Friday, October 05, 2007

FREE-TRADE FOLLIES

by John Podhoretz


"The U.S. economy has created more than 40 million new jobs since the end of the 1982 recession and the radical expansion of free trade - and more than doubled in size since 1983.

Part of that story, an important part, has to do with the opening of markets around the world and the lowering of trade barriers. Reagan championed multilateral free-trade agreements and was the key figure in the founding of the World Trade Organization in 1986.

His successor, George H.W. Bush, signed a proposed free-trade agreement between the United States, Canada and Mexico in 1992. The Clinton administration aggressively promoted the agreement in a public-relations campaign highlighted by a debate between Vice President Al Gore and protectionist Ross Perot.

NAFTA was passed not due to Democratic support - most Democrats on Capitol Hill opposed it - but because Republicans lined up behind Clinton in the most significant display of bipartisan cooperation in Washington over the past 25 years.

The current president has championed free trade (with one serious exception: his calamitous support for steel tariffs in 2002), but because of the wars and the rise of terror as an issue, trade hasn't occupied the central position in this presidency that it did in the three preceding White Houses.

As results of the Wall Street Journal poll suggest, American leaders must continually explain, defend and promote free trade. If they don't, the policy will be drowned by emotional arguments on the other side - with consequences we will only regret if there is a major policy shift toward protectionism over the next decade."

Free trade is working for us for one simple reason. China. With the dollar hitting new lows you'd imagine that prices for foreign goods would be skyrocketing, but that hasn't been the case or perhaps you haven't been in a K-Mart of Wal-Mart looking for throw-away, drag-around clothing as of late. Yesterday I was heading to Wally World to look for some sturdy trousers, stopped at Martha-Mart first and am glad I did. Heavy duty pants, and shirts in 3 and 4-X were dirt cheap, the lowest prices I'd seen in years. This has got to be good for the American family trying to clothe X-number of rug rats all at the same time, and is made possible because we have an open-ocean policy with a nation that simply keeps the sweat-shops burning the midnight oil to keep us happy.

Tourism is up, American products are selling like hotcakes due to good exchange rates, and Americans aren't feeling the pinch because the yellow-peril is cranking out whatever we need at half the cost of doing it ourselves. And I for one don't worry about all of our hard earned bucks being turned into military hardware by the Chinese because their technology remains generations behind ours, and as long as another Clinton doesn't open the super-dee-duper secret files vault in return for campaign and Presidential Library cash, things will stay that way.

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