Faultolerant also accuses a pro-free-trade commentor of believing that
cheap crap = wealth and cheap crap eradicates poverty.
Does it also get your whites whiter, make gray hair disappear and
brighten your teeth? I’d also bet that, in your definition, cheap crap
makes you smarter, makes your kids stand up taller and improves your
love life.
Gawd, rank materialism stinks…even over the internet.
Faultolerant again misunderstands the argument. He is, though, not alone. Lou Dobbs and Pat Buchanan (among others) also commit this error in their reasoning. I reprise here my answer to that allegation:
Trinkets and Trade
Don Boudreaux
A rhetoric strategy used by opponents of free trade is to describe
the things that domestic consumers buy from abroad as superfluities –
cheap, pathetic, contemptible indulgences that consumers selfishly
gobble up from foreign producers and, in the process, damage the
domestic economy.
I first noticed this strategy in early 2001 when I heard Patrick Buchanan speak at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.
Buchanan criticized free traders who, in his view, are content to see
the U.S. economy destroyed by policies whose only ‘benefit’ is to allow
American consumers to buy self-indulgent, unnecessary gadgets "down at
the mall."
A few years later I debated Buchanan on free trade; in that debate he used the very same line.
Lou Dobbs is another protectionist who, in his book Exporting America, asserts that the only ‘benefit’ of free trade is that it helps "consumers save a few cents on trinkets and T-shirts."
And this letter in today’s New Orleans Times-Picayune ends with this plea:
Perhaps this
is a good time for all of us to slow down and reassess what is
important in life, not to rush back into stores to replenish our lost
inventory of plastic baubles and trinkets made in China.
I’ll not here comment upon Buchanan’s
and et al.’s officious and arrogant dismissiveness of people’s
consumption choices. Nor will I challenge the dubious assertion that
U.S. imports are chiefly baubles, trinkets, and T-shirts. Indeed, I’ll
here assume that this assertion is accurate.
If it were true that American imports indeed are mostly
low-value, insignificant, contemptible knick-knacks, then this fact
would imply that the American industries destroyed by foreign
competition are those that compete with such foreign producers — that
is, American industries that produce baubles, trinkets, and T-shirts.
If protectionists such as Patrick Buchanan and Lou Dobbs
dismiss as worthless the things that American consumers buy from
foreigners, consistency demands that these pundits also dismiss as
worthless the things that American industry would be prompted to
produce by higher tariffs and other protectionist measures.
These protectionists certainly should not be permitted to
get away with suggesting that protectionism would create domestic
industries and jobs that produce worthwhile, cutting-edge goods and
services. Instead, these protectionists should be forced to admit
explicitly that the American industries they seek to reinvigorate are
those that produce worthless baubles, trinkets, and T-shirts.
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