Ben Bova: Trade protectionists fight changes that will make our lives better

Everybody's in favor of free trade, in principle, just as everyone is in favor of free speech - until somebody says something that someone else objects to.

In theory, free trade promotes international trade and helps build prosperity in the trading nations. After all, if tomatoes can be grown less expensively in Mexico than in Florida, we consumers benefit from buying Mexican tomatoes. (Assuming the quality is comparable to the Florida product.) Mexico gains us as customers and grows richer.

But Florida tomato farmers don't want that. They want us to buy their tomatoes, even though they cost more. So they demand that the government protect their prices by setting tariffs on Mexican tomatoes, which artificially increase the price of the Mexican product.

They claim that free trade is what encourages jobless Mexicans to seek employment in the United States. That's not true. If trade between the United States and Mexico were unencumbered by tariff barriers, Mexican workers would find more employment opportunities in their native land. They wouldn't have to sneak into the United States to find work.

It's the Florida farm owners who would suffer from free trade, and that is why they are against it. They want our government to protect their product from foreign competition. The more successful they are, the more tomatoes cost us here in Florida, and the more immigrant laborers remain in our state.

Businesses often ask the federal government to protect them from foreign competition. Sometimes this leads to disaster.

In 1930, with Wall Street in a panic, business interests prevailed on the Congress to pass the Smoot-Hawley tariff, which attempted to protect a wide range of American agricultural and industrial products from foreign competition. Other nations, which would have been trading with us, angrily erected their own trade barriers against our products. The result: international trade was strangled and the world-numbing Great Depression caused unemployment and misery everywhere -- and incidentally led to the rise of Hitler's Nazis in Germany and Japanese militarism.

The Smoot-Hawley tariff helped to bring about World War II and the 50-some million deaths of that war.

Protectionists fear free trade because free trade generates competition on an international scale. In a way, protectionists are like the Luddites of the early Industrial Revolution.

The Luddite movement of the early 19th century was named after Ned Ludd, a man who has not been treated well by history. Various historical sources describe him as feeble-minded, or perhaps nonexistent, a creature of myth.

The Luddites, however, were very real. They were English craftsmen who tried to stop the nascent Industrial Revolution by destroying the new-fangled textile mills that were taking away their livelihoods. Starting in 1811 the Luddites rioted, wrecked factories, and even killed one factory owner who had ordered his guards to shoot at a band of rioting workers.

After five years of such violence the British government took harsh steps to suppress the Luddites, hanging dozens and transporting others to the prison colony of far-off Australia. That broke the back of the movement, but did not put an end to the underlying causes that had created the movement.

Slowly, painfully, over many generations, the original Luddite violence evolved into peaceful political and legal activities. The labor movement grew out of the ashes of the Luddites' terror. Marxism arose in reaction to capitalist exploitation of the workers. The Labour Party in Britain and socialist governments in other nations are the descendants of that early resistance against machinery.

Today the progeny of those angry craftsmen live in greater comfort and prosperity than their embattled forbears could have imagined in their wildest fantasies. Not because employers and factory owners suddenly turned beneficent. Not because the labor movement and socialism have removed greed and selfishness from the human soul.

It is because the machines -- the machines that the Luddites feared and tried to destroy -- have generated so much wealth that the common laborer can have a home of his own, plentiful food, excellent medical care, education for his children, and personally owned automobiles, television sets, and all the appliances that we take for granted.

Today's protectionists show the Luddite mentality, in that they want to keep things as they are, rather than change. It's difficult for a migrant worker, struggling to support a family on his meager income, to accept the idea that free trade will make life better for his children or grandchildren. He's worried about his problems of today, about his next meal, his child's illness, the roof over his head.

But the farm owners and agricultural barons who employ those migrant workers should know better. They resist free trade because it will be an immediate pain in their pocketbooks. Could it be that they cynically manipulate their workers and the workers' organizations to serve as foot soldiers in their campaign to fight against free trade?

It's easy for me to take the lofty position and look at the long view. Yet, if the Luddites had prevailed, the Industrial Revolution would have died in its infancy and we today would be living in poverty and ignorance.

There is a better life, even for farm workers. But it takes courage to face the pain of change. History has shown that the prize is worth the pain. But the prize, as history also shows, does not often go to those who endure the pain.

Naples resident Ben Bova is the son of a worker who helped to form the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union during the Great Depression of the 1930s. His Web site address is www.benbova.net.