When I read of Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm’s concern that consumers are being “bigfooted” with low-cost electric vehicles from China and that our government may step in and keep prices higher, I was taken aback. While the Biden administration’s protectionist trade stance has been fairly clear, officials have also been vocal about protecting ordinary shoppers from corporate America’s high prices. So, it’s remarkable to hear one choosing, apparently, to protect our taxpayer-subsidized manufacturing sector.
“We are very concerned about China bigfooting our industry in the United States even as we’re building up now this incredible backbone of manufacturing,” Granholm said. Evidently, despite an aging U.S. auto fleet and consumers weary from huge auto price increases, the Biden administration won’t accept the arrival of cheaper cars. Instead, we got the message that citizens will be asked to pay twice: once to subsidize U.S. manufacturing and again to pay higher prices for vehicles produced in our hot-house economy.
It starts to sound like satire when you consider that the energy secretary’s dismay was also directed at climate-saving solar panels that, while Chinese-made, had previously been purchased in large quantities by American solar energy providers, though she seemed pleased that our government had put the brakes on that, too. No matter how much we care about climate change, it seems, we should keep out lower-priced solar cells from China. Fortunately, it’s OK to get them from Vietnam. (And of course those cells may have started off in China.)
Reasonable minds can disagree on trade with China, but Granholm’s words sound almost like a paraphrasing of a famous 1845 satire by French economist Frederic Bastiat, The Candlemakers’ Petition, which goes like this:
We are suffering from the ruinous competition of a rival who apparently works under conditions so superior to our own for the production of light that he is flooding the domestic market with it an incredibly low price; for the moment he appears, our sales cease, all consumers turn to him. … This rival, which is none other than the sun is waging war on us. We ask you to pass a law requiring the closing of all windows, dormers, skylights … in short all through which the light of the sun is wont to enter houses to the detriment of our fair industries.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Ridiculous? Sometimes extreme positions make an important point. No one favors blocking the sun to protect the jobs of candlemakers or employees of power companies. But many seem willing to block not only imported cars from a key rival but also tin mill steel from Canada, sugar from the Dominican Republic, and olives from Spain to protect America’s organized interest groups.
If “bigfooting” means we consumers can enjoy a higher standard of living through greater access to the world’s goods, I say let him stomp on! You may feel differently, but we can still agree on the administration’s mixed message.
Bruce Yandle is a distinguished adjunct fellow with the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, dean emeritus of the Clemson College of Business and Behavioral Sciences, and a former executive director of the Federal Trade Commission.
