Dean Baker has long argued that there's no such thing as free trade in this country. Rather, what we have is a trade regime that pushes the prices of manufactured goods down by encouraging competition for downscale jobs but keeps the prices of professionalized services high by protecting skilled industries. It's essentially what you'd expect if you were Karl Marx and you were trying to figure out what a trade policy created by the economic elite would look like. But today Dean Baker has a nice term for these folks that I've not heard before: What we've got, he says, are not "free traders," but "selective protectionists." And it's true. Low wage jobs? Trade em, and stop being so sentimental. Law jobs? Protect 'em. Software patents? Protect! Drug patents? Protect! Hell, you can't even be president if you're born outside this country. But just think how little a Chinese president would work for! And he'd probably put in longer hours, too.
