Trade

Trade, especially global trade deals, have been in the news lately, and as is usual in the age of Twitter, the arguments, pro and con, are greatly oversimplified. Usually it's conservatives who make the black-white, good-bad arguments because evidently their brains can't deal with any amount of nuance, context, or complexity.  But on the issue of trade, it's the left that's making the  argument that trade agreements like NAFTA and the proposed TPPA result in reduced wages and lost jobs for American workers.  Donald Trump also says he believes this, but who knows what he truly believes, if anything. His head is like a gumball machine, with unrelated ideas bouncing around that occasionally pop out in random fashion during his stream of unconsciousness speeches. The truth about how trade affects labor is complicated.

Throughout history, trade among nations has been the most effective way to increase national wealth and raise personal income.  And it remains so today. Ideally, a poor nation sells it's natural resources and low tech goods and services to a rich nation, thereby generating income for its citizens, who then can afford to buy the rich country's high tech, value-added goods and services. Then, after a few decades of this arrangement, the poor nation's work force and infrastructure have improved to the point that it begins manufacturing value-added goods and services and selling them to poor nations, and since workers' wages have increased along with the level of education and training, the newly rich nation ceases to manufacture cheap goods and to sell it's natural resources to rich countries, instead opting to buy both from poor nations who use the revenue to buy expensive imports from rich nations and invest in educating their labor force and improving their infrastructure and on and on it goes.

Since the beginning of civilization, this cycle has played itself out, resulting in a world that is wealthier and more advanced than it otherwise would have been. I'm old enough to remember when every little cheap knick-knack and Cracker Jack prize had a tag that said Made in Japan. This was in the fifties and early sixties, when Japan's economy was still recovering from WWII.  Just a few decades later, cheap trinkets were no longer being made in Japan; instead their exports were cars, computers, and consumer electronics.  China took over from Japan as the manufacturer of cheap goods, but now as China advances, that role is shifting to Bangladesh, and in twenty years it will be some other emerging country.

But this ancient cycle doesn't always work as it should and, that's because human greed often intervenes to distort what should be a natural and reliable process. Greed shows up as rich countries acting as colonial powers exploiting the cheap labor and natural resources of poor countries so that there is no money for them to invest in worker education and infrastructure, so no economic advancement takes place.

In the richest and most advanced country, the distortion is taking another form.  Conservatives are refusing to allow America's wealth to be invested in education and infrastructure, choosing instead to keep it in the hands of a small percentage of the population. The result of this distortion of the natural economic cycle is that low-paying, low-skill jobs have been lost, but are not being replaced with high-wage, high-skill jobs making value-added goods, so the middle class is disappearing, leaving only the rich and the poor.

Labor organizations and liberals are not helping by rejecting trade treaties and lobbying for protectionism.  It makes no economic sense to try to keep low-wage jobs in this country; the goods produced will never be competitive on the global market, and the wages paid to Americans will not allow for anything beyond a subsistence level existence.

American workers should not make textiles; they should make the machines that make textiles, whle buying towels from Bangladesh.  We should make expensive, high-tech cars, and buy economy cars from Mexico. In the future, we should make magnetic transporters and buy smart phones from Argentina. This is the way the world advances.  But, because conservatives control so many corporations and have taken over so much of government, we are stuck in a world of low taxes and low wages, and are missing out on the world of high taxes and high wages. The difference is a world apart.

There are no morals more relative than conservative morals, and no hypocrisy quite like conservative hypocrisy.