| Richard Gephardt can credibly accuse you of of adopting a position so protectionist that it's "demagoguing."
I hereby invite commentary from the libertarians-for-Dean crowd about trade. Bush has been awful on trade, of course. But I'm just not going to get enthusiastic about someone running for president on the platform that Bush hasn't been protectionist enough, someone who promises to go still further in that direction. Everyone professes to think Dean's a straight-shooting kind of guy. Libertarians-for-Dean, do you believe Dean's promises about trade? I'm pretty close to launching libertarians-for-Lieberman. I don't necessarily want Lieberman to be president; but I sure want him to do better than humiliatingly-badly in the Democratic primaries, since right now he's the most pro-free-trade candidate from either major party. It was a major accomplishment of the Clinton restructuring of the Democratic Party that it beat back the Gephardtians and got trade agreements passed. I'm not going to be happy to see the Democrats (whether they win or lose the White House) revert to their bad old ways on the issue. Yes, I'd probably prefer Lieberman to Dean on other grounds-- not least the foreign policy questions that are attracting some libertarians to the latter. (I felt like writing Joe a check purely on the basis of the speech he gave at the Arab-American convention last week, though I didn't in the end.) But it's trade, and the future of the Democratic Party on trade, that concerns me. One of the things that's supposed to be hopeful about the Tuxeira "emerging Democratic majority" thesis is that it's a Democratic Party built on professionals rather than unions, and so friendlier to trade. That's the kind of Democratic Party I would think libertarians should want to encourage. -- Posted by Jacob Levy to The Volokh Conspiracy at 10/24/2003 04:51:12 PM Powered by Blogger Pro |
