Last tango for socialism.

• Author: Hazlett, Thomas W.

Of all the inanities spouted in the recent "debates" over NAFTA and GATT, the most outrageous - a very competitive title - concerned the contempt with which Americans on the left (Jerry Brown, Ralph Nader) and right (Ross Perot, Pat Buchanan) dismissed "cheap foreign labor."

The exploitable populist fear underlying every advance of international commerce is the threat that somewhere, in a place far different from our own, people far different from us will rise up and take our jobs. We will be helpless, hapless, superfluous - these people will eat dirt for dinner, sleep standing up, and produce twice what we can at one penny a day. How can we possibly compete against these alien life forms?

Defenders of rational discourse, including in this very lucky instance White House spin doctors, dwell on the inaccuracy of those claims. They pound home the lesson that "comparative advantage" makes the whole pie bigger. I know all about gains from trade; I love and cherish them (on the blackboard and in real life). But what is ugliest about the "cheap foreign labor" argument is its utter brutality. Scratch the surface of the (flawed) economics and you arrive at a horrendously inhumane moral supposition: Screw those poor bastards - they'll outcompete us just for a meal!

If free trade really did downsize domestic incomes, it is only because the poor (them over there) are getting richer while the rich (us here at home) are getting poorer. Tossing out any gains from trade puts one in a zero-sum world where our incomes drop because wages are equalizing and foreign workers are getting more than they get now. More than they deserve, certainly. After all, they were born poor. They shouldn't mind it as much as we Americans, born to a high station in life.

Despisers of the market system once held the moral high ground. It was a stretch to argue, without giggling, that West Germany was less efficient than East Germany when the capitalists were driving Beemers and Mercedes and the socialists were putting about in Ladas and Skodas (Yugos being entirely out of their price range). But, the tale went, it was only in the meanness and harshness of the marketplace that such brutal efficiencies could be squeezed. "From each according to his ability" was much kinder and gentler, and a whole lot more equitable.

With the anti-market types now boastfully abandoning any pretense of fairness, going so far as to demonize the earth's downtrodden, the intellectual victory of...