How Free Trade Helps You
April 9, 2008Alan Reynolds of Cato wrote a nice article in the New York Times about how NAFTA benefits Pennsylvanians. Since Democrats are competing over who hates NAFTA in order to win some PA votes, it’s a great time to look at the facts.
Aside from what he has to say about NAFTA and Pennsylvanians, Reynolds does a great job describing how the shift in the number of manufacturing jobs isn’t due to outsourcing. It’s simply the consequence of a new age, and it’s affecting the whole world.
Technology (computers and robots) has long been shrinking assembly-line manufacturing jobs in virtually every nation. If we exported manufacturing jobs, it must have been to the moon. A 2006 Banco de Mexico study worries that in recent years employment in (Mexican) industry has been decreasing whereas the employment in the service sector has been increasing. Even China eliminated 10 million manufacturing jobs from 1991 to 2003, according to the Asian Development Bank.
Read the whole article here.
