NAFTA, yes - reason for Congress to pass the North American Free Trade Agreement - Editorial

National Review, Nov 29, 1993 by William F. Buckley, Jr.

IF YOU BELIEVE in free trade, it follows, or at least it should, that you believe in freer trade. If the tariff on nutmeg has been 50 per cent, then you welcome its reduction to 40 per cent. Are you, as a free-trader, committed to reducing it to 0? One responsibility of conservative public policy is prudence, so that the presumption would be against going overnight from 50 per cent protection to 0 per cent, but prudence, institutionalized, means no movement at all, and that is offensive to the philosophy of free trade, which is a constituent part of the philosophy of human freedom.

The reason one doesn't want precipitate action is that it brings on, or can bring on, social disruption, and this we shrink from. This isn't always the case. The so-called peace dividend, welcomed everywhere, leaves us with the prospect of demilitarizing huge enterprises, many of them labor intensive, even as a platoon of soldiers is labor intensive. A proposed schedule for demilitarization is governed, of course, by ongoing concern for contingent security, but not by any concern for the closing down of plants that manufacture napalm, or the dislodgement of redundant soldiers trained to kill. When the question is tariff reduction in the direction of free trade, we are traditionally more cautious than when we are engaged in demobilization. In a year or so after Hiroshima, we demobilized ten million men and worried very little about what they would do next. If there had been ten million men making alcohol, the Eighteenth Amendment would have been phased in, not made, overnight, a matter of law.

On this point the NAFTA people appear to have been sensible. To begin with, the tariff on Mexican goods hovers in the area of 4 per cent. But extra protections are given to sundry American products (our tariff schedule isn't to be compared with our relatively uniform tax schedules; there are approximately two thousand separate rates of protection for products made in the United States). NAFTA is nevertheless depicted by some of its critics as a guillotine, assigned the mandate of genocide for the marginally employed. In fact the NAFTA schedule distinguishes among three categories of affected U.S. products, 1) relatively insensitive (i.e., to foreign competition), 2) moderately sensitive, and 3) highly sensitive. Moderately sensitive products would face reduced competition phased in over five to ten years. Highly sensitive products (sugar, e.g.) are on a fifteen-year schedule. It is hard to understand the congressman from Louisiana who said that the day after NAFTA was passed, 25,000 sugar workers in Louisiana would be unemployed.

Estimates of the gross unemployment that would be caused by NAFTA vary, as one might expect. Responsible evaluators talk about 150,000 jobs lost in the year or so following NAFTA's codification. But the same people talk about 350,000 new jobs engendered during the same period, by the same agent. Anticipated joblessness caused by NAFTA, if the projections are accurate, is less then 10 per cent of the joblessness anticipated from the ending of the Cold War--and about the monthly rate of job creation in the 1980s.

HERBERT HOOVER grudgingly approved the last major American protectionist bill, Smoot-Hawley. In principle, Mr. Hoover favored free trade, as has every Republican President since William Howard Taft. It is consistent with conservative philosophy to gravitate to free trade because conservative inclinations are strategic, not tactical. It is the habit of the populist--the liberalprogressive--to go for instant remedies; to "wars" against poverty and drugs, to instant health for everyone.

Conservatives, political scientist Edward Banfield reminds us in his book The Unheavenly City, tend to talk about "Tuesday," rather than about "Monday." The difference in political style has never been clearer than today. It is acknowledged that the man who runs the risk of losing his job tomorrow feels an acuteness of concern unmitigated by the certitude that the day after tomorrow his brother, his children, and indeed he himself will find job opportunities opening up which, though they cannot be defined today, will certainly be there on Tuesday. Tuesday's harvest is an axiom of conservative analysis, reaching back to a basic plank in capitalist thought, namely that the demand for goods is infinite, while the supply is finite. The disparity galvanizes production, and assures the continuing need for expansion.

We have suffered historically, and continue to do so, from misdirected interventions by government. Herbert Hoover didn't want to prolong the Depression, but he did so, as did his successor. What was not invalidated by the Depression was the basic law--which in due course would reassert itself, bringing on the great economic boom of the postwar years--that to freeze production techniques in pursuit of full employment is to freeze economic progress. If we were today restricted to using the technology of 1939, in order to handle current telephone traffic, all women between the ages of 21 and 60 (or the equivalent number of men) would need to serve as telephone operators.