PRESIDENT BUSH'S FAITH-BASED TRADE POLICY

President Bush has been running about the world trying his best to sell free trade. It's something he really believes in. There's NAFTA, CAFTA and all sorts of efforts at the world level to reduce subsidies and tariffs.

But all today's relatively free trade has accomplished so far is big trade deficits and the exporting of American middle-class jobs to other countries. So why does the President keep pushing for more of the same?

Is it because he believes the economists who preach "Free trade means that every country will produce what it does best, which lowers prices and increases wealth"?

No. You see, when others were reading their economics textbooks, President Bush was probably reading the Bible.

The parable in Matthew 25, verse 15 states, "For it as if a man, going on a journey, summoned his slaves and entrusted his personal property to them; to one he gave five talents, to another two, to another one, to each according to his ability."

The President probably figured that faith-based free trade economics meant that superpower USA would get the five talents, Europe two and the rest of the world would be the onesies.

The economists and the Bible may have been right when the world was dominated economically by the U.S. and Europe. No one else had the production capacity to steal good manufacturing jobs from America. So for a while, prosperity and good jobs did flow to America, just as the Bible parable and the economists suggested.

Unfortunately for America, the economists did not foresee the post-war rise of manufacturing powers like Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea. The economists did not see those countries taking away America's steel, ship-building, appliance, electronics and auto industries -- and the high-paying jobs that went with them.

Despite this evidence that free trade would be harmful to America, the economists and several presidents of both parties plunged blindly ahead, pushing free trade.

Then about 1990, China and India began to roar to life, changing from third-world agricultural countries into manufacturing and technological powerhouses. China began absorbing manufacturing jobs from all over the world while India started up the ladder snapping up call center work, computer programming and corporate back office operations. Good jobs began to produce that "giant sucking sound" Ross Perot warned us all about in two presidential elections.

If we step back and look at things using reason instead of faith in Bible parables and economists, it should be obvious that the world has changed. The idea that "each country will make what it does best" is dead. It has been replaced with a far more accurate and frightening theorem:

Each country will make what it makes the cheapest.

And, as you can guess, we don't have people working for one or two dollars a day. So where does that leave us? With fewer good jobs and more low-pay work.

We have already declined from a work force where one income could support a middle-class family. Now it takes two. Keep on pushing this free trade business and we may have to repeal the child labor laws.