More fundamentally, in dismissing the impact of standards on the pressing concerns of American workers, they miss the point on why they are actually vital to include in the rules of the game governing the global economy: The failure to adhere to basic standards in protecting workers' rights in large countries (essentially China) is a huge problem for workers in other poor, developing countries.

As much as lefties (rightly) decry the policy constraints foisted on poor countries as a precondition for entry into the WTO or the receipt of World Bank/IMF loans, or access to the U.S. market through bilateral agreements, the policy constraints currently being imposed on them by the Chinese labor practices (and even more importantly the Chinese exchange rate peg) are at least as stringent. On the exchange rate issue, a number of developing countries (mostly in East Asia) have publicly expressed the desire to diversify their own reserve holdings away from dollars, but, if they do this, they will lose U.S. market share to Chinese exports as the value of their own currencies rise.

On labor rights, countries that may want to switch to a growth regime fueled by domestic wage growth will find the trade-off of this policy switch much steeper in a world where their exports compete with those from China -- where labor costs are low not just because of low productivity levels but also because of outright labor repression. How is it the left position that one powerful country should be able to limit economic policy options in dozens of other nations?

Further, if one was arguing for the inclusion of serious labor standards as a precondition for access to the U.S. market full stop, this would indeed not be very useful. But, the left voices in this debate are hoping for a wholesale swap of all the corporate clutter (including a favorite pet irritation of most lefties, including Matt -- harmonization of intellectual property protections) that is the current cost for poor countries' access to the U.S. market in exchange for the simple, transparent, and win-win condition of market access in exchange for serious labor standards. This is actually a move towards more liberalized trade with fewer conditions for market access, but, a move that aligns workers' interests instead of pitting them against each other.

I will note that I understand many of JKG's frustrations with the U.S./China debate. China has done many things right in carving out a development strategy that has been wildly successful along many dimensions. Capital controls, shrewd industrial planning, hard bargaining with the multinationals that want to set up shop in China -- all of these are good things, and, indeed, should be models for development. I would even add the refusal to pay excess rents on first-world intellectual property to this list. Lefties rightly want to highlight successful alternatives to Washington Consensus (WC) development policy, and, as much as the WC crowd want to claim China as vindication for what they're pushing, it's clear that Chinese growth has come largely as a result of breaking with this neoliberal orthodoxy.

Further, even some of the Chinese strategies that can't go on (the exchange rate peg) are normatively innocuous, and, could even be a sustainable strategy for a smaller country. But, China's not a smaller country, it's the second-largest economy in the world, and, it's mercantilist strategies are squeezing not just the U.S., but, more importantly, other poor countries.

All that said, arguing for a purely domestic response to globalization's pressures on American workers is largely correct only if one cares exclusively about American workers. The odd thing in trade debates is that those arguing for a purely domestic response (and here I'm thinking more of the DLC types that Matt references) often act as if they are safeguarding the interests of developing countries from U.S. protectionism. I'd argue instead that the globalization status quo is so stacked against developing country interests that a purely domestic U.S. response to globalization is essentially American workers pulling the ladder up behind them and leaving the rest of the world's workers out to dry.

--Josh Bivens