Scott Brown’s election is good news but, as with most things, only mostly. It just might be bad news for the diminishing band of believers in free trade.
Not that the senator-elect from Massachusetts is a protectionist: He most likely is not. But his election is likely to have one of those bugaboos of all policymakers — an unintended consequence.
The Democrats have learned at least two things from their Bay State fiasco. The first is that they had better hold close to their breasts their trade union supporters.
With independents abandoning the party in droves, Democrats will more than ever be dependent on the money and the doorbell ringers that the unions can provide. And the trade unions are not famous for their deep devotion to the teachings of Adam Smith.
The second is that voters are more concerned about jobs and the deficit than they are about any inadequacies of the current health care system, or the possibility that the now-questionable climate data might be foretelling a hard time for polar bears.
It is easy for economists — many with tenure at their universities, others working for investment banks that are flush with cash, still others ensconced in secure federal government jobs — to say that the jobs market is improving. And it is.
But it doesn’t feel like that to the 17.2 percent of Americans who are either out of work, involuntarily working only part time or so discouraged that they have stopped looking for work. Or to their neighbors, who fear that they might be next for the chop.
Then there are the deficits that are piling up IOUs for voters’ children and grandchildren to pay. They especially don’t like the idea of leaving to future generations a nation deeply indebted to China, a country whose interests and values are not necessarily coincidence with our own: Witness the censorship imposed on Google, and the clout our biggest creditor demonstrated when the president of the United States felt it necessary to defer to its wishes and refuse to meet with the Dalai Lama.
The Democrats read the Massachusetts returns as a warning that their hold on Congress and the White House will prove short-lived unless they respond to voters’ concerns about jobs and deficits. And what better way, they reason, than to erect barriers to imports, especially from China?
The president has already imposed tariffs on tires and some steel products that are made in China. The next target of the unions is Chinese-made glass. They point out that the World Trade Center’s twin towers were sheathed in good old made-in-the-USA glass, but the building that is springing up to replace it will be covered with glass imported from China.
Whether that is because Chinese glass-makers receive subsidies from the government, as the unions allege, or because the Chinese are simply more efficient matters less to politicians, and to many Americans, than the symbolism of America’s new Freedom Tower being covered in Chinese glass.
China is not alone in seeing Americans as the world’s consumers of last resort, never mind that the recession-induced decline in our trade deficit has already been reversed.
What our trading partners see as the export of goods and services, our politicians, responding to the concerns mirrored in the Massachusetts Senate election, will see as importing unemployment.
True, consumers here benefit from lower-cost imports, even from those subsidized by job-hungry China. They are the winners. Workers, on the other hand, are the losers. And unlike consumers, unions are organized to put pressure on Congress; witness their success in getting special tax treatment for their “Cadillac” health care plans.
Obama and his congressional allies now face a new equation. They would like to pass another stimulus, their favored approach to job creation. And they just might be able to do that, although some Democrats might balk at more spending.
A more certain vote-winner for the Democrats will be the creation of barriers to imports, the beneficiaries of which know who they are, while the losers rarely notice that their pockets have been picked.
So Scott Brown’s victory, whatever else it might portend, is not good news on the trade front.
Examiner Columnist Irwin M. Stelzer is a senior fellow and director of the Hudson Institute’s Center for Economic Studies.
