By James J. Burnett
Facing what is fortunately his last year in office, President Clinton apparently has begun fashioning his "legacy." All lame-duck Presidents do this. They've been doing it for decades. Basically, creating a legacy involves using Executive Orders and other powers resident in the Chief Executive to implement policies designed to have some lasting, and theoretically beneficial, effect on and for special interest groups. They mend fences with political groups they may have alienated, or they create some enduring if ethereal monument to themselves within the bureaucracy. As his term shortens, President Clinton's supporters (yes, Virginia, there are people out there who say he's done a good job, though the mind collapses from the strain of trying to figure out what he did that was so good), especially all the talking heads in the news media and the more vaporous heads in the entertainment clique, are waving their "Bill is Great" banners and singing praises about his "legacy" for all they're worth.
One cannot really blame the President for his efforts in this regard, nor his cohort of ballyhooers for ballyhooing it. After all, who wants to be remembered for two terms of form over substance? Or for trying to turn a nation's armed forces into an experiment in social engineering? Or for Whitewatergate? Or for Haiti, or Bosnia? Or for a foreign policy that has left the United States a source of amused ridicule even among its allies? Or for showing America a unique perspective on the hazards of cigar use? No one with an I.Q. higher than room temperature would want that as his legacy.
Sadly, however, this "legacy building" is just another example of form over substance, of lip service without meaningful effect. And in at least one situation, it is hurting far more people than it could ever hope to help. For President Clinton has decided to "help" the American farmer by imposing a tariff on the import of lamb. That's right, lamb. Foreign countries, he has ordered, will pay nine percent more to export lamb to the United States, up to the amount they exported last year. If they export more than that, they will pay a forty percent tariff.
I can understand, in part, why the President did this. During his term in office, he has taken criticism for the anti-American trade effects of NAFTA and of GATT, even though he was not in office when NAFTA was born and even though no one understood GATT if simply because no one was able to stay awake through its twenty-thousand-odd pages. Perhaps he has seen an opportunity to strike a blow for "American trade" and to appear to "protect" the American farmer. In other words, it's politically advantageous to have this tariff. However, simply because a President's actions may be politically comprehensible doesn't make them right, and this action by President Clinton is fundamentally wrong.
"But, he's only trying to protect the American farmer!" his advocates (whoever they are) will say. Is he? Does American agriculture really need this particular "protection"? I think it does not.
American agriculture really is one of the marvels of the modern world. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the United States has, on 1 August 1999, a population of 273,140,367. The U.S.D.A.'s 1997 Census of Agriculture registered fewer than a million Americans as farmers, barely two-tenths of one percent of the nation's population. The overwhelming majority of their farms were less than five hundred acres in size, and yet they produced enough food last year to feed everyone in this country, and to provide significant shipments of food to nearly three-quarters of the world's population.
Those farmers raised more than thirty-four million head of beef cattle. They also raised almost eight million sheep, not all or even most of which were used for food. A beef cow can yield four hundred pounds or more of edible meat; an adult sheep can yield about seventeen, and a lamb much less than that.
The truth is, Americans like beef a lot more than we like lamb. In 1998, each American ate an average of fifty kilograms of beef. That's 110 pounds, for those of you who don't speak metric. By comparison, we ate less than half a kilogram of lamb per person. Beef, in other words, outsells lamb in this country by a factor of a hundred to one.
So, the tariff isn't going to help a significant portion of American farmers. It isn't going to have a noteworthy effect at all on American agriculture. But it is having a serious effect elsewhere. You see, not all of the lamb we ate last year grew up on American farms. Some of it grew up elsewhere. Most of the lamb we imported came from Australia.
Australia has a much smaller population than the United States, about eighteen million people. Its economy and GNP are proportionately smaller than ours. Australian farmers exported about twenty-five percent of their lamb production to the U.S. last year. This year, they will get to pay nine--or forty--percent more to sell us their lamb. Lamb we wanted to buy; no one made them send it here.
It wasn't their fault U.S. consumers wanted Australian lamb, and it wasn't their fault that they were more competitive than American sheep farmers in producing lamb our people wanted. But that doesn't matter; according to the Clinton "legacy" scheme. They'll just have to pay nine to forty percent more, all the same. That'll fix 'em. And it'll help so many American farmers!
Does this sound antagonistic? Punitive? It is. That's what tariffs are. That's what they do. They punish foreign suppliers to try and prevent them from exporting their goods. It doesn't matter, apparently, that our buyers want their goods, are willing to spend our money on their goods. Washington doesn't want them to do it.
Protectionists, isolationists, and Arkansas cigar connoisseurs may view them as "helping the local economy," but I view tariffs generally as inefficient and dangerous, and history supports my view. Tariffs are fundamentally wrong. They are vile things, guaranteed to wound our relationships with other countries. Such wounds fester and are difficult, often impossible, to heal. They make enemies of our friends and inspire blood feuds by those who were already our enemies. They have been the cause of wars, and war is the antithesis of trade and growth. They are anathema to free trade. When other nations impose tariffs against us, we holler bloody murder. Well, sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. Tariffs are wrong. Period.
This tariff in particular is incredibly ill-considered. It is based on a fiction and it is being implemented with no concern for its overall consequences, simply to garner a few political brownie points. It is economically, logically, and morally objectionable. Yes, morally objectionable. It is immoral to turn on one's ally without cause, and that is precisely what the United States is doing with this tariff. It is injuring a loyal ally for no better reason than to give an outgoing executive the sham appearance of "sensitivity" for a tiny portion of our population.
Australia has been one of our most loyal friends and most dependable allies. It is our most important English-speaking ally in the Pacific; some would say it is our most important ally there, bar none. When the United States became involved in Vietnam, Australia sent her sons to fight and die alongside ours, not because she perceived a threat to her people's safety, but because, as one Australian official of the time said, "We have a moral duty to stand with our friends." They have been our friends, and now they are hopping mad. They have a right to their anger, for President Clinton is treating them shabbily.
You see, economies are complex and yet very delicate things. The President may believe it will make him more popular with some tiny percentage of American farmers to say, "We want you-all in Australia to send less lamb," but that begs the vital question of where, exactly, the Australians are to ship the lamb he says we don't want. The tariff puts Australian farmers in a lose-lose situation. They cannot simply dump an additional twenty-five percent of their production on their local economy. Neither can they readily or affordably export the lamb to other foreign consumers. Their only logical recourse is to produce less lamb. To sell less lamb. To lose money.
The President claims this tariff is necessary to assist American farmers, to bolster their economy. He "bolsters" less than one percent of American meat production at the sake of twenty-five percent of the production of another country, with a much smaller population and accordingly a much more sensitive agricultural economy.
Is this really the legacy you want to fashion for yourself?
Australians as a group may decry what they see as the encroachment of "American culture" into their lives. They may jibe us and enjoy their private jokes about us. They may make fun of our use--they would say "misuse"--of the English language, call us "seppos" and even "(rhymes with 'trucking') psycho Yanks," but the Aussies I have met have been wonderful people, personally very friendly toward Americans. Though they may like us personally, however, they can only end up disliking us even more as a nation when our national leader embarks on a program that can produce no tangible benefit for our own people at a terrible expense to them.
Benjamin Franklin said, "No nation was ever ruined by trade." That was true in the eighteenth century and it is true today. If we as a nation wish to have free trade with other nations, we must offer free trade in return. Adam Smith was right; the free market is a tremendously effective mechanism. If American sheep farmers wish to sell more, then they must determine to do that through their own industry. They must find the ways to produce a better run of livestock at a more competitive price. Perhaps they need some support or incentive, but what they--and we--do not need is a sheepish attempt to put common sense on the lamb.
Retract the tariff, Mister Clinton. Seize the ram by the horns and stop pulling the wool over our eyes.
I welcome your comments and suggestions concerning the Scriptae Scriptor.