It's Time To Try Something Different For A Change

I don’t remember anyone on the American left complaining about me savaging these ludicrous Milo Minderbinder-esque celebrations of Friedman about the benefits of globalization. He was jubilant about the future, saying very soon no one would have a choice but to get rich under globalization (what he called the “golden straitjacket”), a system under which maybe not everyone had a job, but everyone would have a share. His seminal work The World is Flat, a whole book based on the wrong premise that a flat world is more interconnected than a round one, argued incessantly that exporting factories to China would magically benefit the very places that lost them:

If General Motors builds a factory offshore in Shanghai, it also ends up creating jobs in America by exporting a lot of goods and services to its own factory in China and benefiting from lower parts costs in China for its factories in America…

In one of the few metaphors he didn’t mangle (because he didn’t invent it), Friedman argued that globalization would work out because a “rising tide lifts all boats.” Then the 2008 crash hit, and globalization-euphoria went out of style. Friedman gave up talking about boats.
Trump’s tariffs returned him to the subject, but with a different take. Friedman this month explained that yes, free trade hasn’t been great for the U.S., but so long as we can accept being taken advantage of a little, it’s all good:

The world has been the way the world has been these past 80 years because America was… a superpower ready to let other countries take some advantage of it in trade, because previous presidents understood that if the world grew steadily richer and more peaceful, and if the United States just continued to get the same slice of global G.D.P. — about 25 percent — it would still prosper handsomely because the total pie would grow steadily. Which is exactly what happened.

A few days later, he decided he wasn’t against tariffs on China. We absolutely should do them, he said, just not alone: ="href="https:>

That is why President Trump’s strategy is so foolish. Instead of putting tariffs on the whole world, we should be looking to line up all our industrial allies in a united front to say to China: You cannot make everything for everyone.

This is similar to what Bernie Sanders, a longtime proponent of stiff tariffs on China, is now saying. Tariffs, say Bernie, should be used “selectively,” and not in a way that makes people think, “Oh, God, look at what the United States is doing.” Now it’s, “We are all human beings,” and “We don’t have to hate China” and we have to figure things out “globally.” It’s either fear of actually upsetting China, or of seeming in agreement with Trump, neither of which is a legitimate policy concern. If you’re in favor of tariffs when you know you don’t have the votes but against them once they’re actually in effect, you’re just a politician with no balls.