Corey Sheahan's column in The Badger Herald ("Free trade our best chance," Dec. 3) struck me as remarkably short on both data and logic, especially coming from someone with a background in social science. In the article he advances two primary arguments, both of which fail to support his conclusion that free trade represents the "best chance" for anyone.
First, he argues that despite the precipitous decline in manufacturing jobs brought on by globalization, Americans' livelihoods are secure due to the new information-based jobs, which Mr. Sheahan asserts, "provide better wages." If it were truly the case that manufacturing jobs are being replaced by higher paying and more productive jobs, then we would expect Americans' wages to be rising. Sadly, this is not the case.
In fact, according to the Labor Research Association, when you adjust wages for inflation, Americans are actually taking home less money today than they were through the '60s and '70s. All in all, wages have fallen about 10 percent since their high point in the early '70s.
It's worth pointing out that this fall has taken place while CEO pay has skyrocketed from about 50 times the average worker's wage to about 800 times the average wage today. This trend should give pause to Mr. Sheahan's naive assumption that the rising productivity of the American economy has benefited everyone.
The costs of this massively regressive transfer of wealth go beyond those that can be measured in simple wage terms. For instance, the percentage of Americans without health insurance has been steadily rising since the 1980s — all throughout the period of "free trade" Mr. Sheahan celebrates. For these Americans, higher productivity in industries like health care serves only as a reminder of what they are denied.
In the face of these bitter facts, Mr. Sheahan blithely asserts that we should still be happy with our current lot because, after all, "we're better off today than we were yesterday." This is, to put it gently, a pathetic argument. A citizen of the Soviet Union in the 1960s could have made the same assertion. After all, citizens no longer lived in fear of Stalin's purges, and the standard of living was considerably higher than say, 40 years earlier. Yet would anyone like to tell a Soviet citizen of the 1960s he or she should be happy with his or her life because of these improvements? Perhaps Mr. Sheahan would possess that courage, but I certainly do not.
In short, Mr. Sheahan fails to make even the most elementary case for free trade. While I agree with him that the Democratic candidates are far from offering any kind of amelioration for the economic ills facing the country, it's clear that more of what we've been getting for the past 30 years is not the answer.
Paul Heideman
Graduate student, Afro-American studies
