no favor if we force Americans to buy inferior American hi-fi equipment. And we do the American hi-fi industry no good, because it will grow fat and happy in its protected market and will never develop into a viable competitor for Japanese manufacturers.What's the alternative? In 1929, the United States passed the Smoot-Hawley Act, which drastically increased tariffs on imported goods, in the name of protecting American jobs. Many historians and economic theorists believe that the Stock Market Crash of 1929, the Great Depression, the rise of Hitler can be directly attributed to that one law.Proponents of GATT and NAFTA need only point to these economic and historical arguments to make their case.One Trading Unit, No National SovereigntyThe principles of free trade may be hard to argue with, but the implementation of what we call free trade in the 1990s is another matter. NAFTA and GATT are extremely controversial among Americans, despite being perhaps the only thing Bill Clinton and George Bush agreed upon in the 1994 presidential election. The WTO, a whole new international entity with some of the powers of a government, is viewed with even more suspicion.Before the passage of NAFTA in 1993, opponents warned that corporations would flee to Mexico for the cheaper labor and less restrictive laws. While that does not seem to have happened at the level people feared, many individual examples can be cited (including a 100,000-job transfer by IBM directly from the United States to "less expensive labor markets"). Do we really want, 10 years from now, to be buying Fords and Cheerios and IBM computers all made in Mexico, or Thailand? (To a large extent, we already are.) If our big corporations all move out of the United States, will Americans have any money left to buy Fords or Cheerios or computers? Or, as the free trade proponents argue, will we get better goods along with higher incentives to improve our domestic industries?The second majo...
