DH: >>My soundbite is protect the worker, not the job, Welcome, fellow congregants. Today's sermon follows.
There are good reasons to favor: refundable tax credits over minimum wage cash transfers over rent control dislocated worker benefits over import restrictions cash transfers rather than in-kind (i.e., food stamps, housing vouchers) tradable rights for pollution rather than taxes or quotas education over anti-discrimination "quotas" (sic) You can find all these points made in most intro econ textbooks. They reflect a disinclination to intervene directly in markets and a neglect of transactions costs. The presumption is that such intervention engenders more waste than benefit, or more mis-directed benefits. They all depend on an amply-funded public sector. In the real world, the public sector is not well-funded, or its funding is not well-allocated, take your pick. The politics of market intervention for this and other reasons are easier than the politics of calling for instant social-democracy. To insist on the latter course is not smart, and trade unionists are not stupid. Zeroing in a bit, there is no comparison between retaining one's job and community (even with stagnating compensation and quality of life), and the possibility of some bag of losers' benefits. Workers with families are not usually eager to pick up and move for the sake of a series of declining wage jobs. In other words, they are not graduate students, declasse intellectuals, bohemians, or rootless independent contractors. Hence Tom Geohagen's remark that every time a free-trade Democrat invokes the latter oved the former, the party loses another 100,000 voters. The free-trade leftist is not so constrained because she has no voters to begin with. So workers end up competing with each other, by ethnic group, by community, by state, by region, and by nation, for access to capital. One way you improve such access is by market intervention, a.k.a. "distortion" to the mainstream economic community. Nothing is a more natural and timeless part of the class struggle. This competition -- the existence of competing interests -- would persist under any sort of socialism. To squat vulgarly outside this process (where did I hear that before?), is not smart. Is there some abstract, ethical distribution of capital? What if there was? It wouldn't matter. One should ask, instead, what sort of working class activity moves in the right direction. I would suggest everything that brings capital under more democratic control-- that regulates markets for the sake of equity and social advance. >From a global standpoint, you would seek arrangements that allowed progress for all workers, albeit not necessarily at the same rate or from the same level. What's fair and what is practical are not necessarily the same. International solidarity in this sense would be founded on agreements for balanced trade and labor standards that permit advances in living standards on all sides. No Robin Hood-type redistribution with respect to rich and poor nations, meaning static subtractions from one financing additions to another, has a political chance on the advanced side. It just hands the entire debate to the Right. In textiles, for instance, an agreement to share growth in the industry among countries makes sense. Fairness is possible in the dynamics. I can more readily accept somewhat less growth in living standards than I can an outright, absolute reduction. An arrangement to eliminate the industry in one place because another enjoys comparative advantage makes no sense, except to a neo-classical economist. We could admit in some aggregate sense such a change might be seen as fair, but any such perspective ignores what happens to individuals and cannot be accepted as fair in any meaningful sense. No nation's trade policy can be controlled by a labor movement unless that movement is united on a national level. Hence self-defense of union jobs and living standards are both obvious politics to the worker and progressive in the more far-reaching sense. By contrast, "international solidarity" based on free trade ideology is a suicide pact for any national working class and its organizations. How could one imagine any kind of mass movement of the working class without strong union organizations as precursors? And without such a movement, how could one conceive of the basis for any kind of international solidarity? Everybody knows the unfettered movement of capital is the bane of working class organization. Marx said such freedom would hasten the revolution, a "the worse/the better" formulation. Not one of his better moments, but one that some people seem to want to live in. mbs
