This was my favorite:
"Many economic issues are complex, but sometimes a single fact will tell you all you need to know. When you know that central planners in the Soviet Union had to set 24 million prices—and keep adjusting them, relative to one another, as conditions changed—you realize that central planning did not just happen to fail. It had no chance of succeeding from the outset. It is a wholly different ball game when hundreds of millions of people individually keep track of the relatively few prices they need to know for their own decision making in a market economy."
Chuckle, can't remember the last time I set my own price for a loaf a bread. And why so "few" prices for so many "hundreds of millions of people". No mention of the vast array of prices set by a tiny minority of humanity. Sewer is just playing the old trick of hiding class power under the bushel of the exchange of equivalents.
Although Sewer doesn't present any real evidence, it is theoretically possible that trade liberalization would not lead to the dire scenarios that Perot (and probably Nader) paint. Through the distorted prism of "labor cost", Sewer makes it clear that the only "giant sucking sound" you can be certain of hearing under capitalism is that of the accelerated extraction of human labor-power. But it is an unquestioned assumption of Sewer that - in his scenario - American workers will automatically speed up "on their own", of course, to compensate for the higher nominal price of their labor (wages). And why not assume that workers "willingly" set the "unit price" of their labor lower, since they also set the price of a "few" other commodities.
But Sewer's piece is not really about "economic truth" at all. It's about politics, and particulary it's about the need to confront political threats from the left.
And N.B. that it is _Nader_ that concerns this Hooverite. Not the Democrats, who agree with Sewer in their non-demagogic moments.
-Brad Mayer