
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, November 21, 1993                   TAG: 9311220267
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: EDITORIAL   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

BEHIND THE MESSAGE NAFTA FOES HAD LOUSY LOGIC, GENUINE WORRIES

NOW THAT the House of Representatives has spoken, it may be time to wonder just what it was about the North American Free Trade Agreement that stirred the nation to a level of near-hysteria as no single economic issue has in most of our lifetimes.

Surely the benefits of NAFTA, even expressed in the most optimistic hyperbole - pronounced high-per-bowl by one congressman in Wednesday's debate - did not measure up to the political capital expended by its supporters. Nor did the perils of NAFTA, most fanatically stated, amount to a nanny goat's nightgown compared with economic forces, which, without any help from Mexico or much from Congress, have been devastating the living standards of American workers in the last decade.

Take, for instance, the loss of half the jobs in the U.S. steel industry since 1980, the stagnation and decline of real blue-collar wages that began in 1980, the upward redistribution of wealth that began with the 1981 tax cuts for the wealthy, the recent corporate fad for butchering work forces under the euphemism of downsizing, and the failure to increase the minimum wage with inflation. Compared with these ongoing calamities suffered by American workers, many of the most horrifying anti-NAFTA scare stories, including - gasp - the destruction of the American corn-broom industry, are basically a collection of trivialities.

Certainly, one thing that attracted many of NAFTA's enemies was the chance to blame the nation's troubles on somebody else. How much easier to conjure a Mexican monster snatching the breakfast of the children of American factory workers than to imagine that America itself has been treating its workers rather wretchedly. Besides, if you're not too fastidious about those you associate with, the Mexico-as-monster theory was certain to pick up the votes of those nativists always disposed to believe that nothing good comes from closer association with foreigners, especially when they are a darker-skinned people.

But perhaps all the fuss raised by NAFTA has also sent us a more liberal message. And perhaps it is that much of the opposition to NAFTA was genuinely liberal in instinct - if not common sense - and that there is in this nation a huge pool of dissatisfaction that can be harnessed to more liberal solutions to the nation's problems.

If it weren't so obsessed with proving its centrist manhood, the Clinton administration might have used some of the heroics it expended for NAFTA to fight for its jobs-creating economic-stimulus package that went down the tubes last summer. It might be pushing just as energetically for an early upward revision of the minimum wage, for passage of the bill to ban the firing of striking workers, for more ambitious worker-retraining programs, and yes, for the taxes to pay for them. It might be fighting for more aggressive industrial policies.

Surely, more public investment in education and research, in the infrastructure, in intelligently targeted industrial policy designed to create jobs and enhance competitiveness, even if it involves the government in picking winners from the private sector, is inherently wiser and more efficient than unintelligently applied tariffs and trade barriers, which ostensibly protect American workers, but which in reality involve the government in picking losers and in sticking it to consumers.

Robert Renof writes for Newsday.

f\ REG f-b f-i s\ 7Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service

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