Free trade? Catch that thing. Wrap it up. Throw it in the garbage. That’s the tune of much of the presidential campaign this year and it leaves us wondering what would happen if some wrong-headed promises got translated into reality. Disaster, that’s what. Cruelty to the people, especially the poor.
Among the candidates, there are a couple of especially scary ones on this topic, namely Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. Trump wants tariffs that would likely lead to calamitous trade wars even though he himself has offshore clothing operations in Mexico and China. Sanders wants to ditch existing treaties, thinks they are a case of the rich getting richer while others suffer, and once said the following: “I was on a picket line in the early 1990s against NAFTA (the U.S. trade deal with Canada and Mexico) because you didn’t need a Ph.D. in economics to understand that American workers should not be forced to compete against people in Mexico making 25 cents an hour.”
No, you don’t need a Ph.D. to reason about trade, but you do need at least a slight acquaintance with the facts. For starters, Mexicans today make $8 an hour in benefits and wages in the auto plants Sanders was discussing, and that’s not exploitation. It’s a major gift. Once, while living in El Paso, Texas, I crossed the Mexican border to tour some American-owned plants where most of the workers were women. For many, I learned, these were the only jobs available besides prostitution.
The truth is that nothing has spurred wealth growth among the down and out more than the boom in world trade. Some undeveloped countries have experienced incredible economic growth, hundreds of millions have fled destitution, and people are living much, much longer than ever before.
