Time to Lose the Trade Enforcement Fig Leaf

Posted by Daniel Ikenson

During his SOTU address last week, the president declared it a national goal to double our exports over the next five years.  As my colleague Dan Griswold argues (a point that is echoed by others in this NYT article), such growth is probably unrealistic. But with incomes rising in China, India and throughout the developing world, and with huge amounts of savings accumulated in Asia, strong U.S. export growth in the years ahead should be a given—unless we screw it up with a provocative enforcement regime.

The president said:

If America sits on the sidelines while other nations sign trade deals, we will lose the chance to create jobs on our shores. But realizing those benefits also means enforcing those agreements so our trading partners play by the rules.

Ah, the enforcement canard!

One of the more persistent myths about trade is that we don’t adequately enforce our trade agreements, which has given our trade partners license to cheat.  And that chronic cheating—dumping, subsidization, currency manipulation, opaque market barriers, and other underhanded practices—the argument goes, explains our trade deficit and anemic job growth.

But lack of enforcement is a myth that was concocted by congressional Democrats (Sander Levin chief among them) as a fig leaf behind which they could abide Big Labor’s wish to terminate the trade agenda.  As the Democrats prepared to assume control of Congress in January 2007, better enforcement—along with demands for actionable labor and environmental standards—was used to cast their opposition to trade as conditional, even vaguely appealing to moderate sensibilities.  But as is evident in Congress’s enduring refusal to consider the three completed bilateral agreements with Colombia, Panama, and South Korea (which all exceed Democratic demands with respect to labor and the environment), Democratic opposition to trade is not conditional, but systemic.

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Return of the Trade Enforcement Canard

Posted by Daniel Ikenson

In defending its tire tariff decision, the White House has glommed on to the “logic” that free trade first requires enforcement of trade agreements.  Scott Lincicome exposes the absurdity of that defense here. But with that fallacy serving to undergird what sounds like a pre-justification for more trade cases and more trade restrictions, let me remind the reader that we already have 299 active antidumping and countervailing duty measures in the United States, resticting or prohibiting imports from 43 different countries.  We have all sorts of restrictions on imported textiles, clothing, footwear, food products, agricultural commodities, lumber, steel, pickup trucks, tobacco, and many, many more products, including tires.  But despite all of this enforcement–of rules that are hard to justify, as they penalize most members of society for the benefit of a connected few–we still don’t have free trade in the United States.  In other words, we’ve had the enforcement, where’s the free trade?

And if the holier-than-thou U.S. government is going to focus on enforcement of rules, then by all means do unto others.  The United States remains baldly and defiantly in violation of its NAFTA commitments to open U.S. roads to Mexican trucks by the year 2000.  The United States remains defiantly in protest of WTO Dispute Settlement Body decisions impugning U.S. cotton subsidies, U.S. prohibitions on gambling services offered by providers in Antigua, the antidumping calculation methodology known as “zeroing,” and the Byrd Amendment.  Trade partners in some of these cases are either retaliating or have been authorized to do so.

The argument that more rigid enforcement leads to freer trade will be tested.  But don’t let the inevitable slew of new 421 cases and related restictions in the name of enforcement fool you.  After the restrictions, the retaliation, and the adoption of similar measures in other countries, free trade will be right around the corner.  The next corner.  Keep looking…