Slate’s William Saletan picks apart the new anti-Bush ads from one 527 organization, the Media Fund. His verdict? The ads are perhaps politically smart but morally ugly. Criticism of economic policy has morphed into claiming that Bush is “creating jobs” overseas; criticism of Iraq has morphed into treating the Iraqis as the new welfare-queens. Here’s his description of the former:
“Factory” opens with a close-up of a smokestack. As the camera retreats, the rest of the factory becomes visible, revealing Chinese characters on some of the buildings. “During the past three years, it’s true George W. Bush has created more jobs,” says the announcer. “Unfortunately, they were created in places like China.” Call me unpatriotic, but I’ve never understood why creating jobs for Asians is morally (as opposed to politically) worse than creating jobs for Americans. Billions of people in other countries live in squalor. They’re willing to work for less than Americans are because, by and large, they need money more desperately than we do. All that matters politically, however, is that China has no votes in our Electoral College.
Saletan is spot-on here. This meme of Chinese-don’t-deserve-our-jobs is only a variation of the same economic xenophobia behind the scapegoating Indian technology workers, which the folk(s) at Blame India Watch have done such a good job documenting and critiquing. Even if international trade were a zero-sum game wherein one country’s loss is another’s gain, liberals should at least be willing to spread the wealth internationally, to the extent politically and economically feasible.
However, of course, international trade is not a zero-sum game and the xenophobic mindset get its economics wrong by treating the world as a mercantilist battle for so much wealth that has to be wrested from one country to another. Thus, Jacob Weisburg replies to Saletan,
More generally, for Kerry and his supporters to talk about the loss of jobs due to outsourcing without reference to the American jobs created both by insourcing and by increased exports is both bad economics and lousy logic. You can’t look at just one side of the trade equation; the gains and losses are both products of globalization.
I’d be more worried if I felt that all of the left and the Democratic party remotely shared this xenophobic impulse. But I’d be more comfortable if I felt that these ads weren’t tapping into an already present impulse to confuse an indictment of Republican policies with a hatred of sinister foreigners.
And, frankly, I’m worried about the third position of the liberal-left: that trade (or outsourcing) policies creating overseas employment actually hurts the third world with a “race to the bottom”. The third world has already hit the bottom and without productivity growth will be forced lower through Malthusian land constraints and population growth. We can’t condemn China or India or any other country to import-export substitution; even if well meaning, that would have the same effect as the xenophobic Blame the Third World approach.
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