Candidate Review - Fair Trade - Mike Huckabee

Well Huckabee comes out in favor of Fair Trade. What's interesting is that the split between Free Trade and Fair trade is not a party line split - there are both Republicans and Democrats who think we should move towards more isolationist policies, and there are both Republicans and Democrats who favor free trade. Anyway, Huckabee is a populist, and so favors protecting American jobs.

I believe in free trade, but it has to be fair trade. We are losing jobs because of an unlevel, unfair trading arena that has to be fixed. Behind the statistics, there are real families and real lives and real pain. I'm running for President because I don't want people who have worked loyally for a company for twenty or thirty years to walk in one morning and be handed a pink slip and be told, "I'm sorry, but everything you spent your life working for is no longer here."

I believe that globalization, done right, done fairly, can be a blessing for our society. As the Industrial Revolution raised living standards by allowing ordinary people to buy mass-produced goods that previously only the rich could afford, so globalization gives all of us the equivalent of a big pay raise by letting us buy all kinds of things from clothing to computers to TVs much more inexpensively.

Well that's populist - I note that he doesn't spend much time considering what our trade policies are doing to other nations; but I suppose his audience isn't much interested in that.