The Anger of Compassion

Free Trade (not available in all states...)

Her name could have been Blanca, or Lupe, or Veronica. Yeah, Veronica. Friends and family call her Vero.

I was running near my El Paso home one evening, within sight of Mexico, when a Hispanic woman in blue jeans waved me down.

“Excuse me, sir,” she said haltingly. “Do you speak Spanish?”

I shook my head. “No,” I replied. “No habla Espagnol. Hablo ingles.”

Vero was determined, though, and in short order I discovered why. She pressed on: “Sir, do you know anyone who...who wants their house cleaned?”

Everyone, I thought. Me, I thought. But no way am I going to be another Zoe Baird. Again I shook my head. “No, sorry, I don’t.”

“Okay...thanks.” Vero didn’t look happy. She continued down Balboa Street, the direction she’d been heading before stopping me, toward my house which she wouldn’t be cleaning. I went back to my run, mildly cursing my own thoroughly inadequate Spanish.

And the situation.

Were there losses and benefits from this (unfortunately, entirely verbal and not economic) exchange? Sure:

Benefits: (1) Well, let’s see: I’m not breaking any employment or immigration or tax laws, since I never did hire Vero.

(2) I get to feel good and patriotic, knowing that I’ve done my part to ensure that no wetback is going to “take” a job--cleaning my house--away from a hardworking American. None of whom, by the way, has ever offered to clean my house...

(3) Vero is not cheated out of any Social Security payments decades in the future for work she was unable to secure today.

Oh, and there were losses, too:

(1) My messy house is still messy.

(2) I have to make time to clean my own house, because Vero won’t be doing it, even though my time is more commercially valuable than hers.

(3) Vero doesn’t have the employment, and thus the income, that she sought and needs.

Politicians, including Presidents Clinton and Bush, have extolled the virtues of free trade--whatever that means to them. So did the first President Bush and his predecessor in office, Ronald Reagan. Yet President Reagan, that scourge of Japanese automobile and motorcycle manufacturers and paragon of free trade, was elected in 1980. I remember it well, because I voted for him. Decades later, we have tariffs against Canadian lumber and foreign steel and Vietnamese shellfish. And against Vero.

My home is my castle, or so I’m encouraged to say (if not think). Just so I understand: it’s “my” house and it’s “my,” well, “money,” though it’s not gold...but with all the “free trade” janissaries running around in charge, I can’t do as I’d choose with either “my” house or “my” money. I don’t enjoy the benefits of free trade with Vero in my own home. Which is still messy.

I do wonder how hungry Vero is tonight, as I write this. I wonder how hungry her kids are and whether her husband has a job. I wonder how much more I’d have written today if I hadn’t had to clean the library myself or iron my own clothes. But as Henry Hazlitt and, before him, Frederic Bastiat, pointed out, we’ll never know. We’ll never know because the voluntary exchange didn’t happen, because we--Vero and I--weren’t allowed the freedom to make our own decisions, to so arrange our economic affairs as we each saw fit, to mutual advantage.

I wonder how many bureaucrats and politicians and other professional interventionists of that ilk are happy that I was unable to hire Vero.

But I don’t have time to dwell on such speculation: there’s more work to be done, and I’ve got bookcases to dust.

Sorry, Vero.

Posted by Craig Ceely at September 14, 2003 10:13 PM