Murray Rothbard supported free trade. “The best way to look at tariffs or import quotas or other protectionist restraints is to forget about political boundaries.
Political boundaries of nations may be important for other reasons, but they have no economic meaning whatever. Suppose, for example, that each state of the United States were a separate nation. Then we would hear a lot of protectionist bellyaching that we are now fortunately spared. Think of the howls by inefficient, high-priced New York or Rhode Island textile manufacturers who would then be complaining about the “unfair,” “cheap labor” competition from various low-type “foreigners” from Tennessee or North Carolina, or vice versa. Fortunately, the absurdity of worrying about the balance of payments is made evident by focusing on interstate trade. For nobody worries about the balance of payments between New York and New Jersey, or, for that matter, between Manhattan and Brooklyn, because there are no customs officials recording such trade and such balances.
If we think about it, it is clear that a call by New York firms for a tariff against North Carolina is a pure ripoff of New York (as well as North Carolina) consumers, a naked grab for coerced special privilege by inefficient business firms. If the 50 states were separate nations, the protectionists would then be able to use the trappings of patriotism, and distrust of foreigners, to camouflage and get away with their looting the consumers of their own region.
Fortunately, interstate tariffs are unconstitutional. But even with this clear barrier, and even without being able to wrap themselves in the cloak of nationalism, protectionists have been able to impose interstate tariffs in another guise. Part of the drive for continuing increases in the federal minimum wage law is to impose a protectionist device against lower-wage, lower-labor-cost competition from North Carolina and other southern states against their New England and New York competitors.
During the 1966 Congressional battle over a higher federal minimum wage, for example, the late Senator Jacob Javits (R,NY) freely admitted that one of his main reasons for supporting the bill was to cripple the southern competitors of New York textile firms. Since southern wages are generally lower than in the north, the business firms (and the workers struck by unemployment) hardest hit by an increased minimum wage will be located in the south.
Another way in which interstate trade restrictions have been imposed has been in the fashionable name of “safety.” Government-organized state milk cartels in New York, for example, have prevented importation of milk from nearby New Jersey under the patently spurious grounds that the trip across the Hudson would render New Jersey milk “unsafe.” If tariffs and restraints on trade are good for a country, then why not indeed for a state or region? The principle is precisely the same. In America’s first great depression, the Panic of 1819, Detroit was a tiny frontier town of only a few hundred people. Yet protectionist cries arose-fortunately not fulfilled-to prohibit all “imports” from outside of Detroit, and citizens were exhorted to “buy only Detroit.” If this nonsense had been put into effect, general starvation and death would have ended all other economic problems for Detroiters.
So why not restrict and even prohibit trade, i.e. “imports,” into a city, or a neighborhood, or even on a block, or, to boil it down to its logical conclusion, to one family? Why shouldn’t the Jones family issue a decree that from now on, no member of the family can buy any goods or services produced outside the family house? Starvation would quickly wipe out this ludicrous drive for self-sufficiency.
And yet we must realize that this absurdity is inherent in the logic of protectionism. Standard protectionism is just as preposterous, but the rhetoric of nationalism and national boundaries has been able to obscure this vital fact.
The upshot is that protectionism is not only nonsense, but dangerous nonsense, destructive of all economic prosperity. We are not, if we were ever, a world of self-sufficient farmers. The market economy is one vast latticework throughout the world, in which each individual, each region, each country, produces what he or it is best at, most relatively efficient in, and exchanges that product for the goods and services of others. Without the division of labor and the trade based upon that division, the entire world would starve. Coerced restraints on trade-such as protectionism-cripple, hobble, and destroy trade, the source of life and prosperity. Protectionism is simply a plea that consumers, as well as general prosperity, be hurt so as to confer permanent special privilege upon groups of inefficient producers, at the expense of competent firms and of consumers. But it is a peculiarly destructive kind of bailout, because it permanently shackles trade under the cloak of patriotism.”
But what he supported was genuine free trade, not government-controlled trade masquerading as free trade. As Fergane Azihari and Louis Rouanet note in an incisive article, “It is erroneous to believe that free traders have been historically in favor of free trade agreements between governments. Paradoxically, the opposite is true. Curiously, many laissez-faire advocates fall into the government-made trap by supporting “free-trade” treaties. However, as Vilfredo Pareto stated in the article “Traités de commerce of the Nouveau Dictionnaire d’Economie Politique” (1901):
If we accept free trade, treaties of commerce have no reason to exist as a goal. There is no need to have them since what they are meant to fix does not exist anymore, each nation letting come and go freely any commodity at its borders. This was the doctrine of J.B. Say and of all the French economic school until Michel Chevalier. It is the exact model Léon Say recently adopted. It was also the doctrine of the English economic school until Cobden. Cobden, by taking the responsibility of the 1860 treaty between France and England, moved closer to the revival of the odious policy of the treaties of reciprocity, and came close to forgetting the doctrine of political economy for which he had been, in the first part of his life, the intransigent advocate.
In 1859, the French liberal economist Michel Chevalier went to see Richard Cobden to propose a free trade treaty between France and England. For sure, this treaty, enacted in 1860, was a temporary success for free traders. What is less known however,is that at first, Cobden, in accordance with the free trade doctrine, refused to negotiate or sign any “free trade” treaty. His argument was that free trade should be unilateral, that it consists not in treaties but in complete freedom in international trade, regardless of where products come from.
Chevalier eventually succeeded in obtaining Cobden’s support. But Cobden was puzzled by the complete secrecy surrounding the negotiations and, in a letter to Lord Palmerston, he attributed this secrecy to the “lack of courage” of the French government. Similarly, today, the lack of transparency concerning free-trade negotiations is problematic and it is often hard to know what the content of a treaty will be.
Today, while some of these treaties are currently being negotiated, there are already examples of similar agreements enforced. One could refer to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS), the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) or more regional agreements like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) or the European Economic Area (EEA).
But why would protectionist governments who spend their time hampering markets by giving monopolies and other kinds of privileges at national level, open markets at the international level? The very fact that governments are negotiating in the name of free trade should be suspicious for any libertarian or true advocate of free trade.
Murray Rothbard opposed NAFTA and showed that what the Orwellians were calling a “free trade” agreement was in reality a means to cartelize and increase government control over the economy. Several clues lead us to the conclusion that protectionist policies often hide behind free trade agreements, for as Rothbard said, “genuine free trade doesn’t require a treaty.”
The first clue is the intergovernmental and top down approach. Intergovernmentalism is nothing more than a process governments use to mutualize their respective sovereignties in order to complete tasks they are not able to accomplish alone. Nation-states are entities which rarely give up power. When they finalize agreements, it is to strengthen their power, not to weaken it. On the contrary, free trade requires a decline of governments’ regulatory power.
Also, free trade does not require interstate cooperation. On the contrary, free trade can be and has to be done unilaterally. As freedom of speech does not need international cooperation, freedom to trade with foreigners does not need governments and treaties. Similarly, our government should not rob their population with corporatist and protectionist policies just because others do. Anyone who believes in free trade does not fear unilateralism. The simple fact that bureaucrats and politicians do not conceive of the international economy outside of a legal frame settled by intergovernmental agreements is sufficient to show the mistrust they express toward individual freedom. This reinforces the conviction that these agreements are driven by mercantilist preoccupations rather than genuine free trade goals.
The second clue concerns the intense conflicts between governments on these agreements characterized by a high degree of technicality. History shows that multilateralism leads toward deadlock. The failure of the Doha Round is the cause of the proliferation of bilateral and regional initiatives. The contentious relations between governments come from the will of some states to dictate their norms to other countries’ producers through an international harmonization process. But this is the exact opposite of free trade. As economic theory shows us, exchange and the division of labor is not based on equality and harmonization but rather on differences and inequality. Furthermore, the technicality and secrecy surrounding free-trade agreements favor mercantilism and protectionism to the extent that technical regulations are used to favor producers who are politically well connected.
The Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) is a good illustration of this balance of power. It was at first an agreement between four countries (Brunei, New-Zealand, Singapore, and Chile.) which tried to resist some neighbors’ commercial influence, especially China. Then the United States came and convinced more countries (Australia, Malaysia, Peru, Vietnam, Canada, Mexico, and Japan) to join the negotiations. Let’s also notice that most of the countries invited are already bound by regional or bilateral agreements with the United States. China remains excluded from the process. This governmental drive toward regulatory hegemony is obviously the complete opposite of free trade. Indeed, free trade supposes letting consumers peacefully choose what products they want to promote rather than determining what is available through bureaucratic coercion.
The third clue concerns the vigor with which governments have tried over several decades to impose at the international level a more constraining legal framework for so-called “intellectual property.” The first initiatives appear in 1883 and 1886 with the Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property and the Bern Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works. Amended several times during the twentieth century, the initiatives embrace, respectively, 176 and 168 states. These conventions are placed under the auspices of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), an international bureaucracy which joined the United Nations system in 1974. A turning point came in 1994 with the signature of the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) administrated by the World Trade Organization (WTO). It is now incorporated as an essential part of the administration of international commerce and benefits from the WTO’s sanction mechanisms.
In 2012 we endured a fresh attempt by our governments to reduce our freedom to create and share intellectual works with the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). And, if we look at the negotiations mandates of these trade agreements, we can see they all include a chapter on the reinforcement of “intellectual property” rights. Intellectual property has become a key concept of the international economy. But this must not hide its illegitimacy.
As Vilfredo Pareto remarked, “From the point of view of the protectionist, treaties of commerce are … what is most important for a country’s economic future.” Each time a new “free trade” treaty is enacted, what is seen is the attenuation of tariff barriers, but what is not seen is the sneaky proliferation and harmonization of non-tariff barriers impeding free enterprise and creating monopolies at an international scale at the expense of the consumer. It’s time for genuine free trade.”
If we forget this vital distinction, we fall right into the hands of leftists who attack free trade as part of a “neo-liberal” quest for global hegemony. Because they don’t know what real free trade is, they call for tariffs and local production. But that isn’t the way to fight crony capitalism. Economic autarchy leads to war and fascism. Government control of trade isn’t the answer, and ending tariffs isn’t enough by itself. We need a complete free market, as the great Ludwig von Mises recognized.
“The eminent British pacifist, Sir Norman Angell, repeats again and again that the individual citizen cannot derive any profit from the conquest of a province by his own nation. No German citizen, says Sir Norman, profited through his nation’s annexation of Alsace-Lorraine as a result of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871. This is quite correct. But that was in the days of classical liberalism and free enterprise. It is another thing in our day of government interference with business.
Let us take an example. The governments of the rubber-producing countries have entered into a cartel arrangement in order to monopolize the market for natural rubber. They have forced the planters to restrict production in order to raise the price of rubber far above the level it would have attained on a free market. This is not an exceptional case. Many vital and essential foodstuffs and raw materials have been subject to similar policies implemented by governments around the world. They have imposed compulsory cartelization on numerous industries, as a result of which their control was shifted away from private entrepreneurs to the hands of government. Some of these schemes, it is true, have failed. But the governments concerned have not abandoned their plans. They are eager to improve the methods applied and are confident that they will be more successful after the present Second World War.
The individual citizens do not derive any profit from the conquest of a territory. … Hence, the old liberals concluded, there would be no more wars under a system of economic laissez faire and popular government.
There is a lot of talk nowadays about the necessity for international planning. However, no planning, whether it be national or international, is required to make planters grow rubber, coffee, and any other commodity. They embark upon the production of these commodities because it is the most advantageous way for them to make a living. Planning in this connection always means government actions for the restraint of output and the establishment of monopoly prices.
Under such conditions it is no longer true that a nation may not appear to derive a tangible profit from a victorious war. If the nations dependent on the importation of rubber, coffee, tin, cocoa, and other commodities could force the governments of the producing countries to abandon their monopolistic practices, they would improve the economic welfare of their citizens.
To mention this state of affairs does not imply a justification for aggression and conquest. It only demonstrates how utterly mistaken are pacifists like Sir Norman Angell, who base their arguments in favor of peace on the unstated assumption that all nations are still committed to the principles of free enterprise.
Sir Norman Angell is a member of the British Labour Party. This party stands for the outright socialization of business. But the members of the Labour Party are too dull to realize what must be the economic and political consequences of the socialization of business.” https://mises.org/library/economic-causes-war
Let’s heed Mises’s words of wisdom and do whatever we can to promote real free trade and a genuine free market. One important thing we can do is to support the Mises Institute, the foremost educational center for Misesian and Rothbardian thought, which it was my great honor to found forty years ago.
