NAFTA Rarely Are Right-Wing Activists

NAFTA

Rarely are right-wing activists such as Pat Buchanan and left-wing activists such as Ralph Nader on the same side of an issue. However, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) represents an area where these two traditionally opposite ends of the political and economic spectrum have comparable viewpoints. Buchanan and Nader have remarkably similar stances on NAFTA's negative impact on American jobs, favoritism for large global corporations and the devastation of the United States border with Mexico and possibly the sovereignty of nations.

Buchanan and Nader blame NAFTA as the reason the United States trade surplus with Mexico has disappeared. From 1995 through 1998, the United States ran $20 billion trade deficits with Mexico. and, from 1999 through 2005, the United States trade deficit with Mexico grew every year, from $27 billion in 1999 to last year's $54 billion. Those that defend NAFTA claim that the United States can still benefit through the economic theory of comparative advantage, where a country with comparative advantage can produce a particular good or service by giving up less value in other goods or services that it could otherwise produce with its labor and resources than other countries would have to give up in producing that same good or service. Applying comparative advantage theory to NAFTA, the United States would export high-value items to the United States, while Mexico exports products of less-skilled labor to the United States.

Both Buchanan and Nader dispute that NAFTA is facilitating comparative advantage for the benefit of all. According to Nader, "Someday the pollyanna belief that the U.S. economy always replaces the jobs it loses overseas with new jobs here, as we keep racing ahead of other countries with modern technology, may run into a contrary riptide that no set of spurious statistics can obscure." Buchanan elaborates with statistics related to manufacturing jobs. He says that under Bush, three million manufacturing jobs have disappeared, one in every six, and that Mexico is taking on our higher value exports. Mexico's leading exports to the United States in 2005 were automobiles, oil, electrical machinery, computers, furniture, textiles and apparel while the United States' leading exports to Mexico were plastics, chemicals, cereals, cotton, meat, paper, oil seed, aluminum, copper and knitted or crocheted fabrics. Nader, on free trade in general, points out the lost of skilled jobs in the United States in the fields of computer programming, payroll processing, airline passenger billings, and insurance computer applications.

Buchanan and Nader also hold similar views that NAFTA is serving the interest of large global corporations at the expense of participating countries and their citizens. Buchanan states, "Today's trade agreements are about reshaping the world to conform to the demands of transnational corporations that have shed their national identities and loyalties and want to shed their U.S. workers." Similarly, Nader is concerned that free trade agreements such as NAFTA have been written in a way that allows these agreements to supersede the laws of participating countries and states, undercutting domestic laws designed to protect consumers and the environment. and, Buchanan and Nader list the same laundry list of why corporations are trying to circumvent national laws, citing environmental, health-and-safety, wage-and-hour and civil-rights reasons.