George Will Misses The Point
George Will weighs in on the Senate race in Ohio and pretty much completely misses the point on trade. I mean Dick Cheney quail hunting misses.
A serious student of trade policy, Brown notes that the trade deficit for 1992 was $39 billion, but was $724 billion last year. He wants U.S. trade policy to force “stronger labor and environmental standards” in less-developed nations. He says the point is to “bring up their living standards.” Oh, please. The primary point is to reduce the competitive advantages of nations with lower labor costs and lighter environmental regulations - nations that many Ohioans believe have caused their state to lose 222,800 manufacturing jobs in the last 10 years.
How offensive is it to describe underpaying and mistreating workers in other countries as a “competitive advantage”. It is likewise to position “lighter environmental regulations” as another business “competitive advantage”. Yeah, George, we want to remove those “competitive advantages”. You know, the ones that let employers in other countries exploit their poor and pollute our environment for the benefit of multi-national corporations.
So you don’t think that the people of the world deserve labor and environmental protections long sought after here in the U.S.? Oh Please!
Now, this all begs the question of whether or not the voting public gives a damn about “trade”. They probably should, but whether they do is left open for question. George focuses on it because Sherrod does. I’m not sure if this is something that someone can be elected on solely. What I do know is that Sherrod gets it right and George gets it wrong.
Of course Sherrod is right. I wonder how much George Will would be for these “competitive advantages” if column-writing for American papers were outsourced to people making $10 a column? Or for that matter, if his papers fired all their columnists and hired bloggers doing the job for free.
The problem is that you cannot frame it primarily as a “trade” issue because that’s too remote from people’s lives. That’s why Sherrod must retire the word “trade” and leave that as an amplification of his position on “jobs with a wage you can raise a family on” (I’ve had people tell me even “living wage” is too confusing and complex).