Don’t Trade on Me
In Forbes magazine, the official publication of the corporate wing of the GOP, columnist Steven Landsburg says: “I hold this truth to be self evident: It is just plain ugly to care more about total strangers in Detroit than about total strangers in Juarez… Even if Kerry-style (or Nader-style or Buchanan-style) protectionism could improve America’s well being at the expense of foreigners, it would still be wrong.” He goes on to equate protectionism with the politics of virulent racists like David Duke. This is absurd. Exporting America’s manufacturing base and technical capacity to Communist China has more in common with the culture of death (ours) than simple minded allusions to the magically operative virtues of free trade.
Libertarians hooked on nostalgia for the glory days when free enterprisers and anti-marxists marched against domestic socialist planners and global communists don’t see this threat to our country. In the glory days, they would have called Landsburg a traitor. Loyalty to one’s family, community, and nation used to be the essence of citizenship. He will sacrifice his fellow citizens on the altar of an ideology that will supposedly benefit the entire world. Echoes of communist rhetoric. Not all the beneficiaries of Landsburg’s compassion are foreign, to be sure. Some Americans, like Landsburg, will profit by managing their nation’s decline. Call them the free-trade aparatchiks.
Conservatives have forgotten that “free trade” and “free enterprise” are slogans that were coined in an intellectually substantive effort to limit the expansion of the federal government into the ambits of the states and their citizens. Conservatives agree on the continued relevance of these terms understood in this sense. Some have forgotten, however, that America’s rise to global prominence during the 19th and early 20th Centuries took place behind a wall of tariffs designed to shelter domestic industries from competition with the more advanced nations of Europe, a process that China now pursues to its great advantage in the 21at Century. It’s good policy to encourage domestic competition. But conservatives should be aghast at American workers having to compete with Chinese, Indians, et al. While the corporate wing of the GOP might champion such an ideology, voters are unlikely to go along … unless the free-trade aparatchiks find a way to have third world residents vote in American elections.
–James L. Murphy, Esq., Contributer