I’ve written several times about the foolish War on Drugs, which has been about as misguided and ineffective as the government’s War on Poverty.

So when I saw a news report about a couple of Swedes getting busted for smuggling 200-plus kilos of contraband into Norway, and then another story about a Russian getting caught trying to sneak 90 kilos of an illicit substance into the country, I wondered whether these were reports about cocaine or marijuana. Or perhaps heroin or crystal meth.

Hardly. Norway’s law enforcement community was protecting people from the horrible scourge of illegal butter.

Sounds absurd, but there’s been an increase in the demand for butter and high import taxes have created a huge incentive for black market butter sales. Here’s a video on this latest example of government stupidity.

I guess the moral of the story is that if you outlaw butter, only outlaws will have butter. Or perhaps butter is the gateway drug leading to whole milk consumption, red meat, salt, and other dietary sins. Surely Mayor Bloomberg will want to investigate.

By the way, the United States is not immune from foolish policies that line the pockets of criminals. Here’s a video from the Mackinac Center revealing how punitive tobacco taxes facilitate organized crime.

Big Government Causes Crime, the Norwegian Version is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Just in time for the Christmas baking season, Norwegians are facing an acute butter shortage. Last Friday, customs officials detained a Russian trying to smuggle 90 kilos of the creamy goodness into the country by car.

Wait. What?!? Isn’t Norway that rich Scandinavian country with all the oil ?

Yup, that’s the one.

Wow… This European debt crisis is already causing shortages of staples?

No, that’s not it.

Huh. I feel silly asking this, but are they at war with someone?

Not as far as we know.

Well what gives then?

The story linked above claims bad weather hurt crops and milk production while demand has risen due to a high fat fad diet.

Well why don’t they just, you know, import more?

That’s what Sweden’s doing—they’ve had similar weather and they’ve got the same diet fad, but their stores (and soon their arteries) are chocked full of butter. But the Norwegians couldn’t do that.

Why on earth not?

Norway has a butter monopolist called “Tine” that is deliberately protected from foreign competitors by government-imposed import tariffs.

Well, with all due respect: duh! We’ve only known the damaging effects of monopolies and protectionism for, like a couple of hundred years. You’d think the Norwegian people would have wised up and ditched them by now. Americans would never stand for that sort of thing.

Norwegians seem pretty angry right now, and it sounds as though they may do just that. But I wouldn’t be too smug about the United States. Turns out, it’s got its own $600 billion per year government protected monopoly that makes Tine look like small potatoes indeed. Here’s a hint:

From Russia with Butter is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

When asked to pick my most frustrating issue, I could list things from my policy field such as class warfare or income redistribution.

But based on all the speeches and media interviews I do, which periodically venture into other areas, I suspect protectionism vs. free trade is the biggest challenge.

So I want to ask the protectionists (though anybody is free to provide feedback) how they would answer these simple questions.

1. Do you think politicians and bureaucrats should be able to tell you what you’re allowed to buy?

As Walter Williams has explained, this is a simple matter of freedom and liberty. If you want to give the political elite the authority to tell you whether you can buy foreign-produced goods, you have opened the door to endless mischief.

2. If trade barriers between nations are good, then shouldn’t we have trade barriers between states? Or cities?

This is a very straightforward challenge. If protectionism is good, then it shouldn’t be limited to national borders.

3. Why is it bad that foreigners use the dollars they obtain to invest in the American economy instead of buying products?

Little green pieces of paper have little value to foreign companies. They only accept those dollars in exchange for products because they intend to use them, either to buy American products or to invest in the U.S. economy. Indeed, a “capital surplus” is the flip side of a “trade deficit.” This generally is a positive sign for the American economy (though I freely admit this argument is weakened if foreigners use dollars to “invest” in federal government debt).

4. Do you think protectionism would be necessary if America did pro-growth reforms such as a lower corporate tax rate, less wasteful spending, and reduced red tape?

There are thousands of hard-working Americans that have lost jobs because of foreign competition. At some level, this is natural in a dynamic economy, much as candle makers lost jobs when the light bulb was invented. But oftentimes American producers can’t meet the challenge of foreign competition because of bad policy from Washington. When I think of ordinary Americans that have lost jobs, I direct my anger at the politicians in DC, not a foreign company or foreign workers.

5. Do you think protectionism would help, in the long run, if we don’t implement pro-growth reforms?

If we travel down the path of protectionism, politicians will use that as an excuse not to implement pro-growth reforms. This condemns America to a toxic combination of two bad policies – big government and trade distortions. This will destroy far more jobs and opportunity that foreign competition.

6. Do you recognize that, by creating the ability to offer special favors to selected industries, protectionism creates enormous opportunities for corruption?

Most protectionism in America is the result of organized interest groups and powerful unions trying to prop up inefficient practices. And they only achieve their goals by getting in bed with the Washington crowd in a process that is good for the corrupt nexus of interest groups-lobbyists-politicians-bureaucrats.

7. If you don’t like taxes, why would you like taxes on imports?

A tariff is nothing but a tax that politicians impose on selected products. This presumably makes protectionism inconsistent with the principles of low taxes and limited government.

8. Can you point to nations that have prospered with protectionism, particularly when compared to similar nations with free trade?

Some people will be tempted to say that the United States was a successful economy in the 1800s when tariffs financed a significant share of the federal government. That’s largely true, but the nation’s rising prosperity surely was due to the fact that we had no income tax, a tiny federal government, and very little regulation. And I can’t resist pointing out that the 1930 Smoot-Hawley tariff didn’t exactly lead to good results.

We also had internal free trade, as explained in this excellent short video on the benefits of free trade, narrated by Don Boudreaux of George Mason University and produced by the Institute for Humane Studies.

My closing argument is that people who generally favor economic freedom should ask themselves whether it’s legitimate or logical to make an exception in the case of foreign trade.

Eight Questions for Protectionists is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

From Pennsylvania, bad news for chocolate lovers:

The Hershey Company says it is raising wholesale prices by 9.7% on most of its candy products. The maker of Reese’s, Kit Kat, Hershey’s Kisses and Twizzlers cited increased costs for raw materials, fuel, utilities and transportation.

The costs of two key raw materials—sugar and dairy products—are artificially inflated by federal government policies, the effect of which is to harm U.S. consumers and U.S. food producers, such as Hershey.

Senator Richard Lugar has introduced legislation to reform U.S. sugar policies. His timing is good, as world food prices are rising and some experts predict that sugar prices will soar in coming years.

The best ways to combat rising food prices—which particular harm people with moderate incomes—are free markets, open international trade, and vigorous competition. Unfortunately, those pro-growth and progressive policies are absent in the U.S. dairy and sugar industries, which are subject to Soviet-style central planning. (See here and here).

A consultant study last year (not commissioned by Hershey) indicated that high corporate taxes are also a negative with respect to Hershey’s U.S. production:

The Hershey Co. will be driven to shift more Pennsylvania manufacturing jobs overseas because of artificially high sugar prices in the U.S. market and the state’s high corporate tax rate, according to a new industry cost study by The Boyd Co.

In an interview, Boyd Co. CEO John Boyd Jr. speculated that Hershey would acquire additional overseas plant capacity through its intended acquisitions in foreign markets and then shift production from its North American plants to lower-cost countries and markets.

A key part of this shift will be to avoid markedly higher sugar prices under U.S. protectionary tariffs and quotas, Boyd said. Candy companies with operations in the U.S. pay about 21 cents a pound for sugar, compared to about 9 cents a pound on the world market

Politicians talk endlessly about jobs, jobs, jobs. But job creation is thwarted in the U.S. food and candy industries by government protectionism, taxes and regulations.

I don’t know the Easter Bunny’s political views, but I bet he would support Senator Lugar’s “Free Sugar Act” to generate more chocolate-making jobs in America.

Easter Bunny’s Burden is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Today being St. Patrick’s Day, it seems appropriate to revisit the unlikely juxtaposition of two of my favorite legal policy topics: alcohol and the Commerce Clause.  (Listen to my podcast on the subject or read its transcript.)  The point of all this is that alcohol is no different from any other commodity in that states cannot erect arbitrary regulations that privilege in-state interests (be they retailers, wholesalers, or producers) ahead of their out-of-state counterparts.

But St. Paddy’s Day is not the only reason the issue is topical.  Last week, the Supreme Court declined to review the Fifth Circuit’s indefensible decision in Wine Country Gift Baskets.com v. Steen. It did so despite the Fifth Circuit’s upholding of a Texas law designed to protect Texas’s in-state liquor retailers from out-of-state competition, a holding that disregarded recent high-court precedent.

In Granholm v. Heald (2005), decided together with the Institute for Justice’s Swedenberg v. Kelly, the Supreme Court struck down a similar protectionist law. Both cases challenged laws that permitted in-state wine producers to sell directly to consumers while prohibiting similar sales from out-of-state producers. The Court held that, notwithstanding a provision in the 21st Amendment (which repealed prohibition) that allows states to regulate their own liquor industries, the Commerce Clause prohibits states from disrupting free trade by discriminating against out-of-state businesses in favor of in-state businesses. This interpretation of the Commerce Clause grew out of the common-sense understanding that, if left unchecked, state governments have strong incentives to protect in-state businesses (who are voters) at the expense of their (non-voting) out-of-state competitors. Without constitutional checks, such laws could eviscerate Congress’s constitutionally enumerated power to “regulate [make regular] commerce … among the several States.”  

Nevertheless, the Fifth Circuit decided to limit Granholm to wine producers. As is evident by the name, however, the Wine Country Gift Baskets.com case concerns a wine retailer. Yet Granholm explicitly said that states “may not enact laws that burden out-of-state producers or shippers simply to give a competitive advantage to in-state businesses.” It is dismaying that the Supreme Court didn’t care about the Fifth Circuit’s neglect of this language.

Granholm was an important blow against the heavily protectionist and cartelized liquor industry. As was documented in a pre-Granholm article in Cato’s Regulation magazine, the prohibition on direct shipment has been used to strangle small wineries as they struggle to access larger markets without having to go through the state-controlled distribution networks. Despite an explosion of wine-drinking and -making in this country in the last 30 years — with consumption increasing by nearly 50% between 1991-2001 and wineries quadrupling between 1974-2002 — the small winery still fights against an old-boy network of producers and distributors. In 2003, the top 30 wine companies still provided 90% of U.S. wine although they were less than 1% of the producers.

This is, of course, exactly how the top 30 wine companies want it.

Granholm dismantled some of this network. Unfortunately, Wine Country Gift Baskets.com will allow this unconstitutional infringement of the right to earn an honest living (see Timothy Sandefur’s excellent book of the same name) to persist in some states.

But Americans, like most of the world, appreciate their booze. During prohibition, Americans endured Tommy-guns, corruption, gangsters, and speakeasies just for a drink. If the government made it illegal to drink responsibly, many Americans were willing to thwart the law and drink irresponsibly.

The negative effects of prohibition were too visible to deny and, after 13 years of waging war on a non-compliant population, prohibition ended. In its wake, however, prohibition left another war, an 80-year “on-going, low-level trade war” (in the words of Granholm) between states and their three-tiered monopolies over the production, distribution, and sale of alcohol. And so, 21st Amendment or not, prohibition lives on — though the  colorful characters in spats carrying Tommy-guns have been replaced by iPad-wielding lobbyists and politicians who do their bidding.

Thanks to Trevor Burrus for his help with this blog post.

On the Interstate Shipment of Green Beer is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The U.S. antidumping law still enjoys broad bipartisan support in Congress and within pockets of the executive branch. Although some of that support can be chalked up to politicians representing the narrow interests of influential constituencies that have mastered the use of antidumping as a bludgeon to cripple the competition, much more support stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of the purpose, history, mechanics, and consequences of the law.

Too many policymakers passively accept the anachronistic rationalizations proffered by the steel industry, labor unions, other big antidumping users, and their hired guns in Washington. Too many buy into the idealized imagery of a patriotic, upstanding American producer working tirelessly to ensure the preservation of well-paying jobs for hard-working Americans, but is suffering the ravages of unscrupulous, predatory foreign traders intent on destroying U.S. firms and monopolizing the U.S. market. What politician could oppose a law presumed to protect that kind of a company against that kind of a scourge?

But when the curtain is peeled back, exposing the reality of the operation of the U.S. antidumping law, one discerns a very different reality.  Antidumping measures always raise the costs of firms in downstream industries that rely on the affected imports.  The law routinely claims domestic firms as victims.  The law is often used as a tool by domestic firms waging battle for supremacy over other domestic firms.  Sometimes foreign-owned firms are the petitioners and U.S-owned firms are the respondents.  Rarely does the law lead to job creation or job restoration in the domestic industry.  And never is the allegation of “unfair trade” substantiated, or even investigated.  Myth and misinformation explains the persistence of the U.S. antidumping regime.

Over the next few months, the Cato Institute’s Center for Trade Policy Studies will shine the spotlight on  U.S. antidumping policy and update its large body of research on the subject by publishing some new papers and hosting discussions about the prospects for meaningful antidumping reform. The new Congress should pay attention.  After all, if renewed talk about completing the Doha Round in 2011 is to become action, so must antidumping reform.

The first of those studies is now available on the Cato home page. That paper describes the evolution of U.S. antidumping policy from an obscure offshoot of competition law into the predominant instrument of contingent protection that it is today and provides an account of some of the crucial statutory and administrative changes that have occurred over the decades. Its purpose is to demonstrate that the increase in antidumping activity reflects several developments that have nothing to do with foreign behavior whatsoever, including a progressive expansion of the definition of dumping, relaxation of evidentiary standards, and a pro-domestic-industry bias in the law’s administration at the U.S. Department of Commerce. The arcane mix of statutory rules and discretionary whims that emerged as contemporary antidumping policy is a far cry from the first antidumping law—in practice and intent. Today, antidumping is little more than an elaborate excuse for run-of-the-mill protectionism. And overwhelmingly, U.S. businesses and consumers are its victims.

Getting Serious about Antidumping Reform in 2011 is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

This has been a tough month so far for President Obama and his policies.

After the “shellacking” that he, his party, and his domestic policies suffered at the hands of American voters last week, his international economic policies were no more popular among his counterparts at the G20 summit this week in Seoul, South Korea.

Even the sympathetic editors at the New York Times declared in a front-page (print edition) headline this morning: “Obama’s Economic View Is Rejected on World Stage: China, Britain and Germany Challenge U.S.—Trade Talks with Seoul Fail, Too.”

The other leaders at the summit were right to reject the president’s demands that China be singled out for its currency policies, as I’ve written before, and the South Korean government was right to reject his demands for changes in the U.S.-Korea trade agreement that has been waiting for more than three years for congressional approval.

Although not perfect, the U.S.-Korea agreement is a solid step forward. As my Cato colleague Doug Bandow wrote in a recent study, the agreement would sharply reduce trade barriers between our two nations while deepening our commercial and security ties with a key democratic ally in the Asian Pacific.

The Koreans rightly refused to substantially alter the sections of the agreement relating to automobiles. The agreement would eliminate tariffs on all automobile trade between the two countries. Ford, Chrysler, and the United Auto Workers union oppose the deal, claiming that it does not address non-tariff barriers that allegedly hinder U.S. exports to the Korean market.

As I posted in this space a few days ago, there are perfectly normal market reasons why Americans buy a lot more Korean cars than vice versa. The real agenda of Ford, Chrysler, and the UAW is not to gain greater access to the Korean market, but to prevent any greater access of their Korean competitors to the U.S. market.

The talks in Seoul this week reportedly foundered on the specific U.S. demand that Korea relax its emission and mileage standards so that U.S. automakers can more easily modify their cars for the Korean market. How ironic. It has become part of the Democratic mantra on trade that agreements must strengthen the environmental and labor standards of our trading partners. Yet here U.S. negotiators were strong-arming the Korean government to weaken its own standards while the Obama administration seeks to impose higher mileage and emission standards on cars sold in the United States.

There is still time to save the U.S.-Korea agreement and to present it to the potentially more trade-friendly Congress that will convene in January. But for now, President Obama has chosen to serve the narrow interests of two domestic automakers and their union rather than the overall economic and strategic interests of the American people.

President Obama Represents UAW Rather Than U.S. in Korea Trade Talks is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

At the beginning of the Obama administration, I had the audacity to hope that the new president would defy conventional wisdom and become a proponent of trade and a good spokesman for its benefits. Scott Lincicome and I even wrote a 20,000-plus word Cato analysis explaining why the economic, geopolitical, and domestic political environment offered the president a unique opportunity to steer his party back to its pro-trade roots.

The thrust of our analysis was that, despite the campaign rhetoric, the president understood the economic benefits of trade and that he would see it as an escape route from recession and a path to political success; that the president’s visibility and new cache with his trade-skeptical political party—and the fact that he wasn’t George W. Bush—made him well-suited to the task of challenging and extinguishing lingering myths about the alleged ravages of trade, while explaining its many benefits; and, that the president would recognize that pro-trade policies should be part of the current Democratic Party platform, if for no other reason than the fact that restrictions governments place on trade harm lower-income Americans and the world’s poor more than they hurt anyone else. (Protectionism is regressive taxation, which is presumably anathema to Democratic Party creed.)

Alas, our study, “Audaciously Hopeful: How President Obama Can Restore the Pro-Trade Consensus,” was just a little too. It fell on deaf ears. It was ignored. In fact, it’s almost as if the past two years of trade policy were conducted to spite the recommendations in that paper.

From this administration, we’ve seen completed bilateral trade agreements sent to an off-site storage warehouse; the imposition of taxes on imported tires; “Buy American” provisions; prohibitions on Mexican trucks; demonization by the president of companies that outsource; defiance of multilateral rules governing use of the antidumping law; and, a “Boardwalk Empire”-style deal to prospectively compensate Brazilian farmers for the lower revenues they should expect on account of the lavish subsidies bestowed by U.S. taxpayers on U.S. cotton producers in lieu of reducing—or better still, halting—cotton subsidies altogether. Yes, the hallmark accomplishment of this administration’s trade policy so far is a deal that requires American taxpayers to subsidize Brazilian cotton producers for the right to continue subsidizing U.S. cotton producers.

Despite all that, I remained audacious (or gullible) enough to hold a glimmer of hope that the president would finally see the wisdom in our advice—given the new political landscape.  That glimmer was snuffed out with publication of an oped in the New York Times this past Saturday, in which President Obama betrays profound misunderstanding of trade and its purpose.  The president portrays trade as an enterprise that is won or lost at the negotiating table, where only the most savvy or most committed negotiators can succeed in bringing home the spoils.  The president promises to fight hard to get Americans their fair shake from this dog-eat-dog process, while actual producers, consumers, workers, and investors are relegated to tertiary roles.

The central dysfunction between Americans and trade is the assumption—reinforced in the president’s op-ed—that exports are good, imports are bad, the trade account is the scoreboard, and our trade deficit means that we are losing at trade. That dysfunction resides comfortably within a zero-sum worldview, which the president touts in a purposeful cadence throughout the oped. In the penultimate sentence, the president writes:

Finally, at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting in Japan, I will continue seeking new markets in Asia for American exports. We want to expand our trade relationships in the region, including through the Trans-Pacific Partnership, to make sure that we’re not ceding markets, exports and the jobs they support to other nations.

By opining about trade without understanding that its real benefits are manifest in imports (here’s Don Boudreax’s elaboration of that process), the president is simply reinforcing myths that will continue to confuse and divide American.  As long as politicians insist that our trade account is a scoreboard and that a surplus is a trade policy success metric, Americans will continue to be skeptical about trade.

President Obama Fails to Understand Trade is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

To make his coming visit to India meaningful, President Obama needs to combat the impression that India fares better with Republican presidents than Democratic ones, because the latter are instinctively more protectionist. In his quest for economic recovery, he has bashed US corporations that outsource jobs to places like India, forbidden companies getting government rescue funds from outsourcing work, and has now enacted higher visa fees for visiting IT professionals which seem designed to hit Indian companies quite specifically. This may be designed to win votes in the Congressional elections, but will not win hearts and minds in India. President Obama needs to state categorically that he will not follow the Great Depression formula of trying to combat unemployment with protectionism.

A better way to create US jobs will be to relax labyrinthine export licensing rules for exports of dual-technology equipment and technology (which can be used for both civilian and defense purposes). India also needs to do its bit by shedding its reputation as world champion in anti-dumping actions (206 in the five years to 2009).

How President Obama Can Make His India Trip Meaningful is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Professor William Easterly, the economic development expert from New York University, has written an excellent comment for the Financial Times online. He writes, “The Millennium Development Goals [summit that wraps up in NY today] tragically misused the world’s goodwill to support failed official aid approaches to global poverty and gave virtually no support to proven approaches. … But current experience and history both speak loudly that the only real engine of growth out of poverty is private business, and there is no evidence that aid fuels such growth.”

At the Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity, we have continuously emphasized the power of trade to help the poor escape poverty. Unfortunately, politicians in rich countries find it easier to waste billions of taxpayers’ dollars in the form of foreign aid than to take on special interests that thrive on trade protectionism; hence European and American agricultural tariffs and subsidies.

However, the impact of rich countries’ protectionism should not be exaggerated. African countries are typically more protectionist than rich countries. In fact, they are more protectionist against one another than against rich countries. The sad truth is that poor countries are perfectly able to shoot themselves in the foot by following growth-killing economic policies – irrespective of what the rich countries do.

Foreign aid, incidentally, has been ineffective at promoting liberalization.

Trade Can Help the Poor Escape Poverty is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

“US manufacturing grows for 13th straight month” is the headline of an AP newswire story posted around noon today.  This statistic doesn’t surprise me, since I’ve been following developments in U.S. manufacturing for many years now, and have published analyses of public data that refute the myth of deindustrialization and manufacturing decline. 

With the exception of the recession of 08-09, when all U.S. economic sectors took a hit, U.S. manufacturing has been breaking its own record, year after year, with respect to output, value-added, profits, returns on investment, exports, and imports. U.S. factories are the world’s most prolific, accounting for 21.4% of global manufacturing value added in 2008 (China accounted for 13.4%).

But I bring the AP headline to your attention for one reason: so that you can judge for yourself who has any credibility on Capitol Hill, within the executive branch, in the media, among organized labor, in industry, in the think tank world, and within the international trade bar, as Nancy Pelosi tries to stuff a ruinous anti-China trade bill down our throats in the name of supporting our floundering manufacturing base.  Look for the columns, the op-eds, the press releases, and the floor statements between next week and November.

Who among them will continue to cite our suffering manufacturing sector as the justification for protectionism?  They should never again have any credibility.

The Rumors of Manufacturing’s Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

As many of you may know, Australia had a federal election on August 21 that yielded an at-time-of-blogging inconclusive result. As a consequence, the Liberal-National coalition (currently in opposition) and the Australian Labor Party are both wooing the Green and Independent members in the hope of securing their support. A Canberra-based friend sent me a link to an article in today’s (or, strictly speaking given the time difference, yesterday’s) Australian about the trade-related aspects of the current negotiations to form a minority government.

I’ll admit, the story had me worried. I’ve bragged before about Australia’s bipartisan political consensus on free trade, and it looked as though that was under threat. According to the article, Labor — the party responsible for much of the unilateral trade liberalization undertaken in the 1980s – was considering “re-erecting tariff walls”:

Yes, modern Labor has degenerated to the point where the Treasurer allows the prospect of protectionist horse-trading to be part of the equation for forming Australia’s next government. And so Australia’s political deadlock threatens to encourage the rise of a new industry protectionism driven by the anti-capitalist Greens in cahoots with left-wing trade unions and rural populism…

A few hours later, a new, happier story was filed on the Australian‘s website:

…Ms Gillard used her press club speech to offer continuity and certainty, but made clear she would not seek [Independent] Mr Katter’s vote by pandering to his passionate rejection of free trade, which he believes has ravaged sectors such as the sugar industry in his north Queensland seat of Kennedy.

“You’re talking to the leader of the political party that literally went to hell and back to modernise the Australian economy, including reducing tariff barriers,” Ms Gillard said.

“That is our heritage, that is our belief, that is in us.

“We would not have the modern resilient Australian economy we have now if Labor had not built it.

I’ll ignore that last preposterous statement about a political party building an economy, and instead focus on the main thrust of Ms. Gillard’s comments, which should come as a relief to free-traders everywhere, especially in Australia.

Free Trade Consensus Remains Intact in Australia is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The Mexican government announced yesterday that it will expand the list of U.S. products subject to punitive import duties in retaliation for a brazen, 15-year-long refusal of the United States to honor its NAFTA commitment to allow Mexican long-haul trucks to compete in the U.S. market.  Given continued U.S. intransigence on the issue, Mexico’s decision is understandable, if not laudable.

The dispute is not very complicated.  Under the terms of the deal, Mexican trucks were to have been able to compete in U.S. border states by 1995, and throughout the United States by 2000.  But President Clinton, at the behest of the Teamsters union, suspended implementation of the trucking provision on the grounds that Mexican trucks weren’t safe enough for U.S. highways.

By 1998, the Mexicans had had enough, and brought a formal complaint under the NAFTA dispute settlement system, and in 2001, prevailed with a unanimous panel decision that found the United States in violation of the agreement, and ruled that Mexican trucks meeting U.S. safety standards had to be given access to the U.S. market.

In response to the NAFTA decision, Congress stipulated 22 safety requirements that Mexican trucks had to satisfy in order to gain access to the U.S. market.  But before the U.S. Department of Transportation could grant any permits to Mexican truckers, in 2002, environmental and labor groups filed a lawsuit to block implementation on the grounds that the regulations violated U.S. environmental law.

In 2004, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously struck down the truck ban, and soon after a government pilot program was developed to allow a limited number of Mexican trucks to serve the U.S. market.  But funding for the pilot program was cut off by a Teamsters-friendly Congress in 2008, which effectively put the U.S. market off limits to Mexican trucks once again—and the United States squarely in violation of its NAFTA obligations, again.

In August 2009, after it became apparent that the administration and Congress preferred the economic cost of the trucking ban to the political cost of crossing the Teamsters, the Mexican government tried to change the equation by imposing $2.4 billion in retaliatory duties on about 90 U.S. products.  A Mexican trucking association also filed a $6-billion lawsuit against the U.S. government.

But with no discernible progress toward resolution over the past year, the Mexican government announced yesterday that it will expand the list of U.S. products subject to punitive, retaliatory duties in an effort to convince Congress and the administration to finally live up to America’s word.

The Mexican government is right to retaliate—and to expand the list of products subject to punitive duties.  Of course, retaliation hurts innocents, like U.S. businesses and workers, and Mexican businesses and consumers, who have nothing to do with the central dispute.  And it increases the amount of red tape and the role of governments in international trade.  But retaliation—when authorized by agreement and properly targeted—can also be an effective tool in promoting trade liberalization, reducing red tape, and diminishing the impositions of government.

It is by changing the political calculus that retaliation can be effective.  Thus far, U.S. politicians have found the economic costs of the Mexican trucking ban and the retaliation to be tolerable (for themselves)—at least relative to the expected political costs from doing the right thing by ending the ban.  By expanding the list to include other products, like oranges, the Mexicans hope to impress upon other U.S. interests, like the citrus industry in a very important swing state, that they have dogs in this fight as well.

Between the rising costs on the economic side of the equation and the diminishing political benefits on the other, support among politicians for the truck ban should dissipate.

The Obama administration’s failure to connect the dots is surprising.  Its fealty to the Teamsters directly undermines the lofty goals of its National Export Initiative—which seeks to double U.S. exports in five years.  On trade policy, the administration appears yet to fully grasp that the hip bone’s connected to the thigh bone, the thigh bone’s connected to the knee bone, the knee bone’s connected to the ankle bone, etc.  When you restrict imports (in the immediate case, imports of Mexican trucking services), you restrict exports.

The rising economic and political costs of the truck ban suggest that something’s going to have to give soon.  By amplifying the stakes, the Mexicans are right to hasten that day.

Mexican Retaliation for U.S. Truck Ban is Proper is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Steven Pearlstein’s ready for the nuclear option.  With the conviction of a man who knows he won’t be held accountable for the consequences of his prescriptions, Pearlstein says the time has come for action against China.  Hopefully, those whose fingers are actually near the button will recognize Pearlstein’s suggestion for what it is: an outburst of frustration over what he considers China’s insubordination.

In his Washington Post business column yesterday, Pearlstein criticizes U.S. policymakers for blindly adhering to the view that China will inevitably transition to democratic capitalism, while they’ve excused market-distorting protectionism, mercantilism, and state dominance over the economy in China.  Pearlstein writes:

Up to now, a succession of administrations has argued against directly challenging China over its mercantilist policies, figuring it would be more effective in the long run to let the economic relationship grow deeper and give the Chinese the time and respect their culture demands to make the inevitable transition to democratic capitalism.

What we have discovered, however, is that the Chinese don’t view the transition as inevitable and that, in any case, they really aren’t much interested in relationships. If anything, they’ve proven to be relentlessly transactional. And their view of business and economics remains so thoroughly mercantilist that they not only can’t imagine any other way, but assume that everyone else thinks the way they do. To try to convince them otherwise is folly.

Pearlstein’s suggestion that the Chinese “aren’t much interested in relationships” strikes me as frustration over the fact that China is no longer a U.S. supplicant.  Perhaps the truth is that China isn’t much interested in a one-way relationship, where it is expected to meet all U.S. demands, while seeing its own wishes ignored.  Calling them “relentlessly transactional” is accusing them of naivety for missing the bigger picture, which, for Pearlstein, is that the U.S. is still top dog and China ignores that at its peril. 

Pearlstein is not the first columnist to criticize the Chinese government for putting its interests ahead of America’s (or, more accurately, putting what it believes to be its best interests ahead of what U.S. policymakers believe to be in their own interests).  In a recent Cato policy paper titled Manufacturing Discord: Growing Tensions Threaten the U.S.-China Economic Relationship, I was addressing opinion leaders who have staked out positions similar to Pearlstein’s when I wrote:

Lately, the media have spilled lots of ink over the proposition that China has thrived at U.S. expense for too long, and that China’s growing assertiveness signals an urgent need for aggressive U.S. policy changes….

One explanation for the change in tenor is that media pundits, policymakers, and other analysts are viewing the relationship through a prism that has been altered by the fact of a rapidly rising China.  That China emerged from the financial meltdown and subsequent global recession wealthier and on a virtually unchanged high-growth trajectory, while the United States faces slow growth, high unemployment, and a large debt (much of it owned by the Chinese), is breeding anxiety and changing perceptions of the relationship in both countries….

Of course, the U. S. is the larger economy and the chief designer of the still-prevailing global economic architecture.  But the implication that that distinction immunizes the U. S. from costly repercussions if U.S. sanctions were imposed against China is foolish.  But that’s exactly where Pearlstein’s going when he writes:

Getting this economic relationship back into balance is the single biggest challenge to the global economy, not just because of its direct effects on China and the United States, but the indirect effects it has on the rest of the world. The alternative is a return to living beyond our means, a further erosion of our industrial and technological base and a continued loss of ownership of business and financial assets.

By balancing the economic relationship, presumably Pearlstein is speaking about the need to reduce the bilateral trade deficit, which spurs a net outflow of dollars to China, some of which the Chinese lend back to Americans, who in turn can then buy more imports from China, and the cycle continues.  But to tip the scales in favor of the blunt force action he recommends later, Pearlstein characterizes Chinese investment in the United States as living beyond our means, losing ownership of “our” assets, and eroding our industrial and technological base.  That is a paternalistic and inaccurate characterization of the dynamics of capital inflows from China.

First, let’s remember that the Chinese aren’t holding a gun to the heads of the chairs of our congressional appropriations committees demanding that politicians borrow and spend more on senseless programs.  It’s absolutely priceless when spendthrift members of Congress, oblivious to the irony, blame the Chinese for having caused the U.S. financial crisis for providing cheap credit to fuel asset bubbles when it was their own profligacy that brought the Chinese to U.S. debt markets in the first place.  Stop deficit spending and the need to borrow from China (or anywhere else) goes away. 

Likewise, it is a sad commentary on the state of individual responsibility in the U.S. when a prominent business writer thinks the only way to keep consumers from living beyond their means is to deprive their would-be-creditors of capital.  It sounds a bit like the same tactics deployed in the U.S. War on Drugs.  Blame the suppliers.  The fact that U.S. savings rates have been rising for two years suggests that responsible Americans are interested in rebuilding their assets without need of such measures.

There are other destinations for capital inflows from China, which (despite Pearlstein’s disparaging allusions) should be entirely unobjectionable.  Chinese investment in U.S. corporate debt, equities markets, real estate markets, and direct investment in U.S. manufacturing and services industries does not erode our industrial and technological base.  It enhances it.  It does not constitute a loss of ownership of business and financial assets, but rather a mutual exchange of assets at an agreed price.  When Chinese investors compete as buyers in U.S. markets, the value of the assets in those markets rises, which benefits the owners of those assets when there is an exchange.  Chinese purchases of anything American, with the exception of debt, do not constitute claims on the future.  Accordingly, the economic relationship can achieve the much vaunted need for rebalancing without need of attempting to forcefully reduce the trade deficit by restraining imports.

Pearlstein continues:

So if the urgent need is to rebalance the global economy by rebalancing the U.S.-China economic relationship, we are probably going to have to begin this process on our own. And that means establishing some sort of tariff regime that will increase the cost of imports not just from China, but other countries that keep their currencies artificially low, restrict the flow of capital or maintain significant barriers to imports of goods and services. The proceeds of those tariffs should be used to encourage exports in some fashion…

This relationship, however, is one that must be actively managed by the two governments. It should be obvious by now that their government is rather effective at managing their end of things. It should be equally obvious that we cannot continue to rely on free markets to manage our end.

So Pearlstein comes full circle.  He wants the U. S. to impose tariffs on Chinese imports, subsidize U.S. exports, and institute top-down industrial policy.  In other words, he wants the U.S. to be more like China. 

Of course, I would argue, we already have something that encourages exports.  They’re called imports.  Over half of the value of U.S. imports are intermediate goods—capital equipment, components, raw materials—that are used by American-based producers to make goods for their customers in the U. S. and abroad.  Furthermore, foreigners need to be able to sell to Americans if they are going to have the dollars to buy products from Americans.  And finally, if the U.S. implements trade restrictions on China to compel currency revaluation or anything else, retaliation against U.S. exports is a given.

In short, imports are a determinant of exports.  If you impede imports, you impede exports.  So Pearlstein’s idea that we can somehow subsidize exports by taxing and reducing imports is not particularly well-considered.  And though it may be tempting to look at China’s economic success as an endorsement or vindication of industrial policy, it is difficult to discern how much of China’s growth can be attributed to central planning, and how much has happened despite it.  But in the U.S., where one of our unique and core strengths has been the relative dynamism that has produced more inventions, more patents, more actionable industrial ideas, more freeedom, and more wealth than at any other time in any other nation-state in the world, it would be imprudent bordering on reckless to suppress those synergies in the name of industrial policy.

In the end, I rather doubt that Pearlstein is truly on board with the course of action he suggests.  In response to a question presented to him on the Washington Post live web chat yesterday about how the Chinese would react if his proposal were implemented, Pearlstein wrote:

They’d make a huge stink. They’d cancel some contracts. They’d slap on some tariffs of their own. They’d launch an appeal with the World Trade Organization. It would not be costless to us — getting into fights never is. But after a year, once they saw we were serious, they would find a way to begin accomodating [sic] us in significant ways, and if we respond with a positive tit for tat, things could finally improve. They’ve been testing us for years and what they discovered was that we were easy to push around. So guess what — they pushed us around.

I’m willing to chalk up Pearlstein’s diatribe to pent-up frustration.  But let me end with this admonition from that May Cato paper:

 [I]ndignation among media and politicians over China’s aversion to saying “How high?” when the U.S. government says “Jump!” is not a persuasive argument for a more provocative posture.  China is a sovereign nation.  Its government, like the U.S. government, pursues policies that it believes to be in its own interests (although those policies—with respect to both governments—are not always in the best interests of their people).  Realists understand that objectives of the U.S. and Chinese governments will not always be the same, thus U.S. and Chinese policies will not always be congruous.  Accentuating and cultivating the areas of agreement, while resolving or minimizing the differences, is the essence of diplomacy and statecraft.  These tactics must continue to underpin a U.S. policy of engagement with China.

Pearlstein Wants Tough Trade Measures Against China…and the U.S. is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Further to Tom Palmer’s illuminating post entitled “How to Explain Free Trade in Less Than Three Minutes,” let me add that, occasionally, skeptical professors, teachers, and our favorite protectionists muster up retorts to our sensible arguments.  And sometimes further elaboration and exposition are necessary before we can convincingly dispense with those objections.

For those occasions, you will be happy to have been acquainted with the work of the Cato Institute’s Center for Trade Policy Studies, which has been producing arrows for free trade quivers for 12 years.  Given the persistence of myths that feed trade’s skeptics, eradication of protectionism requires that our arguments appeal to those who can be convinced in three minutes, as well as those who may be more stubborn.

Explaining Free Trade and Convincing Its Critics is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Indeed, every improved product or service may make us no longer value products and services we previously used. That’s what Schumpeter called “creative destruction.” A longer version of the same phenomenon was on the front page of Monday’s Wall Street Journal, in an article about how Wal-Mart’s rivals secretly fund “grassroots local campaigns” against Wal-Mart, organized by political consulting firms, to protect the existing firms’ positions. Every innovator puts somebody out of business, as Agnes’s friend recognizes.

Political Economy in Three Panels is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

In a Cato paper released earlier this month, I argued that the glacial pace of America’s economic recovery and its growing public debt juxtaposed against China’s almost uninterrupted double-digit annual economic growth and its role as Congress’s sugar daddy have bred insecurity among U.S. opinion leaders, many of whom now advocate a more strident approach to China, or emulation of its top-down approach.

I cite, among others, Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, who is enamored of autocracy’s capacity to facilitate China’s singularity of purpose to dominate the industries of the future:

One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century. It is not an accident that China is committed to overtaking us in electric cars, solar power, energy efficiency, batteries, nuclear power, and wind power. China’s leaders understand that in a world of exploding populations and rising emerging-market middle classes, demand for clean power and energy efficiency is going to soar. Beijing wants to make sure that it owns that industry and is ordering the policies to do that, including boosting gasoline prices, from the top down.

Friedman’s theme—but less googoo eyed and more all-hands-on-deck!—is echoed in an op-ed by China-expert James McGregor, which ran in yesterday’s Washington Post.  McGregor conveys what he describes as an emerging sentiment within the U.S. business community in China.  That is: the Chinese government is hell bent on creating national economic champions; is using its increasing leverage (as global financier and fastest-growing market) to impose its own interpretations of the global rules of economic engagement in support of its comprehensive industrial policy, and, ultimately; the United States must wake up and rise to the challenge by crafting some top-down industrial policy of its own.

I don’t dispute some of McGregor’s premises.  China’s long process of market liberalization has slowed down, halted, and even reversed in some areas.  Policies are proliferating that favor local companies (particularly state-owned enterprises), hamper the operations of foreign-owned firms, and impede market access for imports.  Indeed, many of these policies are likely the product of industrial planning. 

But McGregor’s conclusion is extreme:

The time has come for a White House-led, public-private, comprehensive examination of American competitiveness against a clear-eyed view of China’s very smart and comprehensive industrial development policies and plans…What technology do we protect? What do we share? What are our commercial strategic imperatives as a nation? How do we retool the U.S. government’s inadequate and outdated trade bureaucracy to provide thoughtful strategic focus and interagency coordination? How do we overcome the fundamental disconnect between our system of scattered bureaucratic responsibilities and almost no national economic planning vs. China’s top-down, disciplined and aggressive national economic development planning machine?

Central planning may be more en vogue in Washington than usual nowadays, but to even come close to reaching his conclusion requires disregarding many facts, which is how McGregor gets there sans tongue in cheek.

First, in an effort to preempt any suggestion that China’s protectionism is nothing exceptional and can be remedied through the World Trade Organization and other channels, McGregor offers this blanket statement: “Chinese policymakers are masters of creative initiatives that slide through the loopholes of WTO and other international trade rules.”  I realize that op-ed writing forces one to economize on words, but that statement, which serves as McGregor’s springboard to socialism, cannot suffice for an analysis of the facts.  One of those facts is that the United States has been successful in compelling changes in China’s protectionist practices in all of the formal WTO disputes it has lodged that have been resolved thus far (6 of 8 formal cases have been resolved).  If China violates the agreed rules of trade, and its actions impair benefits or impose costs on U.S. interests that are too large to ignore, pursuing a WTO case is a legitimate and proven channel of resolution. Chinese protectionism can be addressed without the radical changes McGregor counsels. 

But I think McGregor—sharing the tactics of other in the media and politics—exploits public angst over a rising China to promote his idea as the obvious and only solution to what he sells as a rapidly-metastasizing problem.  McGregor argues that China is aiming to create national champions through subsidies and other preferential policies, while charging foreign companies admission to its market in the form of technology transfer, joint-venturing requirements, and local content rules.  McGregor claims, that this appropriation of foreign technology will be used to “create Chinese ‘indigenous innovations’ that will come back at us globally.”  Ultimately, McGregor fears that “American technology companies could be coerced to plant the seeds of their destruction in the fertile China market.”

It is telling that McGregor doesn’t consider U.S. government expropriation of those companies’ technology assets as planting the seeds of their own destruction.  Indeed, it is nothing short of expropriation when technology that is owned by individual companies in the private sector, making unique decisions to improve their own bottom-lines on behalf of their own shareholders is suddenly subject to the questions McGregor wants answered: What technology do we protect? What do we share? What are our commercial strategic imperatives as a nation?  Those questions, let alone the answers, imply that the U.S. government should have at least de facto ownership and control over these privately-held technology assets.

What is wrong with allowing each of these companies to decide for themselves whether they want to license or transfer some of their technology to Chinese companies, as the price of doing business in China?  Some will, some won’t, but the presupposition that those who do are selling the golden goose is not based on fact.  Let companies decide for themselves how to use their resources, and don’t treat industry as a monolith, as in “What are our commercial strategic imperatives as a nation?” 

Had we tried to answer and implement the answer to that question in the face the Japanese “threat” two decade ago, we’d be bereft of some of the most ingenious technological breakthroughs and the hundreds of industries and thousands of products that “our system of almost no national economic planning” has yielded.

When we peel away the chicken-little rhetoric, when we dispense with neo-Rahm Emanualism (“Never manufacture a good crisis and then let it go to waste”), when cooler heads and analytical minds prevail, the economic question boils down to this: What has been more successful at creating growth, central planning or decentralized dynamism?  For both China and the United States, it has been the latter. 

My bet is that China’s re-embrace of greater central planning will be brief, as it wastes resources, yields few -if any- national champions, and limits innovation.  For similar reasons, U.S. opinion leaders will eschew central planning, as well.

Beware of Americans Proselytizing the Chinese Economic Model is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

I see that my colleague Sallie James has already blogged on the inherent protectionism in the Senate’s long-awaited cap-and-tax bill.  A summary was leaked last night by The Hill.

Well, we now have the real “discussion draft” of  “The American Power Act” [APA], sponsored by John Kerry (D-NH) and Joe Lieberman (I-CT).  Lindsay Graham (R-SC) used to be on the earlier drafts, but excused himself to have a temper tantrum.

So, while Sallie talked about the trade aspects of the bill, I’d like to blather about the mechanics, costs, and climate effects. If you don’t want to read the excruciating details, stop here and note that it mandates the impossible, will not produce any meaningful reduction of planetary warming, and it will subsidize just about every form of power that is too inefficient to compete today.

APA reduces emissions to the same levels that were in the Waxman-Markey bill passed by the House last June 26.  Remember that one — snuck through on a Friday evening, just so no one would notice?  Well, people did, and it, not health care, started the angry townhall meetings last summer.  No accident, either, that Obama’s approval ratings immediately tanked.

Just like Waxman-Markey, APA will allow the average American the carbon dioxide emissions of the average citizen back in 1867, a mere 39 years from today.  Just like Waxman-Markey, the sponsors have absolutely no idea how to accomplish this.  Instead they wave magic wands for noncompetitive technologies like “Carbon Capture and Sequestration” (“CCS”, aka “clean coal”), solar energy and windmills, and ethanol (“renewable energy”), among many others.

Just like Waxman-Markey, no one knows the (enormous) cost.  How do you put a price on something that doesn’t exist?  We simply don’t know how to reduce emissions by 83%.  Consequently, APA is yet another scheme to make carbon-based energy so expensive that you won’t use it.

This will be popular!  At $4.00 a gallon, Americans reduced their consumption of gasoline by a whopping 4%.  Go figure out how high it has to get to drop by 83%.

Oh, I know. Plug-in hybrid cars will replace gasoline powered ones. Did I mention that the government-produced Chevrolet Volt is, at first, only going to be sold to governments and where it is warm because even the Obama Administration fears that the car will not be very popular where most of us live.  Did I mention that the electric power that charges the battery most likely comes from the combustion of a carbon-based fuel? Getting to that 83% requires getting rid of carbon emissions from power production.  Period.  In 39 years. Got a replacement handy?

Don’t trot out natural gas.  It burns to carbon dioxide and water, just like coal.  True, it’s about 55% of the carbon dioxide that comes from coal per unit energy, but we’ll also use a lot more more electricity over the next forty years.  In other words, switching to natural gas will keep adding emissions to the atmosphere.

Anyway, just for fun, I plugged the APA emissions reduction schedule into the Model for the Assessment of Greenhouse-gas Induced Climate Change (MAGICC — I am not making this up), which is what the United Nations uses to estimate the climatic effects of various greenhouse-gas scenarios.

I’ve included two charts with three scenarios. One is for 2050 and the other for 2100.  They assume that the “sensitivity” of temperature to a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide is 2.5°C, a number that many scientists think is too high, given the pokey greenhouse-effect warming of the planet that has occurred as we have effectively gone half way to a doubling already. The charts show prospective warming given by MAGICC.

The first scenario is “business-as-usual”, the perhaps too-optimistic way of saying a nation without APA.  The second assumes that only the US does APA, and the third assumes that each and every nation that has “obligations” under the UN’s Kyoto Protocol on global warming does the same.

As you can plainly see,  APA does nothing, even if all the Kyoto-signatories meet its impossible mandates.  The amount of warming “saved” by 2100 is 7% of the total for Business-as-Usual, or two-tenths of a degree Celsius. That amount will be barely detectable above the year-to-year normal fluctuations.  Put another way, if we believe in MAGICC, APA — if adopted by us, Europe, Canada, and the rest of the Kyotos — will reduce the prospective temperature in 2100 to what it would be in 2093.

That’s a big if.  Of course, we could go it alone. In that case, the temperature reduction would in fact be too small to measure reliably.

I’m hoping these numbers surface in the “debate” over APA.

So there you have it, the new American Power Act, a bill that doesn’t know how to achieve its mandates, has a completely unknown but astronomical cost, and doesn’t do a darned thing about global warming.  Such a deal!

Kerry and Lieberman Unveil Their Climate Bill: Such a Deal! is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The Kerry-Lieberman-Graham (is he still part of these efforts?) climate bill summary has been leaked. I’m sure my colleague Pat Michaels will weigh in on its contents soon, but in the meantime I thought I would comment on the trade-related aspects of the bill, or at least the summary that is now in the public domain.

As Scott Lincicome points out, the drafters have gone to great pains to emphasize that this bill is, like, totally about saving the environment.  (Which, by the way, is a bit of a turnaround). I’ve blogged before about why advocates of “border adjustment measures” need to be careful about the justification they offer.  In short, the World Trade Organization does not look too kindly upon disguised protectionism, and any legal challengers would probably use things like, say, press releases touting the (traditional) protective benefits of carbon tariffs as evidence of U.S. wrongdoing. The House bill fell short in that regard, with lots of talk about equalizing costs etc, and apparently the sponsors of the Senate bill have learned from warnings from trade experts. Not completely, though. Here’s Scott on their efforts to be more careful, and why they fall short:

The bill’s short summary (available here) also follows [a] new “green” road-map…:

In order to protect the environmental goals of the bill, we phase in a WTO-consistent border adjustment mechanism. In the event that no global agreement on climate change is reached, the bill requires imports from countries that have not taken action to limit emissions to pay a comparable amount at the border to avoid carbon leakage and ensure we are able to achieve our environmental objectives.

You couldn’t shoehorn more “environmental” references into this summary if you tried.  Only one small problem: this strictly “environmental” summary falls clearly under the main heading “Expanding America’s Manufacturing Base,” and the long summary of Sections 775-777 above comes under the main heading “Subtitle A – Protecting American Manufacturing Jobs and Preventing Carbon Leakage.”  So did the Senate drafters really just take all that time purging all of the scary “competitiveness” language from their new bill’s carbon tariffs provisions, only to keep them under a legislative subtitle that expressly denotes provisions dealing with domestic industrial competitiveness?

Scott’s right, but I found the heading in the bill’s long summary even more blatant: Title IV, under which the international provisions are explained, is called “Job Protection and Growth”. Call me overly cautious, but I don’t think having the phrase “job protection” as the first words in the title on border measures is a good way to hide your intent from the WTO or, for that matter, your increasingly-fractious trade partners.

Senate Climate Bill Trade FAIL is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Sen. Sherrod Brown (D, OH), along with eight other “usual suspects,” yesterday sent a letter to Senators John Kerry (D, MA), Joe Lieberman (I, CT) and Lindsey Graham (R, SC), outlining what’s necessary for their support of the latter’s climate green jobs bill (there seems to be some confusion about the precise purpose). The math, assuming that Republicans vote as a block to defeat the bill, requires that these senators’ demands be met if the Democrats are to overcome a filibuster and pass the bill.

So what exactly do they want? The main thrust of their demands seems to be for U.S. manufacturing’s competitiveness to be “addressed,” including by asking for the bill to “invest” (don’t you just love the way that word is used in the public policy context?) in retooling, R&D, and “support [for] American manufacturers of clean energy technology,” among other requirements.

Of course, no letter from these folks* would be complete without the obligatory  calls for a “level playing field.” Their wish-list therefore also includes provisions to ”apply border measures to prevent carbon leakage”. That, my friends, is a clear reference to carbon tariffs. The senators explain their concerns as follows:

An automatically triggered border measure is necessary to promote comparable action from other countries and prevent carbon leakage. To avoid undermining the environmental objective of the climate legislation, a WTO-consistent border adjustment measure, which the WTO has recognized as a usable tool in combating climate change, should apply to imports from countries that do not have in place comparable greenhouse gas emissions reduction requirements to those adopted by the United States. A border adjustment measure is critical to ensuring that climate change legislation will be trade neutral and environmentally effective.

Much of these sentiments are familiar. Indeed, I have combatted some of the myths implicit in the statement, including why “carbon leakage” might be a bit of a red herring, in my paper from September 2009, “A Harsh Climate for Trade,” and at a Hill brief I gave on this topic last year.

There are a couple of new and interesting things here, though. First, the  almost convincing attempt by these senators to cloak their protectionism in green-speak about the need to ensure that climate legislation is environmentally effective. They will have to keep that up, too, if they are to stay on the right side of WTO law, which says there must be a clear link between a trade measure and an environmental purpose if the measure is to be at least prima facie legitimate.  Imposing border measures to address adverse competitiveness effects of domestic environmental regulations, in other words, probably won’t cut it. (“A Harsh Climate” has more on why unilateral border actions may in and of themselves be inconsistent with WTO obligations.)

Second, and related to the issue of WTO legitimacy,  is the reference to the WTO “recogniz[ing]” border adjustment measures as “a useable tool in combating climate change.” This is disengenuous and possibly misleading rhetoric from the senators, because the WTO has done no such thing. There has been no formal ruling on this issue from any WTO judicial body, because no such cases have come before it. The WTO members as a group have not issued a proclaimation on it, either. I suspect the senators are referring to a joint WTO/United Nations Environment Programme report that came out last year, but as I said in my paper, that report “merely summarizes the relevant provisions, precedents and existing literature on the question on WTO consistency–without reaching any prescriptive conclusion at all.” And the demand that this tool be “automatically triggered” may put it at odds with jurisprudence that says that certain administrative procedures–including the right for a WTO member to review and appeal any decisions made–must be followed (reference for the trade wonks reading this: I am referring to Shrimp-Turtle). 

In sum, while the senators are at least trying to appear as if they give two straws about international obligations (and for small mercies we should be grateful, I guess), I’m not convinced they fully understand the implications of their proposal. Shocking, I know.

* The first letter sent by the group let by Sherrod Brown was signed by Senators Russ Feingold (D, WI), Jay Rockefeller (D, WV), and Al Franken (D, MN). Those senators did not sign the latest letter, and were “replaced” by substitute protectionists Claire McCaskill (D, MO), Kay Hagan (D, NC), and Mark Warner (D, VA).

Ten Protectionist Senators Pay Lip-Service to International Trade Rules is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog