Progressive Trade
There’s something weird going on at Pandagon — support for trade liberalization and supra-national regulatory harmonization! Usually, when progressives encounter such policies, whether it be trade deals or rather innocuous proposals like the Security and Prosperity Partnership, they see them as sops to corporate interests at the expense of unions and the third world poor. But when it comes to letting trucks into Mexico it’s easy to see how much of the right-wing populist opposition to it is rather ugly and bigoted, while the policy clearly benefits poor(er) Mexicans.
It’s easy to see how this logic could be expanded past letting Mexican trucks into America – the same logic underlies further harmonization and liberalization of regulatory policies and easing the move of goods, people and capital across national borders. But so often the progressive left reflexively opposes these deals and sometimes implicitly uses the same rhetoric and mindset as the ugly nationalist right-populists.
As Brad DeLong put it in his debate about China trade policy with EPI head Jeff Faux , “Is there a way to interpret Jeff other than as a call to keep China a society of poor subsistence rice farmers as long as possible–keep them poor, barefoot, uneducated, and by no means allow them to work at any of the high-value manufacturing occupations we want to keep in the United States?” This same analysis can be applied to many progressive critics of freer trade and market integration.
