December 22, 2016
That is in fact what his NYT column said, even though he writes it as though the opposite is the case. The basic argument is that the core Democratic constituency is in places like Silicon Valley and other tech clusters which Edsall claims are thriving in the global economy based on free trade. By contrast, he argues that Democratic populists like Keith Ellison and Bernie Sanders are trying to rally those left behind with a protectionist agenda. Edsall warns that this would run both counter to the interests of the key Democratic constituencies and threaten the country’s economic future.
That is great as propaganda for the status quo, but flunks as serious analysis. The prosperity of the country’s Silicon Valleys depends front and center on patent and copyright protections. These forms of protectionism have been made longer and stronger over the past four decades as a matter of conscious policy. The result has been an ever sharper divergence between the protected prices and free market prices. This is seen most dramatically in the case of prescription drugs where the ratio of the protected price to the free market price is often more than 100 to 1. This is equivalent to a tariff of more than 10,000 percent for folks who care about numbers. (Yes, we have alternatives to patent monopolies for financing research.)
We have also imposed these protections on other countries in trade deals, often at the expense of manufacturing workers. After all, getting stronger protections of drugs and software, while getting cheaper clothes and steel, is a win-win for the Silicon Valley types.
Rigging the market to make the items produced in the country’s Silicon Valleys expensive, while pushing down the price of the manufactured goods produced in the rest of the country might be good for the Silicon Valley types, it is not free trade. It is very generous for people like Thomas Edsall to provide cover for such class biased policies, but the rest of us might prefer to focus on reality.
Yes, this is the main theme of Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy Were Structured to Make the Rich Richer (free download available here).
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