The recent food additive scandal involving
poisoned pet foods might well have far more wide reaching implications than the isolated matter of food safety. If not handled deftly, it might well be the straw that breaks the back of the free trade camel. When
Barney starts dying, all bets are off.
First there was the news that Melamine, a protein lookalike, more properly used in making plastic and fertilisers, was found in wheat gluten and rice protein exported from China for use in pet foods. It was cheap, could be found in old building materials, and made for beaucoup profits. Only problem was that pets in the United States and South America started dropping dead from eating it.
Then there was the even more frightening news that diethylene glycol, an industrial solvent and an ingredient in antifreeze, had been exported from largely unregulated Chinese producers and turned up in, of all things, medicines and cough syrups, resulting in 365 deaths in Panama.
This is bad news, not only for the victims, the producers and resellers of these goods, and lax regulatory institutions, but also for the champions of free trade. The reason, as in most things in the modern world, has to do with Public Relations.
Standard operating procedure for The Powers That Be, whenever someone challenges the accepted wisdom of unfettered free trade, even with nations, such as China, that manipulate their currency to underbid their trading partners (Japan is even worse in this particular regard. In what bizzaro reality does it make sense that the country with the second largest trade surplus in the world has one of the weakest currencies of any industrialised country?), has an endless supply of workers willing to toil for a fraction of the pay domestic workers would need just to put food on the table, and with no environmental or safety regulations whatsoever, is to call in the carnival conjuring tricksters. They have some accredited economist come on MSNBC and wave their arms about like
Mandrake the Magician, claiming that if anything were to impede the free transfer of goods and capital, a giant space goat named
Smoot-Hawley the Devourer would gobble up the Sun, plunging the Earth into the outer screaming darkness of economic Gehenna.
This performance surprisingly works more often than you would believe. As often is the case, people are awed by the impressive sounding jargon and complex models into believing that they just don't have the brains or education to make an informed judgement.
Paradoxically, one of the reasons it works so well is that economics truly is the "dismal science" - dismal in that there is little science to it. Far more than psychology (more properly a branch of philosophy than medicine), and even more than "soft sciences" like sociology, economics belongs with the arts and humanities, rather than the exact metrics and falsifiable theories of physics and chemistry. The very fact that there are no verifiable answers to be had, makes it easier to pull the wool over people's eyes. How do you prove someone wrong, when there is no proven right, other than common sense and empirical data, which can easily be brushed aside as so much anecdotal evidence?
So this is an effective strategy against organised discontent over the slow gradual frog in boiling water erosion of working and middle class buying power and outsourcing of manufacturing jobs, as described in "The New Feudalism: Inflation and Free Trade". But when Barney, the trusty old family Scottish Terrier, lies there whimpering and dies with blood coming out of his rear end, with the kids bawling their eyes out, not even Ben Bernanke, backed up by all the minions of Wall Street and Voldemort, doing the nude voodoo with a headless chicken can make it just go away.
Even beefing up the besieged Food And Drug Administration might not contain the anger. That dead dog is one powerful crowbar to be wedged into the cracks of laissez-faire capitalism and free trade. Perhaps the rallying cry that turns the tide against unbridled free trade isn't "Save the American worker!" - but rather, "Remember Barney!" Stranger things have happened.