The Bottom Line: Contra Free Trade
Culture, Economics — Posted by Jeremiah Bannister on September 23, 2010 7:57 PMFree Trade is killing our American manufacturing base…but at least we still have Walmart and McDonald’s!
Free Trade is killing our American manufacturing base…but at least we still have Walmart and McDonald’s!
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In my opinion this ideas against free trade are not in the writings of Chesterton & Belloc, neither in the Social Doctrine of the Church, they are just a modern develop in response to a modern concern. Distributism origally went against concentration of property. Free trade could be bad is property is concentrated or good is propertly is widely shared.
Dear Alfonso,
Actually, free trade existed in the 19th century, and has been found in the early distributist writing – in fact, I am looking right now at an article called, “Free Trade” by C.E. Baines (G.K.’s Weekly). Distributists were against free trade because it destroyed the farmer and local and domestic production, both in 19th as well as in the 20th century. It hurt domestic production and relied on underdeveloped nations remaining underdeveloped. Distributists viewed free trade as exploitative, with only the wealthy benefiting from it.
Thanks for your reply, Richard. What it´s hard for me to accept is that in this world we should put barriers to free trade. I would support customs duties to chinesse products if they were based on the exigence to that country to improve the salaries of their workers, but not for “protection” of my country own industries. In my opinion the posibility of buy and sell products in other countries is key to develop the poor countries and also very important for very specialized small business. Thanks to the free trade, I can buy books from a very small american editor like IHS even living in Spain.
Well, I would certainly wish to protect the domestic production of my nation, particularly Spain, whose agriculture will be taken over by agricorp businesses like Monsanto, and whose businesses are being absorbed by moving to China just so one person can buy a foreign book for 11 euros instead of 18. In my street in Badalona, Spain we are now surrounded by Chinese “dollar” stores (“Todo a cien”) and our patrimony is being shipped overseas.
Free trade doesn’t develop poor nations. It develops the wallets of bureaucrats and plutocrats. In order for free trade to work in the interests of any greater, more powerful nation, it requires those underdeveloped nations to remain underdeveloped. So while it may slightly improve the standard of living, it will only do so to the extent that it benefits Big Business. Once the plateau is reached, companies pull out and hop over to other, less developed nations.
Amen! So much good in this short piece I do not know where to start. “Free Trade” has largely destroyed many of the small industrial towns in my region. Towns in the Monongahela, Beaver, and Mahoning Valleys were always a little rough around the edges. But many are now inhabited only by those too poor or too old to leave. We now pay higher taxes to keep poor people in jail or on welfare, rather than pay another 50 cents for an industrial good.
I believe the psychological effect are most felt in young men. If the only job available to a 25 year old male entails wearing a goofy fast food uniform and working with teenagers, I am not sure I would not rather be an unemployed street thug myself.
Simple choice: we can restore some notion of meaningful and manly work, or pay higher taxes in police and social service costs.
In addition, free trade as practiced makes no sense. The USA is allowed to subsidize corn production and destroy Mexico’s main grain crop. Then we wonder why those whose livelihood we destroyed come sneaking across the border? The importation of foreign milk protein solids (from places as diverse as Russia and Israel) increased over 600 percent in the past decade, and we wonder why dairy farmers are going bankrupt? Of course the geniuses in Washington recently increased the subsidy to move more “unproductive” dairy cows into the beef slaughter market chain, thereby breaking the backs of beef cattle farmers.
This also ties back into third world exploitation as the labor force created in the cities to provide cheap manufactured goods for us are displaced peasant farmers (like the aforementioned Mexican farmers who cannot make a living growing corn in the nation where corn originated)
Except that ‘free trade’ never destroyed anyone. Wal-Mart never destroyed a single local store. What actually destroys mom-and-pop’s business are consumers *voluntarily* taking their business elsewhere. Wal-Mart has never forced a single soul into its godforsaken halls; everyone in there, without a single exception in the whole history of the company, went in there on his own, because he preferred cheap doodads to pricier alternatives. The anti-free trade doctrine, properly understood, is the doctrine that people are too stupid even to spend their own wages properly, and that even the fruits of the sweat of their brows must be allowed them only under close supervision by wiser men with the liberty and leisure to contemplate higher ends. I won’t for a moment deny that they are that stupid, but I do take issue with this rather disingenuous refusal to state the problem and solution plainly. The blame belongs not with Wal-Mart, but with the booboisie, and this failure to blame the deserving smacks of tickling their ears with sweet words.
I think one thing to remember is our own history in the 19th century. Among other factors, small farmers were swept out because cheap produce from other countries lowered prices and whereas in a local economy, prices will change when there is a drought or an abundance, and hence there is some security. But when I have a drought, the market is not even touched by that, then I just lose money, go into debt and out of business. Large agribusiness thrives on global markets because they can swallow a drought here and there.
Actually, we don’t place the sole blame on Wal-Mart, which is why we encourage people to make themselves more aware of the products they are purchasing. You say that Free Trade never destroyed anyone, but that is disingenuous. Because Free Trade allows Wal-Mart to bring cheap products made by virtual slave labor to the US public in a way that completely hides from that public the conditions of the workers.
You are right that the consumers are the ultimate reason that the small shops close. But why would they do such a devastating thing? It is only because they are not educated in the true economic impact of doing so. They are not educated on the conditions of the factories that produce the products they buy at such inexpensive prices. The mainstream media don’t emphasize the impact of outsourcing (a byproduct of Free Trade) of their local jobs to cheap foreign labor. That is the purpose of the Distributist Review.
Free market is nonsense. The answer to free market has to be true market.
You can´t put barriers to The truth but you have to put barriers to freedom if it´s not funded in truth.
It´s so easy as that. When somebody starts to speak about freedom you should keep an eye on your family.
Dear friends, of course our discussion depends so much on the definition of “free market”. For me “free market” means a market without barriers, the natural state of a market, where people can travel and sell here and there, like could had happen in some areas in the middle age. When you start to put barriers, like “blocking the roads with armed people and ask for money” or custom houses, you start to create a power structure in the name of “protection” that means an strong state or goverment. I think that in the books of Chesterton and specially Belloc (unfortunatelly for myself i haven´t read interesting authors like Baines)you can´t find arguments pro-custom houses but you can find a lot of arguments against an strong state or goverment controlling the life of the people.
Unconvinced,
Walmart is about as “free market” as Joe Stalin was with Ukraine. See the following link about how tax dollars help Walmart in ways that small local business are seldom eligible to receive.
http://www.walmartsubsidywatch.org/index.html
Mira Alfonso. En castellano que me es más fácil. Es doctrina católica que el Estado no es un mal menor sino un bien como los sindicatos.
Es más, según Santo Tomás es la mayor creación de la inteligencia práctica. Y por tanto, de no ser clérigo, el lugar donde deben trabajar las personas que sientan un especial llamado de servicio por la sociedad.
Por otra parte el Estado siempre ha de ser fuerte y mandón. Lo que ocurre es que lo que no debe hacer es inmiscuirse fuera de su ámbito de responsabilidad y ha de respetar el principio de subsidiaridad.
Los caminos hay que protegerlos con las armas de los asaltantes. Y como los proteges hay que financiarlos con impuestos. Y siempre habrá mercaderes que no quieren pagar esos impuestos. Y siempre habrá guardias que se aprovechen de su condición para extorsionar a los mercaderes pero la solución no pasa por suprimir a los guardias sino por suprimir a los extorsionadores. Esos mercaderes siempre se creen que la carretera por lo que transitan es gratis.
Y con las aduanas pasa lo mismo. No hay nada ontológicamente incorrecto en las aduanas. Empezar a ver las creaciones humanas como malas es una maniqueísmo pesimista que no es cristiano.
La realidad es buena aunque esté mancillada por el pecado. El estado, las empresas, los sindicatos, las aduanas, los partidos, …etc son todas cosas buenas en principio porque responden a una finalidad buena.
Son las desviaciones de sus fines las que las hacen menos buenas hasta llegar a ser francamente malas cuando incluso lucha contra el fin que tenían que proteger.
El mal no tiene entidad. Solo es un parásito del bien.
Como Jesús dijo en el evangelio: la verdad os hará libres. No dijo eso de la libertad os hará verdaderos. La verdad engendra la libertad.
Donde no hay un verdadero mercado no hay libertad pero donde hay libertad bien puede haber un mercado falso.
Por eso se dice que busquemos primero el reino y que lo demás se nos dará por añadidura. Es decir, que busquemos la justicia (la verdad en las relaciones humanas) y no el mercado de la libertad.
Muchas gracias T_Paz por tu respuesta. Coincido en la importancia del Estado, del que por cierto soy vocacional servidor, dentro de un papel subsidiario. Tampoco creo que las aduanas o en general las barreras al comercio sean buenas o malas por sí solas. Depende de para qué fines se las utilice. También tengo muy claro lo que dices sobre que el mal es parásito del bien. El mal no crea nada, tan sólo pervierte las maravillas de la Creación (por cierto, la mejor explicación de esto la he encontrado en las obras de Tolkien). Por eso en este mundo caído la tendencia a la perversión de las construcciones humanas es tan grande y hace imposible en la práctica el comunismo, porque la tendencia del hombre con poder hacia la mezquindad y el apartamiento de los fines originales de ese poder es enorme (vease en este sentido el pensamiento de Francisco de Vitoria, siglos antes de la aparición del socialismo). Lo mismo puede pasar con las barreras al comercio: si se ponen para evitar la explotación en China están, en mi opinión, bien, pero en la discusión ni siquiera se maneja este argumento, sólo se alude a razones locales, como si los chinos fueran un factor externo al asunto.
Y en mi opinión, lo mismo que sucede con el estado sobredimensionado o con las barreras a la competencia, que se pervierten facilmente en manos de los poderosos, sucede con la institución denominada libre mercado. Las leyes del mercado, la idea de que la confluencia de una oferta y una demanda determina un precio, no son malas (ni buenas). Son tan sólo una pauta que se cumple cuando los seres humanos desean intercambiar sus bienes y servicios. Lo que hace desigual e injusto un mercado es una distribución inicial de los recursos tan desigual que deja a unos el poder de decidirlo todo y a otros sin ninguna opción más que tomar los precios, trabajos y salarios que otros han determinado. El mercado es bueno cuando hay confluencia libre de voluntades, el mal está precisamente en la negación de eso, no olvidemos que el objetivo del mal es el poder, que no es sino el gobierno de otras voluntades.
Lo que vengo defendiendo en estos foros, a los que agradezco infinito la posibilidad de expresarme, es que el distributismo original (Chesterton, Belloc y Rerum Novarum) ponía el énfasis en lo injusto de la distribución inicial de recursos y veía en el acceso a la propiedad de todos el camino a seguir para intentar solucionar los males. Sin embargo, el distributismo actual, por que se puede leer, parece centrarse en criticar al “mercado” o “la libre competencia” y uno no sabe muy bien qué clase de mundo de pequeños estados fuertes y barreras al comercio se puede llegar a configurar con esas ideas. Ni siquiera en Caritas in veritate, magna obra de Su Santidad Benedicto XVI, gracia y regalo del Espíritu Santo y en mi opinión la persona que mejor sabe interpretar nuestro tiempo, se puede encontrar una defensa de los aranceles, más bien se alude a la responsabilidad individual del consumidor como solución a los desmanes que el comercio injusto entre entes desiguales (no el libre mercado) proporciona.
Me gustaría ver un distributismo más práctico y pegado a la realidad, que defendiese políticas realistas centradas en la distribución de los medios de producción, como el fomento del trabajo autónomo y la defensa de la familia, algo como fué la CSU bávara en sus orígenes, algo en definitiva a lo que se pudiera votar en unas elecciones. Perdón por la longitud del comentario y gracias por el esfuerzo a los que lo hayan leído completo ;)
Perdona Alfonso, pero Chesterton, Belloc, Penty, et al. siempre criticaron el “mercado libre” interpretado por el liberalismo Gladstone y la escuela de Manchester (y la escuela de Mises en la actualidad).
After all these years I find out that Walmart doesn’t destroy the local small businesses, their customers do. So the local drug dealers don’t addict anyone, the addicts addict themselves, paederasts don’t seduce children, pornographers don’t enslave their models – Hey, I begin to see that the Medellin Cartel is really just vertically integrating the pharmaceutical industry in the Western Hemisphere. They “convince” their suppliers and customers to join their local outlet pharmaceutical operations or get really, really sick. Boy, if there is money or sex involved, it’s truly amazing what rationales and rhetoric folks dream up with to justify lust and greed.
There has never been a market without barriers in history. In the middle ages, you had guilds and people who did work outside the guild and guild rules found barriers to trade to be quit painful.
I hate refer to Philip Blond lecture called “After the Market State” again but people should really review his refuting of “liberalism” as a self defeating enterprise that must produce collectivist totalitarians.
Free Trade limits the freedom of producers and labor to determine their free associations and the rules under which they operate.
If a group of producers says that wish to separate from the practice of another group which practices child labor and they wish to protect themselves against such practice but the individual trader who sells such products wishes access to the market free of duties according to the dogma of liberalism the freedom of individual trader must prevail over solidarity of the group of producers.
Under Free Trade, all markets must be global and cosmopolitan and therefore uniform in rules of commerce and therefore there can be no national sovereignty, union, guild, or any collective self determination is would be permitted under free trade.
History has a name such a system. It is called an Empire for it aims subject the self determination of all peoples to the control of Oligarchy which determines control the trade by the magnitude goods traded and the ownership of the means of production.
Under Free Trade, no independence producers are allowed because separation by taxation or barriers to trade are the only ways to develop independent productive capacity not subject to loot dumping that the Bandit traders with stolen goods from slaves under the control of their Empire.
Free Trade is Banditry for it lets the Bandit sell his loot everywhere he pleases and denies of the right of any people to protect their economy.
Free Trade by definition asserts that the Trader/Consumer is prior and superior to Labor. I think St. Paul dealt with that question and sided with labor.
Furthermore, Free Trade by definition denies all attempts of a economic collective to restrict the individual then by definition any attempt by the individual to seek natural association in a particular group must be repressed and therefore the is made part of a uniform collective mass since everything that is particular to a group must therefore restrictive the individual in order for it to be particular and universal.
Free Trade is economic liberalism, economic liberalism is globalism, globalism is imperialism, and imperialism is slavery therefore free trade is slavery for it denies the freedom of particular association which is bases of all economic freedom.
Economic freedom is physical power. Humans are not born powerful. But the first human association of family is form of economic power. As the individual gains more association he gains more economic power through friends and institution like the church, schools, university, the state, a union, and a shop or office. But each of associations are particular therefore economic power by definition is the number of particulars in an economy. Diversity is strength.
Free Trade reduces the economic diversity and number of producers by because the doctrine of comparative advantage each nation specializes and with an more uniform domestic economy the nation is less and less able to produce as it becomes more and more specialized and therefore less dynamic. A nation of farmers with nothing but carrot and corn farmers won’t have a very dynamic market as everyone makes the only two things but add a wheat farmer then the economy can grow because the dynamics of association have the possibility of more combination.
Man is drawn to man just a matter to matter. There is unity of laws between the physical worlds and the social relations of man.
Please read Henry Carey as he proves what you call “barriers to trade” are the basis of economic exchange as uniformity or equilibrium always reduces the possibility of work. Free Trade violates all known physicals laws and historical observation. It is physically impossible because it must physically reduce the possibility for it to exist.
Free Trade says the most profit from the trucking of goods to the most distant of places but physics says trucking of goods destroys capital i.e. wear and tear on cart, horse, driver, and road.
I should stop now but I have at least 50 reasons why “Free Trade” is impossible and simply incoherent. Frankly, only Descartes laws of motion are more absurd. Free Trade is Descartes’ laws of motion applied to trade.
Here is something else that might convince you. http://money.cnn.com/2010/09/28/news/economy/Outsource_jobs_bill_dead/index.htm The fact is that, in the name of Free Trade, our government gives incentives for companies to outsource jobs out of the country. Even in the current economic crisis with a high unemployment rate, it fights against ending those incentives. Why? Because it would be less profitable for the companies.
Dear Richard, of course they were not pro-”laissez-faire”, but also were not insisting in the importance of the trade barriers, they study the economy from a hole-world point of view. Also Rerum Novarum is not insisting in this, cause the Universal (Catholic) Church thinks in everybody from every nation and barriers are usually made to favour only one side of the barrier. They insisted in the distribution of the property (something also against the “laissez-faire” but diferent to the barriers), and this is, in my opinion, the right focus.
Dear Septeus7, thanks for your friendly reply. I apreciate your arguments and agree with many of them, but not with all (anyhow the purpose of a debate must not be to come to a complete agreement, but to try to understand the reasons and motivations of the others).
For me trade is “free”, not only if you can buy and sell freely, also if freedom is present in the production of the goods (if somebody is working in Asia in semi-slave conditions to produce the good, this is not free trade). And trade is “fair” if their profits are equally shared. In a “perfect world” where the property is widely distributed, and one man can´t control the will of the others (=you don´t have to work in something you don´t like just to life), the “laws of the market” (not the hand of evil ;) )will make the deals both free and fair. In this world no barriers to trade would have sense.
Of course we are not in this “perfect world”, but the way to get closer to that uthopia is to promote the distribution of the property, not to promote the barriers beetween countries.