Anyone who lays into the Democrats with a quarterstaff for being anti-competitive will usually get my seal of approval. In Navarrette’s case, I withhold my utterly unimportant benediction. He got one or two points correct, but failed to tell the whole story. I’ll do my best impression of Paul Harvey and provide a few details as to which dogs Rueban didn’t care to hear bark.
Navarrette begins by doing noble service to the truth. He eviscerates the servile placation of the public school teachers’ unions and argues in favor of school choice. Perhaps Mr. Navarrette savvies the fact that there are a good number of failing teachers and schools which need to be left behind.
It's true in education where Democrats, with their slavish devotion to teachers unions, oppose vouchers even for constituencies they pretend to champion such as minorities and the disadvantaged. Vouchers would force public schools into competition.
His next paragraph appears plausible from a libertarian vantage point. However, it is here where he begins his descent into dogma and economic unreality.
It's true with immigration, where many Democrats advance the phony argument that illegal immigrants displace U.S. workers by lowering wages. For low-skilled workers who refuse to get more skills or learn a new trade, illegal immigrants amount to competition.
What Rueban misses is that illegal workers, not carried on a company’s books, are the only reason many American firms are able to remain engaged in the avocations that they follow. Furthermore, the very rules and regulations that good liberal Democrats like Rueban Navarrette believe make competition fair make the economic fight unwinnable for American firms engaged in low to middle technology mass production.
I’ll go one step further and posit that the very rules and regulations that good liberal Democrats like Rueban Navarrette champion as hallmark advances in Western Civilization are also boons to powerful oligopolistic super firms like Microsoft and Exxon Mobil. Exxon can afford a $8 minimum wage. A wild-cat drilling firm in the dusts of West Texas can’t make payroll with registered, legal American workers.
We have a choice as a society, we can have our regulatory safety net, or we can have an economy that continues to actually register growth and produce jobs and wealth. We live in a world where we increasingly can’t have both. This is precisely the sort of business environment that produces more Kenneth Lays.
Up-and-coming executives learn very early that if they aren’t cheating, they aren’t producing profits. When the governmental burden becomes too significant to support in an honorable fashion, we’ll very quickly run out of honorable businessmen. When our regulatory regimes drive creative entrepreneurs crazy, they’ll go write a song or paint a landscape instead.
To solve this problem, we need to do something that would make Rueban Navarrette’s skin break out in hives. We need to start subjecting future health, safety and environmental regulations to a rigorous cost benefit analysis. We not only need to examine the risk we get from having Alar on our Apples, but also the economic risk of having the apples cost more and having several of the apple orchards that grow them going bankrupt. This sort of competition would make environmental regulators and activists focus their resources on higher payoff targets.
Assuming the generous assumption that these environmentalists actually cared about the environment, this would make them stop lying about alar and start spending more time and money getting Kepone out of the James River and lead out DC’s plumbing and paint. An environmental movement that actually tried to get rid of contamination rather than free enterprise could be a political movement I could wholeheartedly support.
So yes, Rueban Navarrette is correct for excoriating the Democrats for excoriating NAFTA. However, Rueban isn’t admitting that NAFTA holds up a big mirror to America. NAFTA forces us to recognize that we need to be more diligent in actually supporting free market economics in the US and less concerned about caring whether it ever catches hold in Russia or Mexico.
Expecting car companies, textile manufacturers and IT help desks to stay in America and compete with one had tied behind their backs is ridiculous. Expecting American firms that do stay to be in honest compliance with laws that force them closer to bankruptcy fundamentally misunderstands human psychology.
Rueban Navarrette speaks partial truth when he describes the Democrats as anti-competitive. He doesn’t want to admit that a lot of the things he supports are the real reasons why Democrats have to be anti-competition. That’s the part of economic reality that got left out of Rueban Navarrete’s pro-open border fabulism. That, as Paul Harvey famously says, is the rest of the story.
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