It is unfortunate that a debate over the economic agenda of the Democratic party seems to be starting from the Clintonites' framework. There are many important issues about economic policy at stake, but the question of a free market and free trade verse government intervention is not one of them. Trade has played an important role in distributing income upward over the last quarter century not because it has been "free," but because it hasn't. The Clintonites, along with the Republican administrations that preceded and followed them, structured trade agreements that had as a goal putting manufacturing workers in direct competition with low-paid workers in the developing world. The predicted result of such competition is to drive down the wages of manufacturing workers in the United States. Since manufacturing has historically been a source of high wage jobs for less-educated workers (i.e. the 70 percent of the workforce that lacks a college degree), this pattern of trade had the effect of lowering the wages of large segments of the middle class. If the Clintonites had really been interested in free trade and economic efficiency they could have designed trade agreements that put highly paid professionals (e.g. doctors, laywers, accountants and economists) in direct competition with their much lower paid counterparts in the developing world. Instead, the Clintonites preserved and in some cases even increased the protectionist barriers that limited such competition. There are many other ways in which the Clintonites supported protectionist measures (yes, enhanced patent and copyright protection top the list), as always you can get the fuller story in my free e-book The Conservative Nanny State: How the Wealthy Use the Government to Stay Rich and Get Richer. There is an important debate here, but if it takes the form of a battle between supporters of the free market versus supporters of government intervention, then it is a debate that is hugely stacked in favor of the Clintonites and the real issues will never be discussed.
--Dean Baker
