Cartoon Smarts
Attempting to learn about international commerce by reading anything written by Byron Dorgan and Sherrod Brown is worse than trying to learn the laws of physics by watching cartoons of the Road-Runner and Wile E. Coyote.
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23 December 2006
Editor, The Washington Post
1150 15th St., NW
Washington, DC 20071
Dear Editor:
Senators Byron Dorgan and Sherrod Brown are uninformed about trade ("How Free Trade Hurts," Dec. 23). For example, they assert that trade today causes "a global race to the bottom as corporations troll the world for the cheapest labor, the fewest health, safety and environmental regulations, and the governments most unfriendly to labor rights." But as Washington University political scientist Nathan Jensen reports in his new, data-rich book on the investment decisions of multinational corporations, "No systematic evidence lends credence to the race to the bottom thesis."*
If these Senators understood trade, they would realize that the very U.S. trade deficits that cause them so much anguish are evidence that large amounts of investment capital continue to flow into the U.S. - a pattern of investment that simply wouldn't happen if a global race to the bottom were underway.
Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Chairman, Department of Economics
George Mason University
* Nathan M. Jensen, Nation-States and the Multinational Corporation (Princeton University Press, 2006), page 66.
.............................
23 December 2006
Editor, The Washington Post
1150 15th St., NW
Washington, DC 20071
Dear Editor:
Senators Byron Dorgan and Sherrod Brown are uninformed about trade ("How Free Trade Hurts," Dec. 23). For example, they assert that trade today causes "a global race to the bottom as corporations troll the world for the cheapest labor, the fewest health, safety and environmental regulations, and the governments most unfriendly to labor rights." But as Washington University political scientist Nathan Jensen reports in his new, data-rich book on the investment decisions of multinational corporations, "No systematic evidence lends credence to the race to the bottom thesis."*
If these Senators understood trade, they would realize that the very U.S. trade deficits that cause them so much anguish are evidence that large amounts of investment capital continue to flow into the U.S. - a pattern of investment that simply wouldn't happen if a global race to the bottom were underway.
Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Chairman, Department of Economics
George Mason University
* Nathan M. Jensen, Nation-States and the Multinational Corporation (Princeton University Press, 2006), page 66.
Posted by Don Boudreaux on
Saturday September 8, 2007 at 9:55am