January 12, 2018
The Washington Post had an editorial titled “Trump is trying to dismantle free trade. That is almost impossible.” Of course, the Post is not actually talking about free trade, it is talking about a policy of selective protectionism.
This is the policy of deliberately exposing less-educated workers to competition with low paid workers in the developing world while protecting the most highly educated workers like doctors and dentists. It also involves increasing protectionism in the form of longer and stronger copyright and patent monopolies.
The predicted and actual effect of the Post’s selective protectionism is to redistribute money from most workers to the richest people in the country. The Post uses both its news and opinion pages to try to convince people that this was a natural outcome (and then it wrings its hands over this unfortunate situation) rather than the result of deliberate government policy that it strongly supports.
(Yes, this is the topic of my [free] book Rigged: How Globalization and the Modern Economy Were Structured to Make the Rich Richer.)
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