“It is an inevitability,” Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., told an audience in India in 2005. “There is no way to legislate against reality, and I think the outsourcing will continue.”
She was referring to a trend that existed then as it does now. U.S. companies hire foreign workers in developing countries to do low-skill jobs that Americans once did.
Not all foreign hiring is true “outsourcing.” In many cases, companies expand their operations overseas to sell there. But actual outsourcing occurs sometimes too. The American economy is not and never has been static, otherwise the makers of kerosene lamps and buggy whips would thrive today as they did 100 years ago.
Lower-skill jobs that can move but cannot be done by machines gravitate toward developing nations with cheaper, less-educated workforces. Governments cannot stop this without doing more harm than good.
As jobs that require fewer skills find workers who have fewer skills, Americans enter the job market now with more formal education than in the past.
Change brings instability, but benefits too. Open trade has dramatically reduced the amount of time Americans must work in order to afford basic necessities. It has freed up huge markets into which Americans sell goods and services, resulting in more employment in other fields.
The excoriated North American Free Trade Agreement, which Clinton and her husband both once supported, has quintupled exports to Mexico. From that nation alone, this means there is an additional $200 billion of annual business making its way back into investment and hiring in America.
Free trade helps American manufactures more than it hurts it. Protection of the domestic steel industry has been very damaging for American car makers, who have to buy steel at higher prices as a result.
Clinton used to tell the truth about trade. She once understood, as her comment quoted above makes plain, that government cannot protect workers from international competition without imposing steeper prices on those whom it intends to help.
But today, candidate Clinton sings a different tune. Running for president, and at a point in the campaign which she wants to woo voter in the Midwestern Rust Belt primaries, she is deploying the same kind of trade demagoguery as Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders.
Just before the primary in Michigan, which she narrowly lost, she warned companies, “If you desert America, you’ll pay a price.” She has flip-flopped on the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which she advocated vociferously as secretary of state and referred to as one of her most important accomplishments.
When voters hear Clinton speak on this topic, they need to know that America’s second-least-trusted presidential candidate is peddling a fantasy that even she doesn’t really believe in.
