I recently stumbled across a blog by Greg Mankiw, an economics professor at Harvard (As my friend Tennessee used to say, "The Vanderbilt of the North.") In his post Lamont on Jobs and Trade, he notes that in all the talk about Lamont's anti-war sentiment his labor positions went largely unnoticed, and Mankiw is concerned this election may be signaling a move toward isolationism by the Left. His observations are pertinent to the larger discussion about environmentalism and economic development in other places.
So Lamont seems to think the U.S. economy is suffering and the primary reason is competition from poor workers in China.
This rhetoric scares me. Wages, benefits, and labor and environmental standards are primarily a function of the level of economic development. Complaining about poor countries' low wages and benefits is essentially blaming the poor for being poor.
Talk about "strong standards" sounds nice, but it is not realistic: Labor and environmental standards cannot catch up to U.S. levels until China is much richer than it is today. Demanding "strong standards" can easily become an excuse for imposing trade restrictions, which will only improvish the world's poor even further, as well as denying Americans the benefits of globalization.
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