Viva NAFTA?

THE FIRST thing to say about the North American Free Trade Agreement is that the protectionist attacks on it by Ross Perot, Dick Gephardt, Ralph Nader, Jesse Jackson, and others are nonsensical. Jimmy Carter was not exaggerating when he characterized Perot as a demagogue “with unlimited financial resources, who is extremely careless with the truth, and who is preying on the fears and uncertainties of the American public.” The agreement will not create a giant sucking sound and it will not result in the loss of tens of thousands of American jobs. Possibly it will create jobs, as supporters maintain. But the jobs issue that has dominated the debate is a distraction. In searching for the good and the bad in NAFTA, the issue points us in entirely the wrong direction.

Cato Institute Chairman William Niskanen, a NAFTA supporter, finds the jobs issue “extraordinarily overblown on both sides,” and doesn’t think the agreement’s effect on jobs is measurable. In general he finds the agreement “messy,” with “an awful lot of junk in it,” but still, “on net it is beneficial.” Michael Kinsley of The New Republic is right when he says that “the person who will get a job because of NAFTA isn’t even aware of it yet; the person who may lose a job because of it is all too aware.” Robert Samuelson of Newsweek is right when he criticizes the idea that Mexico “will hijack our industrial base.” If this were true it would already have happened. “Mexico’s wages have long been lower than ours, and most of its exports already enter our market without any tariff,” says Gary Hufbauer of the Institute for International Economics.

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Tom Bethell

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THE FIRST thing to say about the North American Free Trade Agreement is that the protectionist attacks on it by Ross Perot, Dick Gephardt, Ralph Nader, Jesse Jackson, and others are nonsensical. Jimmy Carter was not exaggerating when he characterized Perot as a demagogue “with unlimited financial resources, who is extremely careless with the truth, and who is preying on the fears and uncertainties of the American public.” The agreement will not create a giant sucking sound and it will not result in the loss of tens of thousands of American jobs. Possibly it will create jobs, as supporters maintain. But the jobs issue that has dominated the debate is a distraction. In searching for the good and the bad in NAFTA, the issue points us in entirely the wrong direction.

Cato Institute Chairman William Niskanen, a NAFTA supporter, finds the jobs issue “extraordinarily overblown on both sides,” and doesn’t think the agreement’s effect on jobs is measurable. In general he finds the agreement “messy,” with “an awful lot of junk in it,” but still, “on net it is beneficial.” Michael Kinsley of The New Republic is right when he says that “the person who will get a job because of NAFTA isn’t even aware of it yet; the person who may lose a job because of it is all too aware.” Robert Samuelson of Newsweek is right when he criticizes the idea that Mexico “will hijack our industrial base.” If this were true it would already have happened. “Mexico’s wages have long been lower than ours, and most of its exports already enter our market without any tariff,” says Gary Hufbauer of the Institute for International Economics.