Mark Muller: Free trade isn't up to the task of making America thrive

Minneapolis Star Tribune
January 25, 2008
By MARK MULLER

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In his recent article ("Free trade helps Americans more than it hurts," Jan. 17), Steven Landsburg criticized Republican presidential candidates for pandering to displaced workers in Michigan, counter to the free-trade dogma that he supports. We have benefited greatly from the cheap products that international free trade provides, he asserted. Can't these politicians leave well enough alone and let us all be thankful for everyday low prices?

Landsburg is a professor at the University of Rochester in New York. I grew up outside of town there, and it's a region I know well. Were there any suitable jobs in the region, I might never have left. To understand why candidates feel the need to pander about job losses, I suggest that Landsburg take a short drive north and west of the campus.

Like many Rust Belt cities, Rochester has suffered shocking urban decay. Certainly, the social upheaval of the 1960s and '70s was a large driver for the urban decline. But like a good Band-Aid, a strong economy has mended these social conflicts in other parts of the country.

As Landsburg drives outside the Rochester city limits, he would pass the enormous Kodak manufacturing facilities that once employed my father, my uncle, and for one summer, me. But Kodak and Xerox (also based in Rochester) have struggled in a new global marketplace and have shed local jobs in favor of production elsewhere.

In Rochester, my father's generation joked that Kodak was growing so quickly that someone simply needed to walk and chew gum to get a job there. My generation jokes that we might as well have our class reunions in North Carolina because everyone seemed to be moving south for jobs.

Traveling west out of Rochester, Landsburg would soon come to several towns well-known for apple production. But since China crushed the market with incredibly cheap apple juice concentrate, the apple industry has languished. Many orchards close to Rochester have become housing developments; some have been replaced for lower-value corn production, and others just lie dormant.

And then, just north of the orchards is massive Lake Ontario, which creates the microclimate that allows apples to thrive, as well as the water supply that attracted so much industry in the 19th and 20th centuries. But due to pollution and to the decline in several fish species, commercial fishing no longer exists. Since Rochester isn't using much of the water, corporations and other regions of the country have proposed taking the water somewhere else. Our proud Great Lakes economy has reached the point where selling off natural resources is an economically attractive option.

Landsburg implies that policymakers in regions like Rochester should simply let the market work, despite the questionable track record of that strategy. Of course, I get excited about great deals when I'm shopping, but I do take umbrage at a narrowly focused economist criticizing desperately needed local economic-development strategies.

We're not going to get very far by selling fast food to each other. Economies need production, whether it is agricultural products, manufactured goods, computer software or tourism. Reducing our economy to exclusively cheap prices denigrates labor, devalues family and community, and ignores quality of life.

Unlike Landsburg, I applaud proposals that bring value back to our communities. Getting government out of the economy does not create a free market -- it just leaves the market to the whims of the multinational corporations. Low prices are not enough.

Mark Muller is the director of the Environment and Agriculture program at the Minneapolis-based Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy.

NOTICE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this information for research and educational purposes.

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