If 'fair' is the opposite of 'free' ... didn't Lincoln free the fairs?
"Terri" was one of several readers who wrote in to object to my Dec. 1 column celebrating the merits of free trade:
"Sir -- you obviously have not read the last & final round of the GATT/WTO Agreement. I DID (& there are surprises yet to come!!) It is also obvious that you are like most people: you listen to what 'they' say instead of seeing what is actually happening -- the huge trade deficit is a prime example. This deficit ALONE encompasses infinite realities that you are apparently unable to discern.
"Oh, and another SIMPLE thing for you to try to contemplate, HOW IN THE HELL can we Americans compete with 25 cents an hour labor? Go figure.
"Possibly FAIR trade (which this is apparently something else you have not kept abreast of -- I would elaborate but I don't think you are ready), not free trade!"
I replied:
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Hi, Terri --
How are American to compete with 25-cents-an-hour labor? Gee, I don't know: perhaps the same way Henry Ford did it ... by accruing and wisely investing enough capital in physical plant and new technological innovations to become more productive, thus PRODUCING enough extra, per hour, to justify higher wages?
Of course, to do that, we'd have to guarantee the private investors they could KEEP their resulting profits and earnings, by repealing the current confiscatory rates of taxation. And I don't know if your mob would approve of thus coddling greedy capitalist exploiters of the working class ...
Or shall the federal government just make us all "millionaires" by fiat, by setting the "minimum wage" at $500 per hour? Since statists like you contend such interventions don't cause either unemployment or inflation, why not just have Washington DECLARE all the currently observed laws of economics null and void? What are they WAITING for?
As for "Fair Trade," is it safe for us to assume you've read Jim Bovard's excellent book, "The Fair Trade Fraud: How Congress Pillages the Consumer and Decimates American Competitiveness" (1991, St. Martin's Press)?
I won't attempt to sum up here all the absurdities Mr. Bovard collects into chapters like "Protecting America from Foreign Bras." Suffice it to say "Fair Trade" is merely a slightly newer euphemism for those familiar large scale protection rackets and accompanying "public-private partnerships" in which wise bureaucratic overseers supervise and control where private interests invest their capital -- forbidding them from "exporting jobs" by building factories overseas (unless appropriate military governorships are established first), and so on. (All very popular at those union-hall campaign rallies, rest assured.)
But what the heck: It worked fine for Mussolini, Stalin and Hitler ... at least for a while. So let's give full-fledged fascism another try! Springtime for Hitler, and Germany! The goose step's the new step, for me.
Professor Hans-Herman Hoppe (and Frederic Bastiat, long before him) provides us with the perfect answer to your chimerical "balance of trade" problem. If exporting more than we import will make us rich, why not simply load our goods on barges, tow them 20 miles off shore, and sink them? Since the merchants would thus be left with no proceeds to buy goods overseas for importation, our "trade deficit" would disappear in no time! That's prosperity, your way ... right?
Yes, state control of the economy while allowing private corporations to retain vestigial "private title" (look up "fascism" in your dictionary) might sputter along for a time -- two generations or so, until everyone got sick of "pretending to work while they pretend to pay us" -- if only we could impose it EVERYWHERE AT ONCE. It's those damned foreign competitors who keep screwing everything up, by retaining FREE economies and then making our people jealous of their resulting affluence by broadcasting pictures of it over the television. Now here's an idea: Maybe we could JAM those broadcasts, and keep our people from TRAVELING overseas to compare foreign affluence with the "shared fairness" you'd be imposing here at home. By building, you know, some kind of an "Iron Curtain" ...
In fact, Terri, the World Trade Organization (as Lew Rockwell of the Ludwig von Mises Institute points out in his concise Dec. 1 analysis -- check out http//mises.com) actually pushes protectionism, under the guise of free trade. I believe I pointed out in the column in question that a lot of the nonsense they enforce has little to do with trade "freedom" -- which never requires thousand-page treaties or international star tribunals to endlessly decide what's "fair."
So, if you want to attack the WTO as protectionism under the GUISE of freedom, feel free. But demanding MORE protectionism, under the euphemism "Fair Trade"? I believe Messrs. Smoot and Hawley already gave that a try, back in 1930 ...
Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Las Vegas Review-Journal. His new book, "Send in the Waco Killers: Essays on the Freedom Movement, 1993-1998," is available at 1-800-244-2224.
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Vin Suprynowicz, vin@lvrj.com
"The evils of tyranny are rarely seen but by him who resists it." -- John Hay, 1872
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed -- and thus clamorous to be led to safety -- by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." -- H.L. Mencken
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