Is Dr. Krugman evolving? It's probably bad politics to talk about it

The views at the Albanian site this comes from, at www.civitas.al, probably do not correspond to my own, but the idea of "Marxism-Sorosism" is pretty cute.

It's another curious case of a dog not barking, and even the same presumptive intruder the dog is not barking at as in that Taibbi piece the other day, this time in Dr. Krugman's column on the unexpected way international trade has become an issue in the 2016 presidential campaign.

Namely, like Taibbi, Krugman doesn't mention President Obama; and he specifically doesn't mention the Obama-linked object that has made international trade an issue in the 2016 presidential campaign, the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement or TPP (which now seems most likely to be voted on in Congress in the lame-duck session after the November election, if at all). Without Obama pushing the TPP for most of his time in office, forcing the candidates to take positions on the thing, nobody would be discussing this intensely boring subject in the campaign.

But I think the reason for his not mentioning them is very Krugman-particular: it's that if he did, in the course of the argument he's making today, he'd be forced to endorse the damned thing, and he's not ready to do that. I'm really suspecting that he is "evolving" in his position on the TPP in a way analogous to how Obama "evolved" toward support of marriage equality, by which I definitely don't mean it's a bad thing, and beginning to prepare us for the shift.

He starts off with an apparent paradox:

Republicans, who claim to stand for free markets, are likely to nominate a crude protectionist, leaving Democrats, with their skepticism about untrammeled markets, as the de facto defenders of relatively open trade.

(Translation: Trump and Cruz both have denounced the TPP in the strongest possible terms, while Hillary Clinton, though she has registered opposition to the TPP, hasn't been able to explain very clearly why, has at least a history as senator of being open to trade agreements, judging each on its own merits, and was of course a key person in pushing the TPP in her work as secretary of state.)

And yet, as he points out, it's not that new, either: in recent history the Republican talk about free markets has had a considerable element of bluff, with Reagan's support of disastrous import quotas on cars and George W. Bush's illegal attempts to put tariffs on steel:

Actually, the latter episode should be an object lesson for anyone talking tough about trade. The Bush administration suffered from a bad case of superpower delusion, a belief that America could dictate events throughout the world. The falseness of that belief was most spectacularly demonstrated by the debacle in Iraq.

(Translation: Just as Obama's conduct of the military and security side of foreign affairs has begun to lead us out of the hegemonism that has dominated especially under Republican administrations from Nixon through Bush, so his focus on international cooperation in trade is an even more welcome shift.)

In fact, though Krugman explicitly declines to go there, it's been the history of trade in US party politics for a very long time, at least since the 1896 election, when Republican William McKinley's industrialist backers pushed higher tariffs as protection for jobs while Democrat William Jennings Bryan rejected that plutocrat proposal in favor of silver coinage to loosen the money supply, giving workers an edge against bankers (approximately the policy the Obama administration has followed, working on international trade liberalization while keeping interest rates at record lows for unprecedented amounts of time and flooding the banks with Quantitative Easing cash—unfortunately not enough to bring an equal recovery because of the banks' refusal to lend out their windfalls). Through the infamous Smoot-Hawley tariff in the Hoover administration (New Protectionists right and left love to point out that Smoot-Hawley didn't cause the Great Depression—well, duh, since the depression had already started and international markets already collapsed; but it also didn't make things any better, and it's at least arguable that liberalized trade, plus the forgiveness of German war debt, would have helped end the depression years earlier).

He also notes that when liberalized trade fails to benefit American workers, that doesn't mean it doesn't benefit anybody who could use some help:

It’s probably bad politics to talk right now about what a trade war would do to, say, Bangladesh. But any responsible future president would have to think hard about such matters. 

(Translation: I can't say everything I want on this subject just at the moment, but give me some time.)

It's true that liberalized trade leaves some workers stranded, he goes on to acknowledge:

Serious economic analysis has never supported the Panglossian view of trade as win-win for everyone that is popular in elite circles: growing trade can indeed hurt many people, and for the past few decades globalization has probably been, on net, a depressing force for the majority of U.S. workers.

.(Translation: NAFTA did terrific things in the long run for the Mexican economy—that's why immigration legal and otherwise by Mexicans has basically come to a standstill in the last few years, because employment opportunities in Mexico have grown so much—and the Pacific coast in the states, but hurt the Great Lakes Rust Belt region very badly, and that must be noted.)

But protectionism isn’t the only way to fight that downward pressure. In fact, many of the bad things we associate with globalization in America were political choices, not necessary consequences — and they didn’t happen in other advanced countries, even though those countries faced the same global forces we did.

That's the money bit right there, and hardly needs translation. Exemplified through the cases of Denmark and Canada (two of Senator Sanders's favorite countries) where very liberal trade regimes in the midst of globalization are taken for granted, and yet workers hardly suffer at all. Why? Because socialism, that's why! Extensive unionization of the work force and generous social safety nets; free or almost free higher education and day care and adequate pensions allowing older workers to retire and make room for younger ones. Etc., etc. We don't need more restricted trade for the workers of Michigan and Ohio and upstate New York, we need better social policy at home so that the inevitable effects of globalization don't hit us so hard.

And there’s a lesson here that goes beyond this election. If you’re generally a supporter of open world markets — which you should be, mainly because market access is so important to poor countries — you need to know that whatever they may say, politicians who espouse rigid free-market ideology are not on your side.

(Translation: neither are politicians who espouse rigid protectionism, not that Sanders has gone there, but this is what some of his supporters hear.)

But why, in this case, is Dr. K. so consistently against the TPP agreement in particular? Well, he isn't very against it, as he always says: he's a weak opponent, an unenthusiastic one, "lukewarm" is the adjective he most often deploys. He's never all that clear about what it is he doesn't like (a little like Hillary Clinton in that respect).

I got into an interesting interaction on this score the other day in comments over at the Washington Monthly, where I was leaving my usual rant on the Investor-State Dispute Settlement mechanism not being as diabolical as we're led to believe and received this startling reply:

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  Thornton Hall  Yastreblyansky • 4 days ago

  
  

  This is the ding, ding, ding money comment. These facts, which Krugman knows and ignores, basically prove he's being disingenuous on the TPP.

  It's vitally important for liberals to understand that Krugman, who won his Prize for the economics of trade, is on 3 different sides of this issue.

  It's really hard to get liberals to see flaws with Krugman, but maybe comparing his textbook to what he calls "textbook economics" will do the trick.

I could say I'm a "lukewarm" supporter of the TPP: I'm not an economist, obvs, so I can't speak with even minimal authority, but what I read doesn't persuade me that it will do a lot economically, though I'm convinced it won't do any serious harm either. It would be wonderful if Malaysia could move as the treaty requires it to do to eliminate what amounts to slavery, and Vietnam could really permit the creation of independent trade unions, but it's not obvious how these things happen; and I'm convinced that the provisions guaranteeing countries' right to regulate for labor and environmental and other protections are serious, and there are very nice rules on trade in endangered species, and so on, but how much will it really change?

But I support the TPP (and TTIP) for non-economic reasons, as a central part of Obama's foreign policy, in the development of non-hegemonic international institutions (as in the most striking case from TPP, where the other parties to the treaty have successfully prevented the US from forcing its terrible position on biologic drug patents on the other countries—that was the thing that caused the most grief and rage in the drafts that were circulating three years ago, and I predicted that it wouldn't be in the final version, and it isn't). It's extremely important to most of those other governments, from Malaysia and Japan to Australia and Chile, and that's a reason for letting it happen, in the construction of a new multipolar order in which other countries are less dependent on the US.

And Dr. Krugman? Does his tepid opposition have something to do with what is during this campaign season "probably bad politics"? Because (putting the best possible construction on it, because I love and revere Krugman, and I understand somebody in his position just can't necessarily say everything he thinks) speaking openly about it would only confuse the issues in this crucially important election? Yesterday's column suggests that he's at least getting less and less comfortable with it, and getting his audience ready for a more advanced discussion.