WaPo: Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) has spoken eloquently in recent years about the need to reorient the United States’ market economy to better support workers and families. His speech on Wednesday crystallizes that belief and persuasively shows how our lust for cheap goods is endangering our national security. Rubio delivered his remarks at the inaugural Henry Clay Lecture at Hillsdale College’s D.C. campus for the conservative reform group American Compass. The group, headed by Oren Cass, has emerged in recent years as a leading entity — along with the think tank I am affiliated with, the Ethics and Public Policy Center — calling on conservatives to rethink their devotion to free market fundamentalism.
- Rubio’s lecture argues that model is now threatened because of the decision to admit Communist China into the World Trade Organization in 2001. That choice allowed a nation committed to neither economic nor personal freedom to amass great wealth at the expense of the United States. He notes that before China’s accession to the WTO, the United States “was the largest trading partner of 152 countries in the world.” Today, he says, China is the largest trading partner for 128 countries while we are the largest for only 57. The result has been disastrous for the United States. As we now know, huge portions of the United States were de-industrialized, destroying communities and paving the way for the rise of Donald Trump. Rubio notes that “we lost 33 percent of our manufacturing jobs in just the first decade” after China joined the WTO. The financial sector now makes up a larger share of the U.S. economy than manufacturing, and the corporate profits that underlay that sector in large part come from selling to China and outsourcing jobs to countries with cheaper labor and reimporting goods into the United States.
- These facts now give China enormous influence in the United States, the exact opposite of what advocates of China’s entry into the global trading market predicted. Instead of Chinese pushing for more freedom at home, we see U.S. companies “self-censor anything that would offend the Communist Party of China” and lobby to lower tariffs on Chinese goods.
- The jury is still out, however, on whether jobs will return to the United States, as Rubio contends must happen. U.S. companies can disengage from China but simply relocate to other Asian, low-cost countries such as Bangladesh. That was what the Trans-Pacific Partnership was meant to facilitate, and pro-free trade advocates still argue that the United States should not pay the higher prices — fueled by higher wages — that bringing manufacturing back to the United States would entail. Rubio argues that Americans should put as much emphasis on their identities as workers as they do on being consumers, but such thinking has yet to sink in.
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