Free Trade With Mexico

You editorially praise House Majority Leader Richard Gephardt for “tempering his usual get-tough trade policy” in favor of supporting President Bush’s plan for a North American “free trade system” (“The Walls Come Tumbling Down,” May 11). Permit me to challenge your reasoning, no matter its popularity among economists and policy-makers.

You assume that “free trade with Mexico will help the U.S. economy by generating more jobs for workers in this country.” This echoes the standard economic view that if Mexicans can export more goods to the U.S., the Mexican workers who produce those goods will be able to buy more goods made in the U.S. This view overlooks two important factors:

1. Trade disputes (U.S. versus Japan, for example) do not and cannot arise until and unless the combined ability to produce goods within such countries greatly exceeds the combined ability to sell those goods at reasonable prices within those countries and elsewhere in the world. Without this excess of supply over demand, there would be no reason for any argument.

2. Workers in Mexico (or China) can indeed turn out quality products, but if they must work for starvation wages (Mexico), or if many of them are prisoners (China), what U.S. exports can they be expected to buy?

My economist colleagues delight in condemning “protectionism,” but not when the issue involves their own industry. They resolutely support tenure for professors, so they should be able to understand why workers in other industries seek the job security that is necessary to meet mortgage payments and avoid adding to the bankruptcies now at a record level in this region (“New Bankruptcy Filings in Southland Set a Record,” front page, May 11). There is sound historical reason for concluding that “free trade” creates depressions and wars, not prosperity and peace.

FREDERICK C. THAYER, Los Angeles. The writer is professor emeritus at the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public and International Affairs.