The so-called “Buy American” clauses in U.S. President Barack Obama’s 2009 stimulus bill package may initially sound like a good idea given all the recent layoffs and newly unemployed workers, but it recalls that ugly bumper sticker that I love to hate and tend to snicker at those driving the cars on which it is placed:
Out of A Job Yet? Keep Buying Foreign!
Do these people not have any understanding of 21st century economics? The world is fully “globalized,” which means there are no isolated markets. We can no longer speak of an “American market” or a “Canadian market.” This is even more so the case with the unprecedented rise in online shopping globally. Not only producers, but consumers, are fully globalized and transnational. There’s no going back.
But we shouldn’t want to go back, anyway. I don’t intend to enter into the history and benefits of globalized markets here. Suffice to say that the issue is WAY more complex than environmentalists and labor activists’ complaints about slave labor. Remember that all salaried workers in North America are also slave labourers under the capitalist system, okay? And no, I’m not simplifying or ignoring differences in socio-economic contexts.
If the U.S. infrastructure spending program intent on “stimulating” the American economy is going to have any success, it must recognize that the American economy is not a hermetically-sealed entity, but a porous entity with nerve endings that reach all around the world. Economies are open systems. This is how the American dirty debt bombs caused Iceland’s economy to collapse. It would be another act of American hubris, I argue, for the stimulus package to think it can take any truly “protectionist” measures that won’t have negative effects on the rest of the world. It would also be an act of double-standards: promoting Free Trade when it works for the U.S., and reneging on those global agreements and co-dependent relationships when it will “hurt” the U.S.
I have to say I was truly surprised to hear about Obama’s Buy American clause. I thought that with the caliber of his economic advisors and his Chicago pedigree, he would know better.
But perhaps there is a middle way? What do you think – if the protectionist measures are introduced only on steel and only for the current stimulus plan? Unfortunately my fear is that it will encourage similarly xenophobic attitudes in the cultural sphere as well – you know, “those Asians are taking our jobs!!” (as if they don’t have a right to make a living in their own country) – shouldn’t Obama know better than that? His economic moves are starting to look like they’re moving in the opposite direction as his social and political insights and directives (talking to America’s “enemies” etc.).
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