​No Free Trade, because middle America needs a lifetime of terrible, horrible, no good, very bad years

Thursday afternoon links - AEI

More below.

"7. Quotation of the Day, is from Bjorn Lomborg on the “free-trade miracle”:

Shuttered factories serve as highly visible, totemic warnings against open borders. The far greater benefits of free trade are much less obvious. Consumers get a wider variety of goods at cheaper prices. Middle-class Americans gain an estimated 29% of their purchasing power from foreign trade. In other words, the average middle-class American can buy 29% more for each dollar than if there was no trade. The effect is even bigger – 62% – for the poorest tenth of American consumers. Trade makes exporters stronger, more efficient, and more productive. The benefits are shared among workers: Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers found that, on average, US export-intensive industries pay workers up to 18% more than non-exporting firms.

These arguments are all part of the overwhelming economic case for free trade. But the strongest argument is a moral one. Cost-benefit analysis shows that freer trade is the single most powerful way to help the world’s poorest citizens."

What Americans misunderstand most deeply is that the shuttered factory would have shuttered, regardless of trade. The competition would be lessened without trade, but not eliminated, and the factories shuttered were the least competitive. They needed to shutter because they could not continue to produce the products at a cost people were willing to bear. The choice is not cut trade, bring businesses, and their jobs home. That option does not exist. The costs are too high, people won't pay, so either the product will simply be eliminated, or the business will need to automate, or otherwise cut costs. 

Both of our flapdoodle candidates are lying to you when they say they can fiddle with trade, and bring back jobs. They are economic illiterates pontificating nonsense ideas, in a gum flapping exhibition. 

The only trade rule we need is, "America will impose no import tariff on any good imported into the US! Period. Wealth will follow, for the rich, for the middle class, and for the poor. Better yet, the world's poor will hugely benefit from such a policy, and the world's poor will be that much more quickly lifted out of endemic poverty, and want, and into the prosperous world America bring.