Boehner

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  Where should the Tea Party Stand on Free Trade?

  08 Dec 2010 by Jessica Hughes / 8 Comments

  In September, an NBC/WSJ poll showed a majority of union workers (65%) believe free trade agreements have hurt the U.S.  Not surprising since it’s hard to justify $75 an hour in pay and benefits to build a car in the U.S. when we can get the same car built overseas for half that.  What is surprising is that a movement named after a free trade uprising seems to be heavily in agreement with the unions.

  61% of those in the Tea Party said they too believed free trade is harmful to the U.S.  Now the wording of the poll is not clear, so it is uncertain whether these respondents actually oppose free trade of just free trade agreements like NAFTA.  It is important that we understand the difference to avoid our passions and prejudices being harnessed by smooth-talking politicos in order to further their own big government-big business collaboration against the people.

  First we must examine the idea of protectionism which is in part accomplished by levying tariffs against imports not for the purpose of raising revenue, but specifically to discourage the importation or raise the cost of the final product so high as to render it uncompetitive in relation to similar goods produced ‘at home.’  So a vote for protectionism is essentially a vote to pay more for the same product for no other reason than to continue employing someone, somewhere, supposedly.  This is categorically the same as the GM bailout.  Your money is transferred (in the form of the increase in price) from you to the domestic company asking for protection from foreign competition.  While the Tea Party vehemently opposed the GM Bailout, it seems they are in some large majority willing to support the more insidious bailout of protectionism.    The only explanation for this logical inconsistency is that a majority of us do not see protectionism for what it actually is: a government-enforced transfer of wealth from domestic consumers to favored industries.

  Anyone who has seen The Informant, starring Matt Damon as a pathological liar providing inside information on Archer Daniels Midland’s collusion with other agri-businesses to fix prices, knows the ridiculous lengths to which our government will go to prosecute and imprison those businessmen suspected of artificially raising their prices.  How schizophrenic is it to have this same exact government passing laws expressly intended to artificially raise the prices of the products of favored industries?  This is what protectionist tariffs are.  Which raises the question, “Can you support a free market and protectionism?”  I say you cannot.

  Protectionism also asks us to defy the realm of logic and believe that economic laws stop functioning at the arbitrary boundary line that separates your country from another.  If one claims it makes America poorer to ‘outsource’ jobs to foreign countries, then to be logically consistent one would have to agree that it makes the East Coast poorer to outsource movie-making to Hollywood.  It makes New York poorer to outsource beef production to Texas.  It makes Dallas poorer to outsource car manufacturing to Detroit.  It makes my family poorer to outsource clothing production to JC Penney.  In a perfectly protectionist world there would be no division of labor.  There would be no societal bonds.  Each man or woman would produce all of their own food, clothing, shelter, and entertainment.  We would be reduced to a hunter-gatherer culture and most of us would go naked and starving.  Have fun manufacturing your own dvd player not to mention casting, starring in, filming, and producing your own movie to watch on it.

  When reduced to such absurdity it is obvious that division of labor is beneficial.  It lowers real costs and raises real wealth by allowing certain groups to specialize in what they can do most efficiently with the available resources.  The question is, why do we believe somehow that this trend ends at the border?  The argument is that cheap labor overseas destroys American jobs at home which may very well be true, but the bottom line is the Americans doing those jobs are not capable of or willing to do them as efficiently as the overseas labor*.

  Advancements in trade and technology have always prompted the destruction of jobs for some and the creation of new jobs in new areas.  Imagine the number of farm hands who have been displaced by the mechanization of farm equipment.  Yet this advance has enabled billions to be fed worldwide.  Should we abolish tractors in order to provide employment?  What about assembly lines with their increased capacity?  Were we to abolish them we would need to employ hundreds of thousands more workers to keep up with the demand for products which would take longer to produce.  Mechanization and the assembly line have done more to kill jobs than any freedom of trade.  If we don’t see the sense in outlawing machines then we cannot justify protectionist tariffs.

  My hope is that the Tea Party really just has a problem with Free Trade Agreements though I have seen little evidence to justify this optimism.  A real free trade agreement, in the words of Hans Hoppe, requires just two sentences:  (1) I can buy whatever I want, from whomever I want, wherever they are.  (2) I can sell whatever I want, to whomever I want, wherever they are.  Agreeing to trade freely does not requires tens of thousands of pages.  What is contained in the pages of these agreements is not free trade at all, but the very same mercantilist, corporatist, fascist policies our Founders revolted against.  They are thousands of pages of favors to cronies, obstructions of entrepreneurs, payoffs to supporters and insurances of re-election.

  Along this vein, it should be of particular interest to the Tea Party that Dick Armey, whose Freedom Works has jumped in front of the parade to launch the Tea Party Express, was an avid supporter of NAFTA under Clinton.  Joining him were (among others) Mitch McConnell, John Boener, John McCain and Newt Gingrich.  Strangely they appear on this issue in the company of Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, John Kerry, Ted Kennedy, Joe Lieberman and Chris Dodd.  I have said it before and I’ll say it again:  Partisanship usually means putting party above principle.  Bi-partisanship usually means putting power above both.

  The Tea Party absolutely should oppose the bi-partisan stinking pile of feces called NAFTA, but we should oppose it on the right grounds: Not because free trade among nations is a job-killer, but because true Free Trade is a wealth enhancer for all people and NAFTA is about anything but Free Trade.

  *This is not taking into consideration tax burdens of course.  Domestic business taxes distort the true cost of American labor but protectionism hardly deals with this fact, it rather exacerbates the cost to American consumers of everything they buy rather than going to the source of the problem and eliminating the onerous IRS and its myriad punitive codes.

  
  

  

  
  

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  Our Week Versus the Ruling Class

  24 Nov 2010 by Jessica Hughes / 3 Comments

  Today is the busiest travel day of the year and thousands plan to arrive at the airport and opt out of the full body scanners.  My thoughts and prayers will be with these Patriot Protesters because I know it is hard to make decisions that cause inconvenience in pursuit of a principle.  My prayers will also be with those who choose to drive instead of flying, a statistically more dangerous venture to which many have been driven by an out of control police state.  As tensions rise and tempers flare here amid the unwashed masses, nothing is so clear as that the self-anointed American Aristocracy has turned a deaf ear and a blind eye and is merrily showing us the ‘tall finger.’

  First, a recap of some of this week’s highlights:

  Video was released of a screaming, traumatized three-year-old girl being accosted by a TSA agent

  A man who refused to have his genitals touched was detained, then ordered to leave the airport, then ordered to stay, then threatened with a civil suit because he left without letting someone ‘touch his junk.’

  A child was semi-strip searched.

  A breast-cancer survivor was forced to remove her prosthetic breast.

  A bladder cancer survivor was left covered in his own urine after an agent’s rough handling burst his urostomy bag.

  But of course that was going on among us proles.  Among the ruling class things were a little different:

  Hilary Clinton laughed that of course she would avoid the pat downs.

  Janet Napolitano took care to comfort the beleaguered TSA agents, who have been demoralized by the public’s persistent objection to being fondled.

  John Boehner blithely skirted the discomfiting security procedures.

  President Obama lumped himself in with us saying the procedures were a necessary inconvenience to us all, as if he would ever get his junk touched by some rent-a-cop.

  And all of this is justified with the fear-mongering specter of last year’s Christmas Day Bomber; a failed attack foiled not by a vigilant government but by a combination of terrorist ineptitude and passenger initiative.

  As we scream for our freedom and demand that these offensive, obtrusive and invasive assaults end, the Ruling Class is shopping for 500 more naked scanners for airports and planning to install even more at train and bus stations and marinas.  Because we have the money to blow.  Or the Federal Reserve will give it to us anyway.  At this point it might be cheaper to just assign a Storm Trooper to follow every citizen from the bed to the shower to the toilet then to work and home again to make sure every one of us is obedient to our Masters.

  And really, when they’re grabbing your sixteen year old daughter’s breasts so she can fly to visit Grandma can such drastic measures really be so far away?

  
  

  
  

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