Free Trade For Workers, Protectionism For Elites

Dean Baker makes an important point in talking about “free trade” these days. As he says, the trade deals over the last couple of decades have not really been about trade per se but more about providing protections for certain segments of the US economy, primarily in the form of patent and copyright protections. And the beneficiaries have specifically been the pharmaceutical, software, and entertainment industries. The protections, or essentially tariffs, raise the price of goods and services significantly and redistribute income upward to the executives and shareholders in these industries. These protections go hand-in-hand with the protections provided our medical, legal, and other high-skill industries that use licensing accreditation to limit any competition from abroad. The only area where true “free trade” and a “borderless” economy exists in our country is in the manufacturing and other low skill industries where workers constantly have to compete with lower wage foreign workers. It’s no wonder those workers are furious with the elites who are able to live under the protections that they long ago stripped from working class.