March 19, 2016
I usually think Kevin Drum makes pretty good arguments even when I disagree with them, but his trade case really strikes out badly. He wants to take issue with my argument that we protect doctors with average paychecks of more than $250k a year, while deliberately putting autoworkers in direct competition with their low paid counterparts in the developing world.
He quotes my comment that we ban foreign trained physicians unless they go through a U.S. residency program. He then comments:
“Cars made overseas are required to meet American standards. You can’t just build anything you want and sell it here. In the case of doctors, the doctor herself is the product, and we require the product to meet American standards. Aside from the minor jolt of hearing a human being called a “product,” there’s not really much difference. You can argue that standards for cars and standards for doctors are poorly designed, but that’s a much subtler case to make. One way or another, both doctors and cars are going to be required to meet certain standards.”
Umm, the reason that cars overseas meet American standards is because we negotiated a set of standards for them to meet. In other words, that is what our trade negotiators were doing so that they could place U.S. autoworkers in direct competition with low paid workers in Mexico, China and elsewhere.
Our trade negotiators could have been negotiating standards for foreign residency programs. (I know Donald Trump says they are stupid, but they can’t possibly be that stupid.) This would mean that other countries could establish residency programs that ensure that doctors in Germany, Canada, and hopefully many other countries were trained to a level where they were as good as U.S. trained doctors. The reason this didn’t happen is because doctors have much more political power than autoworkers.
Sorry Kevin, you’re a knuckle-scraping Neanderthal protectionist.
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