“The principal way rich countries disadvantage the poor world is not through unfair trade, or through intrusive and ineffective aid, or by forcing repayments of debts. The primary policy pursued by every rich country is to prevent unskilled labor from moving into their countries. And because unskilled labor is the primary asset of the poor world, it is hard to even imagine a policy more directly inimical to a poverty reduction agenda or to “pro-poor growth” than one limiting the demand for unskilled labor (and inducing labor-saving innovations).” — Lant Pritchett, writing in EconLog with commentary by Arnold Kling here
Jun13th2007
Absolutely true.
The U.S. subsidizes (for example) tomato, sugar or strawberry industries and tariffs and taxes their Mexican competitors, and even then these domestic industries are unable to compete successfully with their Mexican counterparts without importing cheap labor in the form of illegals and/or “guest workers”. This is a farce.
If these domestic industries can only be successful with these artificial advantages, it would be preferable for them to simply cease to exist. American consumers and taxpayers would be better off, Mexican workers would be better off, and both American and Mexican economies would be better off - not to mention that it would go a long way towards solving our illegal immigration problems.
Just my two cents.
Those are great two cents! And I agree 100%. The problem is overcoming those special interest groups….
I feel tariffs level the playing field in terms of our workers here, though I agree that many cheat the system by hireing “guest workers”.
we have whole towns across the country that have turned into ghost towns because of free trade. It can not be called free trade if the deck is stacked against us.
When looking at an economy you should not look at a single group only, you have to take the whole pie into account - and when you do that, tariffs clearly harm the whole economy and many times even those people tariffs are supposed to help. See more here.