Left loses touch with trade truth

The left is incoherent on trade. It fails to reconcile its conflicting pulls and sounds like a cacophony of political calls to justice and fairness with no clear destination in mind. The left misinterprets the empirical data to claim the evils of trade without stepping back and viewing free trade, except in the short term.

Anti-free trade pundits argue such on two flawed premises: that it is bad for both the native and foreign worker. This tries to create a negative-sum game for trade to exist in, which is simply false and vastly oversimplified.

The most baffling part of this is how jobs become bad for foreign workers when they were good for domestic workers. Also confusing is when leftists complain that lousy wages are the result of "work for Nike or starve" and immediately suggest "fair trade" (which means protectionism, or some vague tripe about firms suddenly being struck with bouts of guilt and ignoring profit motive). All without blinking an eye at the effect of such-removing the "work for Nike" part of that choice.

Protectionists somehow believe that there exists a certain je ne sais quoi about a nation-state, which makes it the ideal level of governance for erecting barriers to trade. But this is entirely arbitrary. Why the national? Why not states? Constitutional barriers get in the way, of course, but let's get theoretical. They do not suggest it because they know that within our borders, free trade has always existed, and that I, as a working Washingtonian, am not being "exploited" by Joe Redneck from Podunk, Ark.

Hell, why stop with states? Why have we not, as Seattleites, demanded protection for our abused apple farmers from those Eastern Washington scabs? And let's not start with those Tacoma industries, unfairly competing with our growing domestic industries. And let's take on Microsoft! Establish tariffs on all goods from Redmond. Ban outsourcing of domestic software development to the other side of the lake.

It becomes rather apparent that such actions would not help us, but doom us to absolute poverty. This is not accidental. Protectionism is deeply rooted in Rousseauian nostalgia for a fictional "noble savage" and the fallacious Marxist belief that exchanging products of labor via the medium of money is "exploitation."

There is also a fear-driven component of the anti-free trade argument. The left has a deep-seated fear of anything they cannot control or understand, and the market is certainly something uncontrolled. That is its elegance; it is a naturally arising, ordered process by which independent entities with absolutely conflicting ends can work together and each achieve their own ends. However, it is an unplanned order, one which reason does not have any part in creating, and as such is virtually impossible to fully understand.

The time has come for the left to abandon its fear of the world and instead of fighting it, fight the exploitation of the poor that the likes of Paul Allen have managed with bureaucrats as his lackeys. There is absolutely no reason Paul Allen should be given a fraction of a penny in special tax breaks. South Lake Union is going to be a massive write off for Allen. So, Seattle ... what will you do about it?