Janet Daley makes many good points here, but I find it curious that she thinks there is some meaningful difference between the stimulus bill’s “Buy American” provision and Mr. Brown’s “British jobs for British workers” notion that striking laborers there are now insisting be taken seriously. Our friends to the north are a bit put out by the “Buy American” provision, as the U.S. normally imports large amounts of construction materials from Canada, and you can see that Daley is also annoyed at the provision when it seems to adversely affect Britain, but without blinking she wants to insist that free trade does not entail the free movement of labor. This is a pleasant fiction that some generally pro-corporate conservatives like to tell people: I’m not a protectionist (I hate protectionists!), and I believe in market forces, except when they apply to the cost of labor. For years whenever “creative destruction” shuttered some small-town factory and led to greater efficiencies and cheaper goods for the consumer, the Janet Daleys here and elsewhere shrugged and declared that this was just the way things have to be. Now even some globalists are beginning to get agitated by the idea of undermining domestic labor. It might have social and political effects! Really, who would have guessed?

Daley thinks government should defend the interests of the people who voted it into power, except when those interests involve the import and export of goods and the competitiveness of domestic businesses. The interests of those citizens can be ignored, perhaps because they do not have the dramatic and headline-worthy option of launching wildcat strikes. According to Daley, the Americans should adhere to free trade ideology, regardless of the effects it has on American workers, but there ought to be some controls to protect the British worker. In other words, common sense tells her that the British government ought to be serving the interests of British citizens and ought to be able to limit or control the influx of foreign labor, but free trade ideology–something that is at the heart of the European project–keeps forcing her to pull back from her claim that the government has obligations to protect its citizens against cheaper competition more generally. That is horrid protectionism, economic “isolationism,” you see, and she will have nothing to do with that.

At the same time, she is outraged, simply outraged, that all those E.U. treaties compel her government to follow rules permitting the free movement of labor. She really cannot have it both ways. Globalists like Daley have spent the last two decades opposing and berating critics of free trade and mass immigration, only to find out now in a moment of global economic contraction (probably the worst time to make this discovery) that the critics may have been onto something. Even then she is not really willing to follow her position through to its logical conclusions, because one thing remains crucial: to keep the line dividing people like her from the “real” protectionists and nationalists as bright and clear as possible.

Daley is quite correct when she says:

It is not purblind nationalism, let alone racism, to resent the importation of cheap labour en masse when its conditions of employment (transport and accommodation provided, as seems to be the case at Lindsey) allow it to compete unfairly with indigenous workers. The drafting in of low-wage work gangs has always been seen as unjust: exploitative of the foreign workers, and destructive of the social cohesion of existing communities which, incidentally, is something about which the Tories say they are much exercised.

But then Daley wants to make another distinction between the sort of importation of cheap labor taking place with this oil rig operation and the general importation of cheap labor that is mass immigration. When it is prearranged by an employer, that is a dirty, rotten trick that harms all of the workers, but when it is not prearranged it is just a case, I suppose, of people doing the jobs Britons won’t do. Daley believes free trade in goods is essential to economic recovery and the relief of poverty elsewhere in the world, so how exactly does she square that with opposing the free movement of labor? Once you get past all of the caveats, that is what she is saying: the government should be able to restrict the importation of labor to protect native laborers. In the end, national sovereignty and citizenship should still count for something in the economic sphere. She has picked an awfully awkward moment to realize the obvious.

There is nothing necessarily wrong with this position, and there are good reasons to take this position, but just watch how desperate she is to avoid granting any legitimacy to other anti-globalist arguments. On top of all that, recent events have her so agitated that she even manages to confuse FDR for some kind of tariff-hiking maniac, when he continued to represent the traditional Democratic position of opposition to protective tariffs that were strongly supported by the other party. Whatever else I might say about FDR, it is simply not correct to describe him as a pro-tariff man.

It is a bit frustrating that the moment at which creating protections for domestic industry and labor is most likely to be popular is also the moment when imposing those protections makes the least economic sense. Having pursued utterly imbalanced trade and immigration policies that harmed domestic industry and lowered wages during the expansion (ultimately worsening many Americans’ ability to cope with the eventual contraction), Western industrial states are faced by increasingly angry electorates that are facing prolonged recession after having been urged on to spend themselves into oblivion. The prosperity of globalization was financed by the total irresponsibility and lack of discipline that was positively encouraged and cultivated by policies of globalists: keep goods and labor cheap, flood the system with money, keep inflating various bubbles and tell people that they can have it all without any consequences. The real perversity of globalist policies is that they have so sapped national economies of their ability to be anything remotely like self-sufficient that any attempt to break out of patterns of dependence would be extremely painful. Instead of suffering the short-term discomfort of some higher prices that would have resulted from correcting flawed trade and immigration policies when times were better, our governments avoided making the necessary corrections and deferred responsibility. Today we are seeing something similar in other areas: instead of enduring the consequences of the bubble’s collapse, our governments are desperately putting off the day of reckoning and delaying eventual recovery by burying us and our descendants under even more debt. We missed the chance during the last three decades to bring sanity to our trade and immigration policies, and we are now going to see what the full cost of those policies really is. Let’s hope that we are now able to stop from being quite so foolish and short-sighted in fiscal and financial matters.