Ken at Dirty Water has a good post up on trade. Myself, I’ve found the TPMCafe forums depressing, not only for the sense of being outnumbered on an issue I do care about, but also by the sheer extent of the anti-free-traders’ tendency to impute the worst motives to the other side. Also, I can’t help but being struck how strange the economic theories underpinnning some of the TPM commenters are. I mean, none of us are economics experts (at least I’m not), but there’s an oddness of latching onto concepts like wage arbitrage without once considering the simpler concept of foreign currency exchange markets. Ignoring the latter leads you to the conclusion, say, that free trade causes trade deficits. Now, there’s a political anti-free-trade argument that argues by effects - saying that if X group of workers are displaced by a policy, then we should scrap that policy, however ideal it is in other senses, because those workers are already feeling the brunt of economic change and the dismantling of welfare capitalism/the welfare state. To me, that’s the smartest anti-free-trade argument I’ve heard, though I’d say the calculus changes when you take the wellbeing of the third world worker into account. (I know the progressive/liberal split is particularly strong on that diagnosis.) But often the anti-free-traders aren’t content with the political argument and seem to want to erect increasingly arcane economic theories.
No comments have been added to this post yet.