If This Be Rabble-Rousing
BROCKWAY, GEORGE P.
The Dismal Science IF THIS BE RABBLE-ROUSING BY GEORGE PBROCKWAY Afriend has taken exception to my proposal to limit or forbid the importation of foreign manufactures that threaten to destroy...
...When we shift from microeconomics to macroeconomics-from firm to nation-we find (as we frequently do in such shifts) that we have committed the fallacy of composition...
...At present rates, the Federal income tax raises about $285 billion, leaving a deficit of about $200 billion...
...Should the scheme fail, the banks will come crying to Uncle Sam to bail them out (they're already lobbying for an increase in our contribution to the IMF), and we will in reality have given Brazil the steel mills that are destroying our industry and putting our fellow citizens out of work...
...The first I find difficult to take seriously...
...It does this by increasing and rationalizing employment, for wealth is the product of work...
...But the necessity, or even the desirability, of foreign trade has been grossly oversold...
...My friend is a compassionate man and is willing to consider the problem...
...Second, we determine whether that threat is made possible by wages or conditions that we would consider exploitative...
...Charity should no doubt be world-wide, yet it should certainly begin at home...
...Micawber, he expects something to turn up, but in the meantime he is willing to institute the dole (he is not a Reaganite) and to pay for it with a progressive income tax...
...Microeconomically-that is, company by company-foreign trade can be very attractive...
...Hedoesn't deny that Americans are thrown out of work when our industries are shipped abroad, but he is confident that their distress is only temporary and perhaps not altogether undeserved...
...The only new industry now on the horizon is high-tech, which, as noted, is high-tailing it for the Orient, and is not a big employer anyhow...
...When trade expands employment for both partners, the prosperity of both is advanced, and David Ricardo's Law of Comparative Advantage (see "How Our Sun May Rise Again," NL, July 12-26, 1982) can be said to apply...
...This time no one is underselling us in our domestic market, or in our international market...
...Two questions are mixed together here...
...they used the Arabs' money, deposited with them because of the high interest rates the Federal Reserve Board encouraged, allegedly to fight inflation...
...An interesting thing about Smoot-Hawley is that its original impetus came from distress on the farms...
...The other side is the cost to my friend in taxes...
...In setting forth my proposal, I specified two steps that would have to be taken before barring a given import: "First, we decide that certain of our important industries are threatened in our home market by severe competition from foreign industries...
...yet many uses are now routinely denied him, and there is no use that cannot, in principle, be denied...
...They are the result of policies deliberately, albeit perhaps blindly, adopted...
...The other question is one of fact...
...To repay the loans, though, Brazil has to export still more steel and import less of whatever it imports...
...The analysis doesn't rise even to the level of post hoc ergo propter hoc, for the Great Depression was already well under way when Smoot-Hawley was passed, while fascism had been in power in Italy for eight years, and was rapidly growing in Germany...
...in many ways is worse...
...The Brazilians invested the money (which, you will remember, couldn't be lent to New York City because it was a "bad risk") in building up their industry, particularly steel...
...Just as bankers become unwitting partners of debtors to whom they lend too much money, however, we as a nation have become the unwitting partners of the banks that now have shaky foreign loans far in excess of their assets...
...I repeat: It is a question of fact, not of theory...
...I'm afraid that no doubt exists about the suffering, and it is by no means confined to the automobile industry...
...It must adopt what the bankers and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) aseptically refer to as austerity measures...
...If, as some tell us, he was overpaid, then the dream was a fraud...
...And millions of our fellow citizens would be condemned to aimless, hopeless lives...
...Nor is there any doubt that very little of the suffering we have so far seen will be alleviated by the so-called recovery...
...Of course, Chase and Citibank and the rest didn't exactly use our money...
...This means reducing Brazil's standard of living, and consequently paying its steel workers even less than at present...
...A dole at the poverty level might seem a bonanza for a part-time textile worker...
...What is good for each firm individually is not necessarily good for the nation...
...The profitability of multinational conglomerates is enhanced by their ability to manufacture where wage scales are the lowest (and declare their profits where taxes are the lowest...
...Being in thrall to classical economics, he wants to balance the budget...
...What's going on now does not fit into the late Joseph A. Schumpeter's theory of new industries?railroad construction in its earlier stages, electrical power production before the First World War, steam and steel, the motor car, colonial ventures"-leading the upswing of fresh business cycles...
...Today there is again distress on the farms, but its cause is different...
...He nevertheless maintained that in the long run not too much suffering would be caused by the collapse of the American automobile industry...
...The Dismal Science IF THIS BE RABBLE-ROUSING BY GEORGE PBROCKWAY Afriend has taken exception to my proposal to limit or forbid the importation of foreign manufactures that threaten to destroy important domestic industries because of low prices based on the exploitation of local labor ("The Way to Protect," NL, September 19...
...The trouble, instead, is that the Poles and others who want our wheat haven't anything to pay us with...
...If Japanese citizens were to buy up the output of Korea's nascent automobile industry in preference to Subarus and Toyotas, Japanese wealth would be decreased, and you may be sure that the Japanese government has imposed effective restrictions...
...This goes for high-tech industries even more than for smokestack industries, because the technology of the former is in fact simpler and the capital requirements less extensive...
...Besides, he objects to the word "exploitation" as old-fashioned rabble-rousing...
...The upshot of all this is that we the people of the U nited States will in effect pay our farmers for the wheat that is in effect given to the Poles...
...For various pragmatic or prudential reasons, the government will not interfere wit h his use of money except reluctantly and after due reflection...
...A flat tax at that rateof increase, let aloneatruly progressive tax, would be a lot to pay for a Subaru...
...A poverty-level dole would cost another $ 100 billion...
...Like Mr...
...Except, my friend says, golf carts: Would you have believed that almost all carts on American golf courses were made in Poland...
...The solution was simplicity itself: We lent them the money...
...Indeed, I say that it should be done...
...The Poles have coal for sale, but so have we-and so do the Germans, the French, the Belgians, the British...
...One of the'' reindustrializing'' schemes that has been advocated and, for all I know, implemented involves rebuilding the port of Norfolk to facilitate the export of coal to God knows whom...
...It is nowhere writ-not in the Bill of Rights, not in the Magna Carta, not in the Sermon on the Mount, not in the Code of Hammurabi-that my friend has a right to buy a Subaru, no matter how well it may be made...
...Although by the time the bill was passed, duties were raised on almost everything under the sun, the presenting complaint in President Hoover's call for a special session of Congress was largely agricultural...
...Trade will always result in some unemployment in a competitive situation, and the unemployment will be compounded where the competition is based on gross wage differentials...
...Now, whethertheseconditionsapply to Subaru or not can readily be determined...
...If the bankers' scheme succeeds?by no means a certainty-additional American steel workers will lose their jobs...
...a halfway decent dole would be double that...
...Trade is one of the modes of civilization (that is what makes economics a humanistic-and ethical-discipline...
...Money is, after all, a social, not an individual, creation...
...Partly we lent it as a nation through the Export-Import Bank, and partly we had it lent for us by our friendly bankers...
...As I have previously said, as long as the American standard of living is higher than the Oriental standard of living, there is nothing whatsoever that cannot be manufactured more cheaply there than here...
...Conversely, when trade brings about unemployment for one of the partners, its advantage disappears...
...These outcomes are not divinely ordained...
...There are, naturally, many things we want or need to import-oil (because we are too witless to cope with our energy requirements), tungsten, chrome, bauxite, coffee-and there are many things we can, without special government assistance, export to pay for them...
...In the circumstances we have been discussing, some (not all) American exports are being paid for by us in theshapeof high interest rates that inordinately benefit a few, and we will doubtless bear the further cost of rescuing banks in danger of failing...
...Retraining for what...
...Trade also adds to wealth-the wealth of individuals, of nations, of the world...
...Thus to do what my friend wants to do would require income taxes one and a half times (if he doesn't balance the budget) to two and a half times (if he does balance) those now in force...
...The result of the banks' loans to Brazil et al...
...If this be rabble-rousing, as I told my friend, make the most of it...
...For the purposes of our argument, my friend conceded that the conditions do apply, and that thousands of Americans in Detroit are thrown out of work because of Japanese labor policies...
...Thanks to their low wages, they are now driving American steel out of the world market and to a considerable extent out of the domestic American market...
...The issue is not whether denial is legitimate, but whether denial in this particular case is reasonable...
...it is a disaster for a veteran automobile worker who has saved a little money, started a family, bought a house, and nurtured the American dream...
...On the other side, some (not all) American imports are being paid for by individual citizens in the shape of shattered prospects and grinding poverty...
...I am not one to say that it could not be done...
...A very high percentage of foreign trade follows the patterns I have outlined, distorting economies everywhere to the principal benefit of bankers...
...He says his freedom would be unacceptably abridged if he couldn't buy a Japanese automobile, because he thinks they are better made than ours...
...That is one side of the problem: the unconscionable cost to American workers of my friend's assumed right to buy a Subaru or a Hong Kong sports shirt...
...and that if suffering is caused, the way to alleviate it is directly through the dole, not by forbidding theimportation of Subarus...
...It is little enough...
...Once a company is successful in its home market-factories built and paid for, experience gained -It takes little extra effort to open an export business, and economies of scale will make that business extraordinarily profitable at the margin, especially when stimulated by tax incentives...
...I have nothing against the Poles, but it occurs to me to wonder why it is better to give our wheat to them than to poor fellow citizens, whom we expect to feed themselves on a supplement of less than a dollar a day...
...Against this dreary scenario, my friend raises the specter of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff, sponsored by reactionary Republicans in 1930 and ever after blamed by junior high school civics texts for the Great Depression, the rise of fascism, World War II, the Cold War, and innumerable minor irritations...
...For this reason, all the vague talk of retraining the millions of our unemployed fellow citizens is cruel nonsense...
...Since the Poles can't pay us for our wheat, we had to fall back on our ingenuity...
Vol. 66 • November 1983 • No. 21
