I used to teach in a small liberal arts college; a very successful liberal arts college. Had it not been successful, it would have been a shrinking liberal arts college. Nobody wanted that, but a lot of people did not want to change, either. Almost every year, someone proposed that the college should not become larger because that would change the nature of the college. And that was so. But the assumption was that what the college used to be, or perhaps precisely what it had become, was what it should remain.
That the college had been founded by church members was significant because there is something in that particular form of religion that is suspicious of change. All one has to do is to imagine what a congregation would do if the preacher were to say that he used to believe in . . . oh, angels, or heaven, or a god who knew everything and who lived forever, but that he had changed his mind. And especially in those churches that define themselves by the ideas they hold, a change in how one thinks of things is dangerous.
The issue with trade--free trade, fair trade, trade agreements, Fortress America--is not whether there will be trade, nor even more trade. It is like living in a small town, and discovering that it is not as small as it used to be. It is becoming a larger place, with more neighbors. When things change, the results are almost certain to be mixed. Some good things are gained, and some lost. Some problems are solved, and some become evident.
One way to deal with change like that is to get a seed-corn cap and embroider a slogan on it: maybe, Make America Great Again, or Build a Wall. Maybe, Make America White Again, or Go Back to Where You Came From.
Everything in the experience of all of us is that we have more neighbors than we used to have; a whole earth full of them! It started a long time ago, when the first waves of emmigrants from Africa walked almost everywhere, into the MidEast, Europe, Asia, and the Americas. Where they could not walk, they sailed. And when walking and sailing began to be a problem, we built better ships, and trains, and planes and even rockets.
It was inevitable that we would discover that we could find food everywhere, and spices on the other side of the globe. It was inevitable that better ships could be built somewhere else, and that ideas were to be found everywhere. In other places, people built steel mills and better cars. Just as the flowers we buy to congratulate our friends are flown in from another continent, our food sources have long travel and trade routes. Our phones and our chocolate are imported. Our clothes are imported. We sell corn and beans to everyone. We sell airplanes and software almost everywhere.
But when the steel mills shut down in Gary and Pittsburgh, they not only moved overseas: they changed, and got better. When the auto production moved to Tennessee and Mexico, the old factories became not just empty, but obsolete. We used to laugh at the small, fuel-efficient cars built in Asia.
The trade is inevitable. The problem is what to do about the people and cities adversely affected by all the neighbors we have to make things we used to make, and even better. Even if all the steel making returned to the MidWest, it would not need all the people who used to make steel. How we make steel has also changed. Robots weld cars together much better than people used to. The pieces fit better. Cars don't rattle, anymore.
Stopping trade, damning trade, vowing to do it all ourselves again, is not just impossible: it isn't even desirable. We have things we want to sell, too.
We have to manage the process: calculate who is being helped, and who is being hurt. It is to our advantage that poor people in Mexico and Vietnam have jobs. The world is small. The effects of poverty cannot be fenced off, not even with "a big, beautiful wall". But it is to no one's advantage to ignore the steelworker's fate, either. The nation is even smaller than the world. When we grow, we have to find ways to alleviate those who are being hurt, too, because they did nothing to deserve the damage they suffer.
It isn't trade that is the problem. The problem is how to manage it to our mutual benefit. The answer is certainly not to go back to an imaginary time that used to be, any more than thinking that the future of a worthwhile college is to do exactly what it used to do when the world was young and truth came in a book.
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