I don't like Steven Landsburg, Slate's economics columnist, at all.* But Kevin Drum is not fair to him when he describes his rationale for endorsing Bush as "galactically incomprehensible."
Landsburg writes:
Duke thinks it's imperative to protect white jobs from black competition. Edwards thinks it's imperative to protect American jobs from foreign competition. There's not a dime's worth of moral difference there.
Now, it's not true that there's no moral difference here--Duke hates black people, and his preferred policies go beyond protecting jobs; while Edwards may just think that, as an official of the U.S. government, he has an obligation to look to U.S. citizens' interests first. So there may be a difference in motivation, and there's certainly a difference in legitimate governmental action (it's wrong for a government to treat to some of its citizens; a government can hardly help treating citizens and non-citizens unequally). So I think Landsburg is overstating the case.
But I think that what Landsburg is thinking is that protectionist measures hurt overseas workers, by forcing them into utterly crappy jobs rather than the really crappy jobs that outsourcing produces. (Or perhaps not-so-crappy jobs, in the case of white-collar outsourcing.) And that this is a drastic overall decrease in utility, which in Landsburg's opinion outweighs the other differences between the candidates.
this, which is just awful, and this and this, which assume that any action that leads to someone's being worse off than they might otherwise be amounts to a tax on that person, and this.
Posted by Matt Weiner at October 27, 2004 12:46 PM | TrackBack