What's in a word? Plenty, when that word is the adjective "free" in front of the noun "trade." The positive connotations of "free" have clouded the debate between free traders and those wanting to protect specific U.S. industries through regulation of foreign imports.
In "Myths of Free Trade," U.S. Rep. Sher rod Brown, the Lorain Demo crat, puts to work the con siderable knowledge he has gained through his efforts on the House subcommittee on commerce, trade and consumer protection to make his argument against untrammeled free trade.
He maintains that he is on the side of the angels, and that the mass public supports his views, no matter how often political and media elites label him an extremist know-nothing.
If leaders of our institutions would take the time to listen to people who work with their hands, they might learn something about the reasons for workers' anxiety, about the hopelessness with which many look to the future, and about social justice," Brown writes. "And they would see that unregulated free trade hurts more people than it helps - not only in the United States, but throughout the world."
Brown argues that an unregulated global economy does not automatically operate efficiently according to some magic formula of American capitalism. He goes further to say that the harm of free trade outweighs any benefits.
Those harmed include a Cleveland-area child "who eats raspberries grown in Guatemala by poorly paid farmers who use pesticides banned in the United States; the unskilled, minimum-wage worker in Los Angeles who loses her job to an unskilled, five-dollar-a-day worker in Yucatan; the machinist in New York who takes a wage cut because of his company's threat to move to China and the Chinese prison camp laborer; the tomato grower in Florida who has to sell his farm; and the peasant in Chiapas who must flee the native village where his family had made its home for dozens of generations."
Brown criticizes both political parties for what he sees as blindness to the facts and wonders about the gullibility of presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, about economics professors, about journalists and about his colleagues in Congress.
Wondering about so many allegedly misguided souls, Brown can sound self-righteous at times. That tone, however, is ameliorated by the quality of his evidence. He might not be correct in some cosmic sense, and he might not convert anybody already on the other side of the debate. But his examples are plausible and well-presented.
"Our political leaders support - and excuse - authoritarian leaders in China and Indonesia because our corporate leaders have identified these totalitarian societies as ideal places to invest and reap huge profits, almost always selling back into the U.S. market the goods that slave labor or underpaid workers produce," he writes. "Big business has ignored or put aside Chinese human rights abuses, security threats, theft of intellectual property and loss of American jobs."
Trade policy is a hot-button issue when jobs come or go because of it. It is difficult, though, to explain the ideas undergirding trade policy. Here, Brown delivers information about an issue usually under the media radar.
