The debate over the future of America\u2019s economy has boiled down to a question of government spending vs. tax cuts. <\/p>\n
Both priorities, one favored by most Democrats, the other by most Republicans, assume that our economy needs a quick pulse of energy and confidence to put it back on its legs. <\/p>\n
The troubling reality, of course, is that Americans simply don\u2019t make things anymore that people want to buy. <\/p>\n
The Chinese do that. And the Japanese and the Mexicans. The Canadians have a thriving manufacturing base, as do the Germans and the French. <\/p>\n
But in this country, both political parties bought into the notion long ago that manual labor is either politically suspect (the anti-union Republican bias) or out-dated, dirty and unpleasant (the Democratic spin).<\/p>\n
For all their philosophical disagreements, liberals and conservatives found consensus on one thing: \u201cdirty-hands\u201d work \u2013 from manufacturing to mining to milling \u2013 should be done somewhere else by somebody else. <\/p>\n
We Americans will be the white-collar workers to the world, the thinkers and innovators and bean-counters.<\/p>\n
The last few months, we\u2019ve learned that economies don\u2019t work this way. Our economy certainly doesn\u2019t. <\/p>\n
For one thing \u2013 Thomas Friedman\u2019s fantasies notwithstanding — we aren\u2019t really a white-collar society. <\/p>\n
A third of Americans never graduate from high school, a dismal success rate that has actually slipped in recent years. <\/p>\n
Which means that for a quarter-century, we\u2019ve pursued a \u201cpost-industrial\u201d trade model that ignores the needs of six-out-of-ten workers. <\/p>\n
Now even the supposed winners in the New Economy have been treated to the spectacle of corporations shipping their cubicle-and-creativity jobs overseas. <\/p>\n
IBM has begun offering downsized American tech-workers a chance to keep earning a paycheck in India, or other developing countries, so long as they\u2019re willing to \u201cwork on local terms and conditions.\u201d<\/p>\n
Maybe one day soon our economy will shuffle along on “remittances” sent home by expatriate cubicle slaves living in New Delhi and Jakarta.<\/p>\n
While we\u2019ve pursued a unilateral love affair with \u201cfree trade,\u201d other countries have carefully protected their home industries. <\/p>\n
From Europe to Canada to East Asia, politicians and industrialists use trade barriers, tariffs, subsidies and other market controls as a matter of course. <\/p>\n
Those same countries openly court American corporations with the offer of extremely low-paid workers and dangerously lax environmental rules. <\/p>\n
Which means that even the best shirt-makers in America are forced to compete with workers in Vietnam earning a few dollars a day. <\/p>\n
A domestic steel plant competes with factories in Indonesia that are free to decimate rivers. <\/p>\n
This ideological pipedream has created a \u201crace to the bottom\u201d global economy, every bit as destructive as the Neo-con fantasies that until recently drove our foreign policy. <\/p>\n
The ultimate loser has been America\u2019s working- and middle-classes, which have been pushed to the edge. <\/p>\n
Until this year, the magnitude of the debacle was concealed by the finance and housing bubbles, and by the rapid expansion of government-sector employment. <\/p>\n
The silver lining of this economic crisis is that it revealed just how rotten our industrial base has become. <\/p>\n
It’s also caused us to ask tough new questions about the pros and cons of “free” trade.<\/p>\n
Tomorrow: Part 2, Is Free Trade part of a “Tyranny of Dead Ideas”?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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