You can learn a lot from
history, unless you’re Pat Buchanan.
In a Dec. 23 segment on
MSNBC’s “Hardball” about the struggling American auto manufacturers, the
three-time presidential candidate launched into a tirade about globalization –
that is, how imported automobiles from other nations have forced American
automakers into an unsustainable competition.
“The problem is we want the
highest paid workers in the world. We want them to have the most benefits, the
safest, most protected factories,” Buchanan said. “We don’t want to put them
into head-to-head competition with Chinese or in unsafe factories making $2 an
hour. The problem is globalization.”
Buchanan’s solution isn’t a
bailout for the automakers, which potentially could go away and leave 1.8
million unemployed by one
Michigan consulting firm’s estimate. He wants the nation to enact
protectionism and become wholly self-sufficient.
“The problem is globalism,”
Buchanan continued. “We used to make everything in this country … In 1781
Alexander Hamilton -- they had French musket, French uniforms, French
ships. He said we’ve got to be economically independent if we’re to be
politically independent. He structured an economic system called protectionism
– put it in every Republican platform until 1948. That’s how we became the
greatest manufacturing power the world has ever of seen, producing everything
we consumed here, and the Americans had the highest standard of living the
world had ever seen. It can be done. It was done.”
But the last time the United States put up trade barriers in a time of economic
fragility was the infamous Smoot-Hawley Act signed into law by President
Herbert Hoover. Edward Goldberg, a consultant on international trade and
professor of international marketing at the Zicklin Graduate School of
Business, Baruch College of the City University of New York, explained how this made matter
worse.
“President Hoover, against
the recommendations of most of the major economists and industrialists, signed
Smoot-Hawley into law on June 17, 1930,” Goldberg wrote
for The Washington Times on Nov. 17. “The law raised tariffs to record
levels on more than 20,000 imported goods. America’s trading partners retaliated immediately by
dramatically increasing their own tariffs. The U.S. export market subsequently collapsed, falling by
more than half, and the jobs that depended on those exports disappeared.
International trade froze, helping the recession of 1929 become the Great
Depression.”
