Anthony Harrigan is a man with a lot of grievances. He objects when other countries sell us tape decks and terrycloth towels, because it means they are waging “international economic warfare” against us. He objects when we sell them lumber and grain in return, because that makes us “hewers of wood and drawers of water” for them. (When we rely on them for tape decks and towels and they rely on us for food, he thinks we are “cruelly dependent” on them, not vice versa.) He objects when foreign firms relieve us of unpleasant low-wage work, like textile making. He particularly objects when a foreign firm takes a lower profit in order to offer American citizens an especially good deal. Basically he seems to object almost every time a shipment of anything crosses a national border.
All the ills of the nation, it appears, are the work of the import devil. Sluggish productivity growth is due to increased foreign competition, not the other way around. You might think, from Harrigan’s description, that productivity has been stagnating in the fields in which the United States competes in world markets, like agriculture and the high-tech industries, and leaping ahead in the fields in which it does not, like government services, utilities, and home building. In fact, the case is more nearly the reverse. You might also think that American unions had been steadily agreeing to productive work-rule changes until foreign competition came along, and only then began to hold out. And there again the exact reverse is true. If it weren’t for Japanese imports, would the United Auto Workers ever have agreed to concessions?
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