Free Trade - What’s Not to Like?
Free trade is like cutting taxes. Great idea, tough execution - at least if you want to achieve some fairness and equity.
Of course, I’m in favor of free trade. After all, I was a business reporter for CNN in New York and London, I’m an educated, worldly guy, I understand the inevitability of globalization, and I, like the editorial writers of the New York Times, consider myself a member of that forward-looking, big and largely well-fed elite group that doesn’t question the concept of free trade.
However, based on ample evidence, I do challenge the assumption that free trade has worked as well as promised and I do wonder whether or not a greater effort should be made to establish minimum labor and environmental standards. Does that make me a protectionist? I emphatically don’t think so, but the Times‘ editorial board, based on yesterday’s editorial, would disagree. The Times airily dismissed concerns raised by most of the Democratic candidates as “protectionist.” The editorial’s lazy lumping together of all the candidates’ trade positions as anti-free trade “pandering” is as facile as the conservatives’ ‘with us or against us’ approach to most issues.
I do agree with the Times assertion that defending our exorbitant farm subsidies is hypocritical and destructive of the interests of this country and of poor farmers worldwide. But I think free trade is a topic worthy of a discussion that goes beyond ‘are you for it or against it?’
The Times surely knows better, but I think that every once in a while, it likes to show the world that it’s not reflexively “liberal.” Those of us who fall somewhere on the left side of the political spectrum already know that.