Wednesday, October 24, 2007

Huckabee's Protectionism   [Ramesh Ponnuru]

A few readers are defending him. A sample:

I have long admired your writing for National Review, but I would ask you to reconsider your hasty judgment of Mike Huckabee as combining the "bad ideas of Pat Buchanan and George W. Bush."

. . . . Huckabee may sound protectionist on trade in his high-level rhetoric, but unlike Democrats and Republicans such as Hunter and Buchanan, you won't find him advocating tariffs or ordering the Chinese to revalue their currency. Primarily his answer to level the trade playing field is to get rid of burdensome corporate and labor taxes, and to relieve employers of massive built-in health care costs. . . .

Please look at the whole record, such as the positions explained on Huckabee's website, before jumping to conclusions about him and expressing them publicly.

Thanks. But The Union Leader reports that Huckabee wants "tougher trade negotiations" to force other countries to attain our labor and environmental standards—which is precisely the line that Democratic protectionists who don't want to be called protectionists take. He has said that he wants us to challenge China to revalue its currency.

Here's more Huckabee, from his website: 

Free trade has to be fair trade. We are losing jobs because of an unlevel, unfair trading arena that has to be fixed. Behind the statistics, there are real families, real lives, and real pain. I'm running for President because I don't want people who have worked loyally for a company for 20 or 30 years to walk in one morning and be handed a pink slip and be told, "I'm sorry, but everything you spent your life working for is no longer here."

Now maybe you can defend that comment on the theory that it's our taxes and regulations that make the playing field unlevel. But the truth is that no free-market regime of taxes and regulations is going to be able to keep factories from ever being shut down. The mindset is protectionist.

10/24 10:15 AMShare