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cost. As a result, the total cost to Americans of all protection against foreign-made

products comes to about $1,500 a year for a family of four.6

One argument that cannot be made for free trade is that it benefits everyone

equally or immediately. The dislocation caused by trade can be painful for workers and

investors in industries that are becoming relatively less competitive. Our response to the

uneven effects of trade should not be protection but rather enhancement of the ability of

workers and business to adjust to change by making our domestic markets more flexible.

After all, technology itself causes dislocation. Consider what has happened to the

typewriter industry in the past 20 years, or the horse-and-buggy business in the 1920s.

Should the government attempt to "save jobs" by slowing the introduction of new

products and technology? That is essentially what protectionists want to do. Like modern

Luddites, opponents of free trade seek to slow economic progress at its source rather than

adjust to the consequences of a dynamic free market.

Fast Track, Necessary Track

The case for fast-track authority is simple: The most promising approach for

advancing free trade in today's international political economy is through negotiated

trade agreements, and those agreements will be difficult if not impossible to reach if the

President of the United States is denied fast-track authority.

Of course, negotiated agreements are not the only way to advance free trade. A

strong economic case can be made for unilateral trade liberalization. By lowering our

own barriers to trade regardless of what other countries do, the United States would make

its own economy more efficient and its citizens freer to control the fruits of their own

labor. It would also offer a powerful example to other nations of the benefits of an open

economy.7

Negotiated trade agreements can also advance economic liberty. By linking lower

barriers at home with reciprocal liberalization abroad, a country's import consumers and

export industries can be brought together in a powerful protrade coalition. Agreements

also reduce the chances of a destructive trade war by effectively locking in lower trade

barriers through mutual agreement. Finally, it's hard to argue with success. American

participation in eight rounds of GATT and in free-trade agreements with Canada and

Mexico has helped bring global trade barriers to historic lows and to keep them down.

Fast-track authority is not a gimmick. It allows the president to submit a

negotiated trade treaty to Congress for an up-or-down vote without the possibility of

amendment. Without assurance of a fast-track vote, foreign governments would find it

virtually impossible to negotiate with the U.S. executive branch because any treaty they

agreed to could be rewritten by Congress. Negotiations would be pointless.

Fast-track authority was first granted in the Trade Act of 1974. Since then every

U.S. president, from Gerald Ford to Bill Clinton, has been granted authority to negotiate

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