This is the most intelligent Neo-liberal defense of trade deals we will ever see. I agree with most of it, and understood most of it for years, and I am glad how John Oliver, about 40% in, recognized setting up the current world required trade deals that did beggar many workers in the US, and did environmental damage around the world.
What is still too bad is Oliver never tells the viewers Peter Navarro is a known economist who, yes, has tried to use hyperbole over the years to get his point across, but who is still fundamentally correct in looking at the effect of China's growing economic power on our nation. Most economists look through a very narrow lens, and avoid nation building and nation sustaining issues. I remember reading during the Bush the Elder administration how we were buying steel from China, rather than our own steelmakers, to build military weapons. I was worried then, and still worry, about our nation becoming more about services than building things.
Oliver also takes the Neo-liberal line on automation, which is fine as far as it goes, but in comparing the loss of jobs now due to Trump's tariff policy, he never wants to compare that to how many jobs have been lost over the past 30 years, as I have long said, from the beginning of the NAFTA discussions, that the problem with the NAFTA and the WTO was the codification of trends the Reagan and Bush administration (which administrations did most of the negotiations that led to the trade deals) had allowed to happen. Let's compare those numbers and yes, John Oliver, it is more complicated. And the fact that we produce as much now as in 1984 (with one third less workers) is one of those snapshots that obscures more than illuminates. What about 1974, and then we'll see what had already happened in that decade difference. And yes, I know automation continues to develop, as anyone can see with self-checkouts and kiosks in fast food places. The question there will be universal basic income (UBI), but so far, Baby Boomers and Oldsters as a group can't seem to grasp that yet. Don't worry kids, in twenty years, we'll finally be dead....
Still, the fundamental thing John Oliver avoids, and here he is most neo-liberal in his thinking, is why it is a short term (meaning now) good to not have trade barriers, but a long term problem if our clothes, steel, and other basic things continue to be made elsewhere. I have always tried to help people understand this is about nation building and nation sustaining--so that tariff policy should be about what Alexander Hamilton recognized in Federalist Paper #11, which is promoting American industry. I have also tried to say that if we are going to impose tariffs, it would be about going to China, and shaming the leaders by saying, why is it your people are still earning starvation wages and can't buy what they make? There is still ridiculous poverty, and maybe 1/8th of the Chinese population is making oodles of money, but the rest of the Chinese people still suffer greatly. Each nation of a major size can diversify its economy and improve the lives of its people in each economy. In smaller nations, they should be promoted to band together to raise wages and work for themselves. And most important, places like China and South Korea imposed strict tariffs while they built up their industries, so that people there had to pay more for foreign goods, which would have been cheaper to buy, so that their industries could grow. The problem with China, and less so South Korea, is that the budding capitalists in China and to some extent South Korea, were not sharing the bounties from the developing industries, which is what happened here in the US, as wave after wave of immigrant workers could always fill jobs, and why we saw so much racism against that wave after wave. The irony has been that the tough immigration laws of the first two decades of the 20th Century gave a break so that the New Deal really got things moving forward for workers here. Yes, I sound like anti-immigration here, but I'm saying anti-immigrant racism was an excuse that gave rich owners the cover to not share profits with workers. At some long term point, China's workers will benefit, but it's a long view the Chinese leaders have, which is an overcorrection from what I would want to change here, which is too short a view.
But you see, all of this is what makes me "a dirty Commie" to right wingers, and that my take on getting people around the world to work together sounds like "Kumbaya Hippie stuff." However, what we have seen for the past forty years (again, this began before NAFTA/WTO codifications) is an integration that has proceeded apace. But now, the integration has gotten so far that we need to reconsider how we approach tariff policy, and most important, how we redevelop our nation's basic infrastructure.
Overall, Oliver is a brilliant mind, and this is a very effective and proper take down of the cynical carnival barker, Traitor Trump. But it remains brilliant within a neo-liberal ideology that needs review and reconsideration, too, especially from a nation sustaining perspective. This is because one day the Chinese will dominate foreign financing, law, medicine, etc. and by then, we will have beggared our nation's talent so that forty years from now, there will be "American war brides" for wealthy Chinese men (remember the birth dearth for girls due to the one child policy) and people around the world will wonder how this nation ever built anything. Oh, and Mr. Oliver, I am not an economist, either. That does not make me dumb. :) My criticism of economists over the decades is very few of them have any knowledge of sociology or anthropology. Also, their economic Darwinian sensibilities show they never read Stephen Gould or EO Wilson on the diversity of motivations (both altruistic and selfish, not one or the other) that humans have developed and life itself developed over four billion years. We can be kind, we can be mean, we can all sorts of things. It is not we are angels or devils, but a combination of both, just for starters.
