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

DATE: FRIDAY, October 28, 1994                   TAG: 9410280066
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A14   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

GATT

A CONGRESSIONAL vote on the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs is set for a special post-election session. If passed, the free-trade measure will lower U.S. consumer prices, but at the cost of jobs in such currently protected U.S. industries as textiles. Under GATT, textile tariffs would be phased out over a 10-year period; at the end of it, U.S. textile mills may well be a thing of the past, unable to withstand the international competition.

The benefits, however, are more than worth it: For an advanced economy like America's, the loss of low-wage, low-skill jobs in places like textile mills will be more than offset by the job gains generated by the capital and creativity unleashed by lower consumer prices here and the expansion of foreign markets for U.S. products.

Moreover, those benefits apply to the families of textile workers as much as to other Americans, observes political economist Russell Roberts, director of the Management Center at the Olin School of Business at Washington University in St. Louis, Mo.

Few of those workers, Roberts notes, have much wish for their children to follow in their occupational footsteps. Without GATT and free trade, those children of course can choose to prepare themselves for other lines of work. But the economic boost produced by free trade greatly expands the range of opportunities that will be available to them.

There is no compelling reason for America to keep constant the number of its textile workers, any more than there was a compelling reason a century ago to keep 33 percent of the labor force in farming. The issue is not more jobs vs. fewer jobs, but one kind of job vs. other kinds of jobs.

Prosperity isn't built on museum-piece industries that can stay competitive only under the protection of tariffs and the tariff-induced high prices that lower the resources available for investment in new enterprises.

Forcing such industries into the light of true competition can lead to localized hardships; in some cases, that may call for special assistance for the people who're struggling. But in the long run, for their children like others, the economic drag of protectionism is no blessing.

by CNB