Congress was considering a vote last summer on Trade Promotion Authority, a fast-track process in Congress under which one or two trade deals would be considered.
According to emails leaked by WikiLeaks, this put Hillary Clinton and her surrogates in an awkward position, and they pondered how they could have the candidate “dodge” (their word, not ours) the issue. Should she try a “pure dodge” or a “full dodge,” meaning she would avoid addressing the question altogether? Or should she talk about TPA as a neutral procedural issue, and take the line that the only important question was what sort of trade deal it produced?
Despite their doubts, they managed in the end to pull off the former. Clinton’s first decisive comment on TPA didn’t come until a week after it passed Congress. As secretary of state, Clinton had helped build the framework for negotiations on the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which she had referred to as the “gold standard” for trade deals. Yet Clinton claimed absurdly that she would have voted against the fast-track process that was necessary to secure a trade deal. Her inconsistency went by without drawing much attention, but it was actually more absurd than when she came out against the Trans-Pacific deal itself a few months later.
Donald Trump sneers at Clinton for her cynical evasions on trade, but he has a similar history on the issue. In last night’s debate, he re-stated his distaste for trade deals and promised once again to renegotiate NAFTA. But in 2013, he published an op-ed on the global economy for CNN Online, praising the ideals of globalism and free trade.
“We are now closer to having an economic community in the best sense of the term — we work with each other for the benefit of all,” Trump wrote. He went on: “There won’t be any winners or losers as this is not a competition. It’s a time for working together for the best of all involved. … We will have to leave borders behind and go for global unity when it comes to financial stability. …The future of Europe, as well as the United States, depends on a cohesive global economy.”
This is quite a different tune from what Trump sings today, framing an adversarial relationship between America and other countries who “take our jobs.” His remark about the need to erase borders, at least in the sense of allowing goods and services to flow freely, contrasts with his excoriation of “globalism” and “lousy trade deals.”
In 2005, Trump also wrote about outsourcing, taking what he called “the unpopular stance that it is not always a terrible thing.” In a short blog post on the Trump University website, he cited the work of a Nobel Prize winning economist, whose study of the (heavily outsourced) IT industry showed that “outsourcing helped companies be more competitive and more productive. That means they make more money, which means they funnel more into the economy, thereby, creating more jobs.”
Clinton’s and Trump’s conversion from free trade to protectionism is more evidence, as though it were needed, that people running for president will say anything they think is popular, whether they believe it or not.
The previous, more honest, incarnations of Clinton and Trump were right about trade. International trade is a boon for everyone for the same reason free-market economies flourish where other systems fail. The aggregated choices of vast numbers of businesses and consumers acting freely in their own interest, even in competition with one another, sums up to human cooperation on a mass scale. In the larger pool of participants created by open trade, the aggregate cooperation and prosperity is yet greater, even though not every competitor wins. The end result is greater specialization, lower prices, better products and services, and more wealth all around.
This is something Clinton and Trump once understood. By striking the opposite pose for the voters, they are pandering to fears and giving credence and support to damaging economics. That is, perhaps, the underlying theme of Election 2016.
