(Note: Robert Lighthizer served as U.S. Trade Representative in the first Trump administration and was a key adviser to Trump’s 2024 campaign. He is the author of No Trade Is Free: Changing Course, Taking on China, and Helping America’s Workers, published by Broadside Books in 2023.)
Interviewer:
Why were [the] free trade innovations in the 1990s, early 2000s—[such as NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement]—why were they bad for workers?
Lighthizer:
The question is: What is the objective of economic policy, of which trade policy is a part of it. One option is “price optimization.” That’s what you would get if you were an economist. A certain group would say “corporate profits.” A certain group — economists again — would say “efficiency in the marketplace.”
In my objective, they are all wrong. And we have 30 years to prove them wrong — although some of us realized it earlier on. The objective should be that the vast majority of American workers have good, productive jobs, stay married, have kids, raise their family, stay off drugs, go to Little League, and create communities. The group of those thousands of communities in America is what makes us a great country. It’s what makes us innovative. It’s what makes our military strong.
So, to me, we were focused on something that was not important, or that was secondarily important. Certainly, corporate profits, efficiency, and price optimization are second-tier things. The real objective is the life of the citizenry, life of communities. And we got off of that....
So one way...to think of it is: if your objective is consumption, then you have one approach. If your objective is production and productive people, then you have the approach that I espouse....
The United States, and some of the other Anglo-Saxon countries, were going [in] the direction of saying, “We’ll get rid of all of our barriers,” and other countries were not doing the same thing. What was happening was that you were outsourcing manufacturing, outsourcing technology, outsourcing your jobs, and really, running up trade deficits. The net of which was we were selling our country for current consumption. And it is fundamentally wrong. It has hurt people....
If you look at the country that Angus Deaton and Anne Case talk about in their book Deaths of Despair, [there have been increases in] suicides, alcoholism, drugs. Two-thirds of...our workers do not have a college degree. Those people are poorer, they live seven years less. And if you look at the top [earners], they live longer and have more and more wealth. So we’re basically making our country less equal.
And a huge cause of that is this notion that we want to get the cheapest television set. And that requires us to ship our television industry to China. Until China comes up with their own industry and takes us on, some group of Americans will become wealthier because of that, but people will lose their jobs. And losing those jobs is a higher cost than the value of the cheaper consumption.
– From an April 2024 Lawfare Daily podcast. Audio and a transcript are available at bit.ly/lawfare-daily-lighthizer.
