July 24, 2016
Ross Douthat inadvertently told readers much about why large segments of the public in the U.S., U.K., and Western Europe are rejecting the policies pushed by elites. In his NYT column, he complained about Donald Trump’s acceptance speech (which provided much ground for complaint):
“That message was a long attack, not on liberalism per se, but on the bipartisan post-Cold War elite consensus on foreign policy, mass immigration, free trade. It was an attack on George W. Bush’s Iraq war and Hillary Clinton’s Libya incursion both, on Nafta and every trade deal negotiated since, on the perpetual Beltway push for increased immigration, on the entire elite vision of an increasingly borderless globe.”
Actually the United States does not push “free trade.” A major thrust of all trade agreements of the last quarter century has been longer and stronger patent protections. These are “protections” as in not free trade. They raise the price of the affected goods by factors of ten or a hundred, making them equivalent to tariffs of several hundred or several thousand percent.
While the ostensible purpose of thesse protections is to promote innovation and creative work, there is little evidence that the additional incentive provided is justified by the additional cost. The one thing that we know for certain is that they redistribute income upward, forcing ordinary people to pay more for everything from prescription drugs to movies and computer software. The beneficiaries are the high end employees and shareholders of drug companies, software companies and the entertainment industry.
It is also not true that our elites have a vision of a “borderless globe.” In the United States it is illegal to practice medicine unless you complete a residency program in the United States. This means that our elites will have foreign doctors arrested for doing their work. This protectionism raises the pay of U.S. doctors by more than $100,000 a year compared to their counterparts in other wealthy countries. It costs the country around $100 billion a year (@ $700 per family) in higher health care costs.
It is striking that Douthat apparently can not even see these and other protections that redistribute income upward. Perhaps this explains why many people don’t like the elites.
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