Incite -- (v) 1: give an incentive; 2: provoke or stir up; "incite a riot"; 3: urge on; cause to act |
Monday, March 22, 2004
Written by: AnonymousI believe that most Buchanan-style rants about the precipitous decline of the United States as a manufacturing nation are false. The real numbers simply don't bear this out. But assume for a moment that such reports are correct, as pure free trade theory certainly permits them to be. Assume that the principle of comparative advantage means that over time, other nations will be the manufacturing nations. They will be the manufacturing nations because of their artificially cheap labor and their artificially lax environmental laws. Because we do not have artificially cheap labor and artificially lax environmental laws (instead, we have artificially expensive labor and artificially repressive environmental laws), assume that we will slowly become a largely non-manufacturing nation. Instead, we will be the consulting nation, the financial services nation, or whatever. I simply refuse to believe that this would be a good or stable state of affairs. I refuse to belive it would even be in our long-term economic interest alone, given the inherent instability. It seems to me that the case for global free trade rests on a whole lot of asusmptions about great power peace, international cooperation, and the like -- assumptions which may have held up between 1993 and 2000, but which have not held up historically. In an environment where such assumptions hold up, the value-free attitude that free trade requires ("it doesn't matter what we make as long as what we make maximizes our economic advantage, and it doesn't matter where manufactured goods come from as long as we have access to them") is harmless. But in the real world, if China gets a significantly bigger share of manufacturing and we get a significantly smaller one, and China (as it will) tries to leverage this state of affairs against us for political gains, we are worse off. Under free trade. And it doesn't require a bunch of countries ganging up to deprive us of steel all at once; all it requires is a clear enemy whom we're building up industrially to use the changed state of affairs against us.
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