Posted on 11/30/2013 2:29:41 PM PST by BfloGuy
Editors Note: The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was approved by Congress 20 years ago this month. Rothbards essay on NAFTA, reprinted below, is available in the collection Making Economic Sense.
For some people, it seems, all you have to do to convince them of the free enterprise nature of something is to label it market, and so we have the spawning of such grotesque creatures as market socialists or market liberals. The word freedom, of course, is also a grabber, and so another way to gain adherents in an age that exalts rhetoric over substance is simply to call yourself or your proposal free market or free trade. Labels are often enough to nab the suckers.
And so, among champions of free trade, the label North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta) is supposed to command unquestioning assent. But how can you be against free trade? Its very easy. The folks who have brought us Nafta and presume to call it free trade are the same people who call government spending investment, taxes contributions, and raising taxes deficit reduction. Let us not forget that the Communists, too, used to call their system freedom.
In the first place, genuine free trade doesnt require a treaty (or its deformed cousin, a trade agreement; Nafta is called a trade agreement so it can avoid the constitutional requirement of approval by two-thirds of the Senate). If the establishment truly wants free trade, all it has to do is to repeal our numerous tariffs, import quotas, anti-dumping laws, and other American-imposed restrictions on trade. No foreign policy or foreign maneuvering is needed.
If authentic free trade ever looms on the policy horizon, therell be one sure way to tell. The government/media/big-business complex will oppose it tooth and nail. Well see a string of op-eds warning" about the imminent return of the 19th century. Media pundits and academics will raise all the old canards against the free market, that its exploitative and anarchic without government coordination. The establishment would react to instituting true free trade about as enthusiastically as it would to repealing the income tax.
In truth, the bipartisan establishments trumpeting of free trade since World War II fosters the opposite of genuine freedom of exchange. The establishments goals and tactics have been consistently those of free trades traditional enemy, mercantilism the system imposed by the nation-states of 16th to 18th century Europe. President Bushs infamous trip to Japan was only one instance: trade policy as a continuing system of maneuverings to try to force other countries to purchase more American exports.
Whereas genuine free traders look at free markets and trade, domestic or international, from the point of view of the consumer (that is, all of us), the mercantilist, of the 16th century or today, looks at trade from the point of view of the power elite, big business in league with the government. Genuine free traders consider exports a means of paying for imports, in the same way that goods in general are produced in order to be sold to consumers. But the mercantilists want to privilege the government-business elite at the expense of all consumers, be they domestic or foreign.
In negotiations with Japan, for example, be they conducted by Reagan or Bush or Clinton, the point is to force Japan to buy more American products, for which the American government will graciously if reluctantly permit the Japanese to sell their products to American consumers. Imports are the price government pays to get other nations to accept our exports.
Another crucial feature of post-World War II establishment trade policy in the name of free trade is to push heavy subsidies of exports. A favorite method of subsidy has been the much beloved system of foreign aid, which, under the cover of reconstructing Europe, stopping Communism, or spreading democracy, is a racket by which the American taxpayers are forced to subsidize American export firms and industries as well as foreign governments who go along with this system. Nafta represents a continuation of this system by enlisting the U.S. government and American taxpayers in this cause.
Yet Nafta is more than just a big business trade deal. It is part of a very long campaign to integrate and cartelize government in order to entrench the interventionist mixed economy. In Europe, the campaign culminated in the Maastricht Treaty, the attempt to impose a single currency and central bank on Europe and force its relatively free economies to rachet up their regulatory and welfare states.
In the United States, this has taken the form of transferring legislative and judicial authority away from the states and localities to the executive branch of the federal government. Nafta negotiations have pushed the envelope by centralizing government power continent-wide, thus further diminishing the ability of taxpayers to hinder the actions of their rulers.
Thus the siren-song of Nafta is the same seductive tune by which the socialistic Eurocrats have tried to get Europeans to surrender to the super-statism of the European Community: wouldnt it be wonderful to have North America be one vast and mighty free trade unit like Europe? The reality is very different: socialistic intervention and planning by a super-national Nafta Commission or Brussels bureaucrats accountable to no one.
And just as Brussels has forced low-tax European countries to raise their taxes to the Euro-average or to expand their welfare state in the name of fairness, a level playing field, and upward harmonization, so too Nafta Commissions are to be empowered to upwardly harmonize, to ride roughshod over labor and other laws of American state governments.
President Clintons trade representative Mickey Kantor has crowed that, under Nafta, no country in the agreement can lower its environmental standards ever. Under Nafta, we will not be able to roll back or repeal the environmental and labor provisions of the welfare state because the treaty will have locked us in forever.
In the present world, as a rule of thumb, it is best to oppose all treaties, absent the great Bricker Amendment to the Constitution, which could have passed Congress in the 1950s but was shot down by the Eisenhower administration. Unfortunately, under the Constitution, every treaty is considered the supreme law of the land, and the Bricker Amendment would have prevented any treaty from overriding any preexisting Constitutional rights. But if we must be wary of any treaty, we must be particularly hostile to a treaty that builds supranational structures, as does Nafta.
We haven't experienced free trade in this country since before WWI. And we had a run of pretty amazing growth when we did.
Id like to see our trading partners being free traders also. But they are heavily invested in their manufacturers and therefore we do not have free trade with such partners
Any agreement that gives non-citizens the right to develop what our policies will be, is off the table for me.
These are multi-national agreements, and their review process can morph the original terms.
Who doesn’t actually agree with Free Trade as long as it makes sense? If it’s contributing to the standard of living for our citizens, I’m pretty much for it. If it puts some folks out of work so someone who is still working can get a 25% discount on what they purchase, I think it’s a decaying process on the well-being of our nation.
We MUST HAVE EMPLOYED citizens to thrive. Employing the citizens of other nations while our populace puts up with 25% unemployment and another 25% of our citizens have to work for far less than they used to, doesn’t add up on the list of what healthy nations do.
I don’t like taxes, but we do have to have ‘some’ tax base. It’s silly to thing we don’t. As we build ever larger national debt, there are contributing factors. Those factors include the financial well-being of our citizens.
As for these agreements, there are always things included that have nothing to do with trade, but more a binding of our border status, across border security, and a myriad of employment practices.
My rule of thumb is this. If we could thrive as a nation without these multi-national agreeements thick enough so no sane person would read them, then why must we have them now?
Trade took place before. We obviously don’t need these agreements to conduct it now. Further, we don’t have to have 20 nations in an agreement to get an agreement.
These things get far afield. They shouldn’t.
Personal agreements nation by nation are a better way to go IMO. If there is a reason to alter the agreement, we can do so without offending the other 19 nations in the agreement.
We hobble ourselves, and make agreements that don’t benefit us all too often.
I just don’t agree with this drive to turn us into a multi-national co-op.
We obviously didn’t have to go this route. And when you look at where we were twenty-five years ago today, and where we are now, I defy anyone to say we’re better off economically today.
We obviously didnt have to go this route. And when you look at where we were twenty-five years ago today, and where we are now, I defy anyone to say were better off economically today.
Were if it were not for the arguments by Ross Perot long ago, Clinton would never have been president. Unfortunately those who heard Ross’s commentary thought he was a nut and Bush I went down in flames.
Part of Perot’s message was reasoned.
Unfortunately, it remains true that he was a nut.
Clinton stroked his ego, and the little nebish nearly walked with the whole bag of marbles.
The problem for us, was that globalist suicidal trade was going to happen, Bush or Clinton.
The globalists drafted the plan. Both parties bought into it. Here we are today. Perot was right, but guess who ushered in the globalist of his choice. Ross Perot.
Unfortunately, it remains true that he [Perot] was a nut.
As for free trade, if one trading partner is practicing free trade and the other is managing its trade, the the first partner is a sap.
Agreed. I will grant you that on the surface Perot looked like a financial sage, but he acquired his wealth from government contracts. At the very least, that places a very valid asterisk after his wealth IMO.
Btt
Thanks.
I pretty much have to agree with that. Capitalism works just fine when socialists aren't interfering with it. Unfortunately, they have been interfering with it for a long time and then they have the gall to claim that it doesn't work and, therefore, we need more socialism. It's like someone pouring sugar into their gas tank and then complaining when their car stops working and then demanding more sugar to fix it.
boy did this topic cause quite a stir 10 years ago!!!
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/954156/posts
But our system could never compete with Third wage slave gulags like Red China and India. American workers making 15 bucks an hour and benefits can never compete with some poor Chinese kid making 10 cents a 14 hour shift.
The Globalists know this and have used Red Chinese cheap labor to deindustrialize us and to deliberately wreck our economy. Without a strong middle-class or economic independence the USA can be easily submerged into the Globalist's One World Government.
The Globalists and their Free Traitor dupes have ruined this country.
We should let the country where 10¢/hour is the prevailing wage[hint: that ain't China] make what they can and buy it from them freeing up our capital for the items they can't afford to make.
It's painful for me to read threads like that because our idiocratic leaders have tarred the concept of the freedom to trade with crony-capitalist nonsense like NAFTA.
With our state-of-the-art robots.
Ska-rew the unions.
Yeah, the vast majority of Americans still think we have a capitalist economy when all of us under the age of 80 have never lived under a system even close to one.
They have a plan for a "strong middle class," too.
Why don't all you budding social engineers go fuck yourself?
Free trade -- even the real kind based on actual freedom -- will always cause some to lose work. People in other countries with different economic situations will be able to produce some goods more cheaply and more efficiently.
We should take advantage of that and shift our capital into lines of production that are more capital-based and more profitable. In a well-functioning and free economy, that process would more than compensate for the losses.
It is the gradual erosion of our economic freedom that causes the overall job losses -- not the freedom, itself.
It never ceases to amaze me that what people predicted in 1993 forward having come true, there are still some people out there who will chastise them as the enemy of our nation, and those who did whatever the hell they wanted against those folks wishes, are still respected by some no matter the amount of damage their policies wound up causing.
Democrats, union members, black separatists? Seriously? Patriotic as the Count?
And you think you really scored with that post. Damn...
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