Posted by
Reeson on Sunday, January 14, 2007 1:03:44 PM
There was a great rundown on free trade on
RealClearPolitics. Excerpts are below. Bottom line is this: barriers to free trade with other nations ultimately hurts American consumers. We end up paying more for our goods and the range of items available to us as consumers shrinks. If country A can make a give product more cheaply than we can, why would we force Americans to buy from domestic producers at a higher price?
By Steve Chapman
It's an elementary axiom of economics that if Person A sells something to Person B, it's good for each of them. Otherwise, why would they bother? It should follow that if Country A sells something to Country B, both again benefit. But Democrats have turned against that basic insight. They think if Americans buy something from abroad, it makes us worse off, and they want to protect us from such folly.
Demanding the imposition of American-style labor and environmental standards on poor nations is merely a ruse for rejecting trade liberalization altogether. To say developing countries shouldn't be allowed to take advantage of their workers' willingness to accept low pay or hard conditions is like saying we shouldn't be allowed to make use of our high-tech factories or our skilled labor force.
It's the equivalent of telling them they shouldn't produce anything until they've advanced to our standards -- which they can't do unless they start from where they are and work their way up. Sort of like we and every other rich country did. Likewise with environmental rules. Poor people can't afford to put a priority on clean air and water until they stop being poor, a process for which trade is indispensable.
Blaming international trade for wage stagnation in this country is like blaming lettuce consumption for rising obesity. Trade is about selling American goods abroad as well as buying imports here. Exports have been rising, and studies indicate that the jobs created by exports pay better than the ones destroyed by imports.
Brown and others cling to the superstition that we can get rich by sealing ourselves off from the world and paying each other high prices for products made entirely in the U.S. of A. If they manage to erect new barriers to trade, we'll learn once again that protectionism is nothing but fool's gold.