Bad Faith, Free Trade Style

The economic argument for free trade involves making a bunch of supply-demand diagrams and noticing that, if you expand trade to include the entire world, it can't help but increase overall surplus. That is, if the country becomes an exporter and the price of the good in that country increases, the gains for producers will outweigh the losses for consumers, and if the country becomes an importer and the price of the good drops, the gains for consumers will outweigh the damage to producers. This means that, in theory, one could then re-allocate some portion of the gains that the winners from trade accrue to the losers, allowing everyone to come out ahead as a net matter. If you do it right, free trade can be pareto efficient.

Mitch McConnell, a "supporter" of free trade, is planning to vote against various free-trade agreements the Administration wants if they don't drop their insistence on including Trade Adjustment Assistance in the pacts. TAA is a program aimed at helping workers displaced by the effects of free trade find new jobs. It constitutes, in other words, the exact kind of redistributive scheme that the standard economics argument in favor of free trade calls for to make everyone better off. And McConnell opposes it. This is a tell; he's tipping his hand that he doesn't really care about free trade. He doesn't want a Pareto improvement in the well-being of Americans; he wants a really, really big improvement in the well-being of large American companies that stand to profit from free trade done badly. This is the kind of thing to look for from a politician, because when they take a stance like this it means they are not playing the game in good faith.