"My family is starting to look at me funny..." Moira is putting most of her blog-energy into commenting on other people's sites these days, so I feel perfectly justified in swiping a chunk of the comment she left here just so that Alien Corn retains at least a small bit of that Moira Breen Flavor©™.

The topic is trade policy; you may start to see more stuff like this around here.

My family is starting to look at me funny, though that may just be projection and paranoia on my part. Then again, I'd love to be convinced that I was just turning into a paranoid crank about this stuff.

[...]

Over the last decade or so I've seen the cheerleaders for globalization and "free" trade transform their arguments, starting out like carnival barkers promising wealth for everybody and, more recently, furrowing their brows and switching to moral admonishments - how it's "our" moral duty to wave bye-bye to the middle class so the Third World can meet us somewhere south of the middle, wage-wise. (While one can see that there will be more competition for limited resources like oil, I have my suspicions that gutting the American middle class is not really the only way to raise living standards for Chinese and Indians. The easiest for the Chinese and Indians, and the most profitable for the geniuses of our short-term thinkin'/ADHD corporate class, yes. I figured that the adoption of the holy "moral duty" line was a veiled admission of the bankruptcy of the original arguments.) To summarize the change in the "sell" to the American worker:

First we get:


1) "The rising tide will raise all boats!"

Then:

2) "There's a pony in that shitpile for you somewhere! Really, there is! Just keep digging!"

Finally:

3) "Sucks to be you, loser!"

The "'our' moral duty" line I consider to be merely the more obfuscatory version of (3), above.

For the record, I categorically deny looking at Moira funny. I can't speak for our daughter, though.

Posted by David Fleck at 21 April 2008 07:09 AM