Regarding my previous post on this topic, 2 emails:

1) “Interesting–just curious, does George Will e.g. think that persons who lose jobs to domestic competition are less entitled to help than persons who lose them to foreign trade?

“Haven’t studied these issues but ‘instinct’ says: people who lose a job to foreign competition and to domestic competition, where the competition is extra-regional in source, have more weight policy-wise than those persons whose loss of job is a result of intra-regional compeition. The key thing is to avoid disruption of local communities, family life as much as possible via migration to other parts of the country.”

My response: Assuming that federal-government action can serve the long-term interests of communities in the way my correspondent suggests, wouldn’t the issue be the extent of job losses in a community rather than the location of the competition? Whole industries can just decline, not because there are more efficient producers of the good in question in some other region or country but because there is less demand for it, there is a substitute good, etc.

2) “The reason (or at least a reason) a person displaced by foreign competition is more entitled to federal aid then one injured by domestic competition is that we owe our countrymen more than we owe foreigners. We all exist under equal laws and have equal rights. However, foreigners have no entitlement to our markets, as our countrymen do by natural justice and the dormant commerce clause of the Constitution. The benefits of foreign trade are a net benefit but they do not benefit all Americans equally. In order to continue political support and moral support for free trade (especially with unfree states) some help for displaced workers of that policy can be considered, where it would simply be robbing Peter to pay Paul to do it domestically.”

My response: I don’t think this argument works. Whether we owe more to our countrymen than to foreigners is irrelevant here; my question was not, after all, whether we should compensate foreign worker for losing American market share as much as we compensate American workers. I don’t see how anyone has any “entitlement” to having their product sold in America in the quantities and at the prices they want, wherever they’re from. Intra-national trade can be said, just as international trade, to benefit Americans unequally. It may be, as correspondent 2 says, that protection for workers displaced by foreign competition–assuming you can identify who they are–makes sense as a way of buying political support for free trade. But the moral justification still eludes me.