From the Archives: Two views on breaking the free-trade policy logjam

Publisher's note: This article was originally published on Examiner.com on April 22, 2010. The Examiner.com publishing platform was discontinued July 1, 2016, and its web site went dark on or about July 10, 2016.  I am republishing this piece in an effort to preserve it and all my other contributions to Examiner.com since April 6, 2010. It is reposted here without most of the internal links that were in the original.

Two views on breaking the free-trade policy logjam
April 22, 2010 6:35 PM MST

There are three major free-trade agreements pending in Congress: one each with Colombia, Panama, and South Korea.

Congressional approval is necessary to implement the agreements, which are intended to reduce tariffs and quotas and smooth the way for the United States to increase its exports to those countries while also allowing the three trading partners to export more products to the United States.

Brink Lindsey, now vice president for research at the Cato Institute in Washington, formerly served as director of that organization’s Center for Trade Policy Studies. He is the author of The Age of Abundance: How Prosperity Transformed America’s Politics and Culture and, with Daniel Ikenson, Antidumping Exposed: The Devilish Details of Unfair Trade Law.

Trade Policy in the Mud
Lindsey spoke about the prospect of ratification for the three free-trade agreements when he was in Charlottesville on April 15. He told the Charlottesville Libertarian Examiner that “they are all stuck in the mud for the foreseeable future.”

In order to get them out of the mud, Lindsey said, “we would need President Obama to see that his credentials as a multilateralist would be burnished by getting these bills through Congress.” At the moment, he continued, Obama is “not putting pressure on Congress.”

Moreover, Democratic control of Congress “means they are very sensitive to the interests of organized labor, it doesn’t want to move on them. That logjam has to be broken.”

Breaking the Logjam
Lindsey went on to say that “it’s possible now that [since] Obama is well to the left of public opinion and is suffering in the polls as a result,” the president will be “looking for things to make him seem more moderate, make him seem more pro-business, more pro-market”

In other words, Lindsey suggests that “this is one possibility for him to buck the interest groups in his party and push sound trade policy. It’s possible, [but] I’m not holding my breath.”

Would any one of the agreements be more likely than the others to be approved first? Lindsey thinks not. “They’ll all rise or fall together,” he said.

A Candidate’s View
GOP congressional candidate Matthew Berry explained the importance of free trade policy during an interview on April 17.

“We need free trade agreements for two reasons,” Berry said. First, “more American exports mean more American jobs… a billion dollars worth of exports creates about 15,000 American jobs.”

Second, he said, “Trade increases competition, which means lower prices for American consumers, so your dollar goes farther.”

Obama’s Willing Partners
To break the logjam that Lindsey identified, Berry argued that if Republican candidates do well in 2010, President Obama will have “more willing partners in Congress” because even though the President says that he favors ratification, “he hasn’t been willing to expend any political capital to get them ratified.”

Berry concluded that, “if the Republicans could retake Congress, it will be easier for President Obama to put these on the table and [get them] passed.”

From the Archives: Talking about 'liberaltarianism' at the University of Virginia

Publisher's note: This article was originally published on Examiner.com on April 16, 2010. The Examiner.com publishing platform was discontinued July 1, 2016, and its web site went dark on or about July 10, 2016.  I am republishing this piece in an effort to preserve it and all my other contributions to Examiner.com since April 6, 2010. It is reposted here without most of the internal links that were in the original.

Talking about 'liberaltarianism' at the University of Virginia
April 16, 2010 11:23 PM MST

On April 15, an interdisciplinary group of scholars from two universities and a Washington think tank participated in a panel discussion at the University of Virginia on the topic, “Libertarianism: Left or Right?” The panel was organized by Jennifer Burns, an assistant professor of history at UVA, who explained how it came about to the Charlottesville Libertarian Examiner.

“I met Brink Lindsey in the course of doing an event at [the Cato Institute] on my book, Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right. I had read his article about “liberaltarianism,” proposing an alliance between liberals and libertarians. I thought it was really interesting, a really creative new way to think about politics in the 21st century.”

Lindsey, vice president of research at Cato, had “brought a liberaltarianism discussion to several universities,” Burns said, including Princeton and Stanford, and he “asked if I wanted to do it down at the University of Virginia. So I put together some folks who are interested in engaging these questions.”

The eventual panel was made up of Lindsey and a colleague from Cato, Will Wilkinson, as well as Gerard Alexander and Colin Bird, both associate professors in the UVA Department of Politics; political scientist Steven Teles from Johns Hopkins; Sahar Akhtar, assistant professor of philosophy at UVA; and Burns.

There were some distinguished names in the audience, as well, including UVA English professor Paul Cantor, UVA psychology professor Jonathan Haidt, and UVA philosophy professor Loren Lomasky.

After the free-wheeling panel discussion ended, Lindsey explained the basis of his argument, which was first published in an article in The New Republic called “Liberaltarians” on December 4, 2006:

There is, he said, a “need to rethink the historical alliance between libertarians and social conservatives, that that alliance was born out of unique historical circumstances, specifically, the challenge of socialism at home and totalitarian socialism abroad. That’s gone now. There’s a lot of ideological flux on the right. It’s an appropriate time for libertarians to see the possibilities of engaging people on the left side of the political spectrum.”

Asked why there is an organized libertarian caucus within the Republican Party but no equivalent in the Democratic Party, Lindsey replied:

“Who knows? One reason is that libertarians have not made an effort to present libertarian policy ideas in a way that is calculated in any way to be congenial to the way liberals think.”

He added, “Whether they think of themselves that way or not, libertarians have been part of a right coalition. They have framed their arguments in conservative terms, in terms of preserving the heritage of American liberty and venerating the Founding Fathers and the Constitution, rather than in presenting their case in terms that might find a more receptive audience on the left.”

One of Lindsey’s respondents on the panel, Gerard Alexander of UVA, set out his own point of view of “liberaltarianism” as one that understands “that where libertarians ally themselves is a historically contingent thing. I don’t believe that conditions justify them allying more with people to their left than their right. I think the basic conditions that obtained 40 or 50 years ago still obtain.

“Therefore,” he concluded, “the most logical alliance, however imperfect, for libertarians in modern America is still with people who call themselves conservatives.”