by This strikes me as such a blatant piece of hypocrisy from some of the left: they have spent years (rightly) decrying the absurd cult of free trade and the various deleterious neoliberal trade deals passed off as free trade (on which, see Galbraith 2008: 188–189; Baker 2006: 2–3, 18–19), and yet now there is a Republican front runner also vehemently denouncing free trade deals Trump doesn’t get any credit for it. Very strange.[embedded content]If there is something to criticise here, it is Trump’s laughable lip service to free trade – even while he is deeply hostile to it. He’s a protectionist – just like the protectionism wing of the old US paleoconservative movement. This hostility to free trade is not necessarily a problem – it’s a step forward. (Although, in the interests of fairness, I should point out that NAFTA gets unfairly blamed to some degree for a trend that existed long before it, and NAFTA was only a small part of larger problem, as argued by James Galbraith 2008: 80–81, 191–192.)At the end of the clip below, Trump actually manages to get to what is in fact the sensible position: we should reject free trade, and strongly support smart (managed) trade.[embedded content]There is another serious issue of course: would you trust him to actually do something effective and create smart trade for America if he gets into office? I would remain skeptical.
Topics:
Lord Keynes considers the following as important: Trump’s protectionism
This could be interesting, too:
If there is something to criticise here, it is Trump’s laughable lip service to free trade – even while he is deeply hostile to it. He’s a protectionist – just like the protectionism wing of the old US paleoconservative movement. This hostility to free trade is not necessarily a problem – it’s a step forward. (Although, in the interests of fairness, I should point out that NAFTA gets unfairly blamed to some degree for a trend that existed long before it, and NAFTA was only a small part of larger problem, as argued by James Galbraith 2008: 80–81, 191–192.)
At the end of the clip below, Trump actually manages to get to what is in fact the sensible position: we should reject free trade, and strongly support smart (managed) trade.
There is another serious issue of course: would you trust him to actually do something effective and create smart trade for America if he gets into office? I would remain skeptical.
Even more: beyond the pure economic arguments against free trade, we have the tremendous social costs of shipping off manufacturing and outsourcing to the third world: those devastated communities turned into rust belts, with depressed, demoralised, de-skilled, long-term unemployed working-class men. What’s been done to formerly prosperous parts of the Western world is disgusting and outrageous.
A final point: the populist conservatives in America of the early 1990s like Ross Perot were actually prophetic.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Galbraith, J. K. 2008. The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too. Free Press, New York.
Baker, Dean. 2006. The Conservative Nanny State: How the Wealthy use the Government to Stay Rich and Get Richer. Center for Economic and Policy Research, Washington, DC.
http://deanbaker.net/images/stories/documents/cnswebbook.pdf