You can’t hardly turn on the boob tube or read a newspaper or look at a mainstream website without hearing the clamor about the benefits of “globalization” and “increased trade” blah, blah, blah…if you try to contest that nonsense, you’re just a dumb protectionist (trust me, I have the scars to show it…oh, sorry, that’s a certain New York senator’s line). Anyway, my friends at the Center For Economic and Policy Research, Dean Baker and Mark Weisbrot, have an excellent piece out about globalization responding to a piece in Foreign Affairs. It’s short and sweet–a little too wonky for my taste but it makes some very important points.

    One of the things I and others keep pointing out is the fallacy that globalization and so-called “free trade” has been of great benefit to anyone but the very wealthy and privileged. The two CPER dudes write:

   

In other words, even ignoring the re-distribution of income in the last few decades, the U.S. economy during a period in which it was mostly a closed economy (1946-1973) vastly outperformed the increasingly open economy that we have had over the last 33 years, in terms of raising living standards.

    That’s right. The economy did better, as a whole, when it was…oh, my god, hold your hats on this…CLOSED than when it was subjected to the whims of free market globalization.

In the United States, it is quite likely that the vast majority of the labor force has actually lost more from the redistribution of income and lowering of their real wages due to trade and investment liberalization, than they have gained from access to cheaper consumer goods.

    As I’ve pointed out many times, most recently the other day, the rhetoric of “free trade” versus “protectionism” doesn’t really tell us the real story. The CEPR dudes conclude with this nice point:

This drives home the nature of what we are dealing with: it is not a question of “saving globalization” from “special-interest protectionists” as the authors argue. The “special interest protectionists” – highly paid professions, CEO’s, pharmaceutical companies and other monopolists – have been reaping the gains from misnamed “free-trade” agreements for many years, while subjecting the majority of Americans to international competition that has lowered their living standards. The “dangerous path” ahead is not so much the “creeping protectionism” feared by the authors as it is the continued use of global commercial agreements to increase income disparities in the United States.