A few points.

Protectionism is a great way to reward concentrated interests with diffuse costs, so members of Congress will always have an incentive to act in this way.

Doesn't the fact that free trade has been 90% implemented indicate that public choice theory is much less important in action than in theory? Supposedly, there is this huge incentive to embrace protectionism, yet you still have free trade. I know that to think this, much less say it, goes against the modern day dogma that all that matters are incentives, but maybe incentives don't matter as much as is commonly assumed. If incentives are all that matters, it is a real puzzle why we have free trade at all, no?

2) Child labor plays a huge role in the economy. No, not as measured in GDP, but as measured in ethics.
There is more to economics that dollars and cents. I would say that it is far more important to prevent that abuse of child labor than it is to ensure that Zimbabwe pays pharmaceutical companies inflated prices for drugs. But that is just me.

3) Conservatives never would go for shifting payroll taxes from the poor to the rich. Remember, they are for shifting taxes away from the rich with their tax shifts (err.. they call them tax cuts, but since they aren't paid for, everyone knows they are just tax shifts). I am 100% sure that liberals would go for this idea, however.

Shift America's 12 million illegal aliens to an island in the Atlantic, broker a free trade agreement, and then watch Kevin Drum complain that yet another free trade agreement is driving down American wages.

"Protectionism is a great way to reward concentrated interests with diffuse costs, so members of Congress will always have an incentive to act in this way."

So far those interests include politicians, lawyers, investment bankers, tenured professors, oil companies and etc., you know, those who struggle to make it in our society.

But why do blue collar workers need pensions or healthcare - they aren't the choosen people. Maybe we can increase the EITC to shut them up.

And besides, Exxon needs it subsidies.

Dan,

I think you underestimate the “plus” in these trade-plus agreements and how it serves the interests of American interests. It seems to me that, from American perspective, these FTAs are not really about the remaining 10% protected goods. Their primary goal is the opening important service sectors, like telecommunications, insurance, and finance. They also provide very strong protections to the properties of American investors (intellectual as well as physical). The trade part of the agreement is beneficial to the FTA partner, as it provides access to the U.S. market.

Repeal the payroll tax as to 50% of all workers?

This conservatarian generally favors of tax cuts, but eliminating all the underside to spiraling Fed spending would put the U.S. in a situation where 50% of the workers, plus just one trust funded limousine liberal, could vote themselves whatever largess they wanted from everybody else' pocket. Do you see any hazards arising from that proposal? Add in non-wage earning retirees and voting age students, and there would be a supermajority constituency in favor of infinitely increasing social benefits. Hey, what the hell, doesn't cost me nothin', right? P.J. O'Rourke has humorously noted that when 51% of the people figure out that the other 49% are basically a blank checkbook, your market democracy is pretty much done for. And since when was the 50th percentile in need of that kind of tax relief? I've lived in that percentile as recently as 7 or 8 years ago, and even then thought it was probably a pretty good idea that I be required to pay at least some taxes - the fact that the Dems' promises about student loan relief sound inviting to me now, even though I know better, backs up my intuition that it's possible to make wild increases in Fed spending *too* easy to vote for.

Dan, as a (very) small business owner, I like your proposals. Health care portability doesn't affect me so much, but fear of losing it is very real to most of my clientele. The payroll tax and tariff issues certainly appeal to anyone like me who's trying to stretch every dollar.

Re. Very Freaky, public choice is in action every day at discount retailers. The public by and large will favor buying less expensive goods brought to them by free trade - clothing from Vietnam or Pakistan, toys from China - while playing lip service to protectionism. There is ambivalence in the political conversation, but not so much at the check-out counter.

As for the statement "Conservatives never would go for shifting payroll taxes from the poor to the rich," maybe that should be qualified as "Elite politicians who sup with lobbyists" rather than "Conservatives". An awful lot of conservatives pay payroll taxes, and wouldn't mind sharing the payroll love a little more with their higher paid brethren. Payroll taxes, which are regressive in that they fall disproportionately on lower-income workers, aren't even in the same ballpark as income taxes, which many many payroll-tax-paying workers get back every year. I don't think the average conservative minds some progressivity in the payroll tax that much, and also doesn't resent letting the people who pay the vast majority of the income taxes get a moderate break. Similarly, the average conservative may not mind spreading the payroll tax burden out a little more by shifting the ceiling, if he gets a break at the lower end and if there seems to be a real purpose to it, other than giving the central government more money to waste. Can the average Liberal look at a tax change and resist the temptation to make it a hike rather than just a shift? When Liberals talk taxes, that is the root of the fear in the Conservative's eyes.

But then, it probably doesn't matter what the "average" conservative or liberal thinks, anyway. They're not the ones making the policies and they're not the ones in bed with special interests. The term "Democrat economic populism" is an oxymoron if ever there was one.

The free trade debate has been miscast from the beginning. It not about growth but about the rules of diverse political economies. It's not about wringing our the last 10% of comparative advantage, but about how to control factor-price equalization. It's not about competition, but about economic morality.

We have spent the last century developing that morality, the rules and regulations governing our economy, only to see it cast to the winds of amoral globalism. If I suggested throwing away our democratic institutions because they were interfering in the growth of trade, people would be aghast at the cavalier manner in which I would treat our countries inheritance.

Yet the idea that we are throwing away a century of economic morality bought by the sacrifices of our forefathers is hardly a consideration in our drive toward greater global growth and the need to compete.

Economist harp on the benefits or comparative advantage, yet conveniently forget about the effects of price factor equalization on the wages of workers in developed countries. They conveniently forget about a century of economic morality, rules and regulations, that have been fought for by different interests groups. They appear to be blissfully willing to throw away a political economy that has been democratically stitched together in the name of competition with political economies that are fashioned by authoritarian regimes.

When Chinese workers aren't allowed to assemble, or their wages are held down by the state, the equilibrium in price-factor equalization is held back and held down. Our economic morality is tested by the amorality of globalism.

Without international governments to set the rules of the game or set the rules under which countries can play the game of free trade, the debate about free trade hasn't even begun. It's not at the end of its run where we worry about the last 10% of comparative advantage, but it's at the beginning where we worry about its effects on political economies democratically arrived at and the damage done to them by the political economies of dictatorships.

Unless he has radically changed his views since his column of May 14th, Paul Krugman, one of the the favorite economists of Democrats, is very much a free trader.