In Defence of Governmental Education

Steven Landsburg, a radical libertarian economist at the University of Rochester, had a somewhat polemical article in the NYTimes today in which he argued that the government should not pay for the reeducation of workers who lose their jobs to globalization nor give them workers' benefits. The premise on which he based his argument was that if people are unwilling to give money to the government when the benefit from free-trade, why should the government have to give to the people who don't benefit. Landsburg went on to argue that protectionists are "bullies" of sorts. They keep consumers from getting the best deals possible by regulating what leaves the country and, more importantly, what comes into it. For example, if I could buy a car in the United States for $10,000 and the same car in Mexico for $5000, then it is unfair for the government to charge me an additional $5000 to import the car in order to protect the autoworkers' union. On this basis, I agree with Dr. Landsburg from a purely theoretical point-of-view. I support free trade. But I disagree that reeducation programs and/or workers' benefits are unethical and should, therefore, not be practiced by our government. Education (and reeducation) of our workers, in fact, has largely positive economic benefits from the standpoint that it allows us to reallocate our industry in this country and find a new workforce whom we can adapt to it. This is the entire point of free trade: To assure that the right person fills the right job. Furthermore, if our trade deficit (the margin by which we buy more than we sell) continues to grow in this country, it may very well lead to further economic instability and higher chances of recession. With the decreasing value of the dollar, we have an opportunity to reverse this trend, and trade barriers are the last thing that we need to plague both the supply- and the demand-sides of production. Nevertheless, we're going to need a technologically literate workforce if we want to keep our edge as one of the world's leading industrial nations. Reeducating the unemployed is a step in the right direction, regardless of whether they deserve it or not.