Classifying McCain’s Position on Trade

Now it is time to classify McCain’s position on trade.  As stated previously, McCain is a free trader.  The question becomes, how do we classify his outlook to free trade in our newly minted taxonomy?  McCain is a Messianic Free Trader, minus the messianic.  In typical McCain fashion, he bucks classification.  (Of course, you have to wonder whether Lawrence purposefully constructed the taxonomy in order for this to happen.)  He is not a Messianic Free Trader, but he is also not a proponent of Cave Mercatem.  He does not propose restricting free trade with labor or environmental standards.  What he does do is more subtle. McCain believes that the American worker is the best in the world and can compete with anyone.  He welcomes, if not revels, in this competition.  However, on his website, right below his stance on free trade comes a paragraph about how he intends to keep the American worker competitive through providing education for all.  Why would these two issues go together?  It is almost as if McCain is alluding to a different kind of trade adjustment assistance, but this kind is inter-generational.  McCain does believe in the power of free trade, and he does not propose any sort of trade assistance anywhere that I can find (if you have an example, please write a comment below.).  He must believe that the current generation of workers in the American economy is the most competitive in the world, so America’s job losses due to trade will be small.  Having said that, if you are one of the people who loses a job due to trade, small is not small enough.  To keep this competitiveness will require a rethink of America’s education system McCain warns.  In summary, McCain believes in the power of free trade and the competitiveness of the American worker, but in order for future generations of Americans to continue to capture these benefits, we must invest in the education of the next generation.  This investment by today’s workers in tomorrow’s workers is to some degree inter-generational trade adjustment assistance.  Interesting that McCain ties trade and education together.

Implicit in McCain’s argument is the stance that trade adjustment assistance is ineffectual.  How he rationalizes this belief is not known.  A surmise on my part is that, in the spirit of Gregory Mankiw’s scepticism of trade adjustment assistance, it is very difficult to identify those jobs which are lost to trade.  Can a cashier at a grocery store who loses his job blame trade?  After all, WalMart can charge such low prices, since it has access to cheap goods from abroad.  Or should he blame the technological advancements which brought on the U-Scan check-out lanes?  McCain might buy this argument to rationalize his lack of support for trade adjustment assistance.

Next time, we will classify Senator Obama.