lunch there is no such thing as free trade. Somebody must pay. Guess who?
Indeed, it is largely thanks to trade that the average American worker is in the top 1 percent of earners in the world.
The problem is that there are more than 90 million able minded/bodied Americans that just aren't even looking for jobs anymore.
EXACTLY...
Yeah....”slavery creates free trade” The irony is lost on so many.
“The USA collects less than 1% on imported goods.”
Which says very little about the actual tariff rates. The World Bank says the weighted mean applied tariff for the US is about 1.5% and that is a function of the rate and the amount imported. IOW, items with very high rates will have low imported amounts contributing little to the weighted mean average.
BTW, tariff rates, as recently as 2010, were as high as 350% tobacco; 164% on peanuts; 100% on jam, chocolate and ham; and 48% on sneakers. There are tariff based quotas on other items such as sugar. Some estimates in 2011 indicated that the tariffs on sneakers indicated that this tariff increased the cost of a pair of sneakers by 40% costing consumers over $2B per year.
I happen to think that Von Mises and Milton Friedman are the proper guides for real conservatives. Instead we get Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton and Trump giving us their uninformed, populist, politically corrupt guidance.
Here is von Mises on tariffs in a nutshell:
""All that a tariff can achieve is to divert production from those locations in which the output per unit of input is higher to locations in which it is lower. It does not increase production; it curtails it."
- Ludwig von Mises
(Human Action, p. 737; p. 744)".
If you don't know who von Mises is then read the following comment he made about tariffs. He is correct. Hillary, Bernie and Donald are wrong.
How are you going to do that?
Countries don't trade with each other. People trade with other people. At some point, are you going to announce to the American people, that, after today, they may not buy anything from China?
Also, a so-called trade deficit does not "indebt" anyone to anyone. The trade deficit does not create debt. Period.
If you buy a Chinese TV, you pay for it. You have not created a debt with the Chinese. Now, it may well be that you put that TV purchase on a credit card, but in that case your debt is with an American bank.
That imbalances in trade create debt is one of the biggest economic fallacies in existence.
Fixed it.
ping
You should have read past the first few llines. Whether you like it or not you will find very little disagreement between Bernie, Hillary and Donald when it comes to Trade Policy.
You can study the subject a bit or you can, like Donald Trump, fly by the seat of your pants.
Your loss, not mine.
We don’t have a free trade agreement with Malaysia.
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