Tuesday, March 15, 2016

The Rise of American Protectionism

By Richard Epstein

The wedge issue of the 2016 primary campaign is the rising hostility to free trade—and, specifically, to the Trans-Pacific Partnership. On the Republican side, establishment candidates like Jeb Bush, Scott Walker, and Marco Rubio have failed or fallen behind, while Donald Trump maintains a commanding lead going into Florida and Ohio thanks, in large part, to his protectionist rhetoric. On the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton has been veering leftward to fight off a determined challenge from Vermont’s democratic socialist Bernie Sanders, another unapologetic protectionist.

There are of course major difference between the insidious Trump and buffoonish Sanders. The former, for example, favors low taxes and the latter confiscatory ones. Still, the real selling point of each boils down to one issue: In the indecorous language of the pollster, Pat Caddell, Americans feel “they have been screwed” by free trade. Caddell writes as if this virulent falsehood is an undisputed fact. What is undisputed, however, is that Adam Smith’s defense of free trade is in retreat as protectionism becomes the common thread across the both political parties. It is as though the economic unwisdom of the 1930 Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act is back. The question is why protectionism is having a political moment.

One answer is that things have not gone well in the United States. Standards of living have been static at best, and people feel economically insecure. In this environment, it is easy to blame the obvious culprits, like the tide of imports and the systematic movement of American jobs overseas to locations where the regulatory environment is more favorable and where the cost of labor is cheaper.

But putting the story in this fashion conceals the key benefit of free trade. Free trade offers an uncompromising indictment of, and a powerful corrective for, America’s unsound economic policies. Private investors have been voting with their feet in response to such policies. Simply put, the reason that local businesses outsource from the United States is the same reason why foreign businesses are reluctant to expand operations here. Our regulatory and labor environment is hostile to economic growth and there are no signs of that abating anytime soon. The United States has slipped to eleventh place on the Heritage Organization’s 2016 Index of Economic Freedom. And it is not just because other nations have moved up. It is also because the steady decline in freedom and productivity inside the United States has continued apace. Ironically, the strong likelihood that the next American president will expand protectionist practices will only make matters worse: firms, both foreign and domestic, are more reluctant to invest in the United States, and the risk of a trade war by other countries such as Mexico is a live possibility, especially if Trump imposes high tariffs on automobiles made there for the American market.

The great advantage of a free trade policy is that it both reduces these political risks and makes it impossible to conceal these glaring structural defects from the world. And once they are recognized at home, free trade gives the federal government and the individual states strong incentives to clean up their act so that they can once again be attractive to foreign investment. There is, moreover, only one way for that cleanup to proceed. The United States must reduce the drag that its regulations impose on all businesses that operate within its borders, which means rooting out the various forms of monopoly power, like unions, that can only survive if protected by state law.

This point explains why the American labor movement has historically opposed free trade. The essence of unionism is, and always will be, the acquisition of monopoly power. There is no way for a union to obtain that monopoly power in the marketplace. It can only secure it through legislation. The first step in that process was the exemption of unions from the antitrust laws under Section 6 of the Clayton Act of 1914. The second major step was the legitimation of collective bargaining under the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, which gave the union the exclusive bargaining rights against the firm once it was successful in a union election. These major statutory benefits strengthened private sector unions and imposed inefficiencies on unionized firms. This, in turn, opened the field for new firms, like the Japanese automobile companies, to organize outside the union envelope. In response, labor’s strategy went one step further. It pushed hard on trade and tariff barriers to keep out foreign imports, and exerted political influence to encourage local zoning boards to exclude new businesses that do not use union labor. Add to these issues the aggressive rise of minimum wage laws and other mandates like Obamacare and family leave statutes, and you construct a regulatory fortress that defeats the corrective forces of free trade and renders the nation less economically resilient and productive than before.

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4 comments:

  1. But today, with central bank interventions, minimum wages ect does free trade exist? I do not believe it does. Free trade should be a one page document. So in absence, why not have policy benefit americans and not everyone else?

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  2. TPP is garbage.
    5000+ pages of garbage.
    It is nice that both The Donald & The Bern are denouncing it.

    Why there is so much angst among Libertarians over this is beyond me.

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    Replies
    1. Hear! Hear! TPP and NAFTA are not free trade

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  3. Economic protectionists want a safe space from the free market and voluntary transactions

    ReplyDelete