An article entitled "Outsourcing Gets Closer to Home with CAFTA" (the Central American Free Trade Agreement) appeared Nov. 7 online in the Money page of USA Today. It detailed how American companies such as Dell, Sykes, Sitel, IBM, Procter & Gamble, Western Union, Sara Lee/Hanes, Russel Athletic, VG Corp., and others will be "nearsourcing" previously American jobs to Central America.

It pointed out that the jobs will include everything from reading X-Rays to sewing jeans. After all, Central America is much more convenient, in terms of time zones and flight time, than is India or China.

Congressman Wamp promised us that CAFTA would be good for the region. Perhaps the candy manufacturers are able to buy cheaper imported sugar, as he claimed, but this will be offset by American sugar producers going out of business, after which the foreign producers will be free to raise their prices.

Have any new industries opened in Tennessee or northern Georgia or Alabama thanks to CAFTA?

Congressman Wamp promised us that corresponding legislation to provide some protection from China would be forthcoming after CAFTA was passed. Did this actually happen, or was it conveniently forgotten once CAFTA was passed?

President Bush and his subordinates are now busy negotiating "The Free Trade Area of the Americas," the American equivalent of the European Union. It would all but eliminate our borders and merge our trade policies and many areas of regulation and law with those of the corrupt socialist governments in Central and South America. Illegal immigration will be "solved" by legalizing it. It will no longer by immigration but simply migration.

Our freedom to set our own national laws and policies will be subjected to the whim of international bureaucrats and judges.

Plainly, the modern version of Free Trade being sold to us is a disaster. Our federal government taxes and regulates domestic manufacturers to death the same time that it gives a free ride to foreign manufacturers. Under President Thomas Jefferson, the federal government was financed entirely from tariffs paid for by the wealthy importing foreign luxuries.

An American worker didn't suffer the fruits of his labor being taxed one penny from the income tax back then. Plus, back then we had true free trade; free trade between the states, as the federal government wasn't regulating and taxing everybody and everything to death.

CAFTA is another example of mercantilism, where trade policies are set to favor well connected merchants or manufacturers, rather than true free trade. What was written in Cato's Letters back in 1721 has come to pass: "... Some merchants shall be openly encouraged and protected, and get exemptions from searches and duties, or shall be connived at in escaping them; others shall be burdened, oppressed, manacled, stopped, and delayed, to extort presents, to wreak revenge, or to give preference of markets to favorites."

Congressional elections are a year off yet. During that year we need to consider, do we want to vote for a politician who will eliminate Madison's and Jefferson's Tariffs on foreign producers, thus giving them a free ride, and who puts a stifling burden on American producers and manufacturers with Karl Marx's progressive income tax and more and more federal regulations?

Rich Beecher
Chattanooga, TN
rbeecher@hotmail.com