A strange amalgam of Buchananites, trade unionists, and leftover environmental kooks have gathered in Seattle this week to protest the supposed "conspiracy" being hatched there by 3,000 trade officials from more than 100 nations, gathered in hopes of further reducing barriers to international trade.
Such Luddite protests have an ancient provenance. Surely there were demonstrations among beet and turnip growers when those products were in part displaced from European dining tables by imported American tomatoes and potatoes 500 years ago. Surely at least a few of those Mediterranean shipwrecks the archaeologists keep discovering were caused by protesters upset that the island's local vineyards were under "economic assault" by those darned cut-rate Athenian amphorae.
The term "saboteur" comes from the habit of unhappy Northern European tradesmen who would throw their wooden shoes -- "sabots" -- into the belts and cogs of newly-built factories to stop "greedy industrialists" from manufacturing and selling for mere pennies the lace and other textiles which had once been available to the wealthy alone.
(Why, so hideous was this capitalist plot that it eventually allowed even the poor to buy cotton clothes -- made from a cheap imported fabric, much to the detriment of domestic wool-gatherers -- and thus wash and change their clothes, sometimes as often as every week!)
The opening of international borders to trade in recent decades has done more to spread affluence and raise standards of living than any other factor. Yet it appears we will never run out of those who whine that free trade "destroys jobs and harms the environment."
Now, the Seattle protesters have every right to voice their opinions, of course. And in fact, the intricate compacts enforced by the World Trade Organization don't always promote trade "freedom" at all -- preliminary talks failed even to agree on an agenda last week, as one delegation after another sought to open other people's markets to (start ital)their(end ital) products while "protecting" their own.
(The French, as usual, proved most amusing -- Agriculture and Fisheries Minister Jean-Andre Glavany declaring he had no intention of abandoning the import restrictions and price supports which keep Frenchmen paying three times what they should for their bread, milk, and cheese, since "I oppose the ideal of vast empty tracts of land." Would those be vast empty tracts of land like the ones that now surround Boston, since Massachusetts no longer finds work exporting striped cloth to clothe the Southern slaves? Or vast empty tracts of land like those that now typify Silicon Valley, since the California cattle industry collapsed in the face of cheaper imports a century ago?)
The rules against "dumping" now enforced by this so-called "free trade" outfit are a classic case: The concern is always that a powerful exporter will drive his competitors out of business and then raise his prices. So ... when (start ital)will(end ital) the Rockefeller interests get around to tripling the price of kerosene? And now that Japanese manufacturers dominate the television and VCR markets, when (start ital)are(end ital) their prices going to start climbing, instead of dropping every year in the face of Korean competition?
Yes, foreign nations may experience some societal upheaval and even environmental degradation as the Industrial Revolution sweeps through. But there is no better answer to the problems of the Industrial Revolution than the affluence (start ital)created(end ital) by the Industrial Revolution -- complete with more discerning consumers, who promptly start demanding better wages and cleaner air and water than could ever have been imagined in the days of ox carts and peat fires.
Professor Hans-Herman Hoppe of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, probably best answers this "America First" argument when he asks, "Well, why stop there? Why not Nevada first?" Why should Nevadans tolerate the "exporting of jobs" from the Nevada horse-breeding and buggy-manufacturing trades, by allowing the free importation of cheap automobiles from Michigan? Think of all the Nevada glass-blowing jobs that could be saved, if we simply stopped allowing all that cheap glass to "pour in" from Pittsburgh and Corning, N.Y. ...
No, there's no stopping trade -- though politicians are free to temporarily punish their own people if they wish, creating massive black markets in anything from smuggled cheese to Freon.
As to this concern that other nations may be unwilling to open their markets as quickly as ours -- England found the right answer in the 1850s, becoming the wealthiest nation in the world by the simple expedient of dropping all her tariff barriers ... unilaterally.
Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Las Vegas Review-Journal. His book, "Send in the Waco Killers," was recently named 1999 Freedom Book of the Year by the kind folks at Free-Market.Net. Copies are $24.95 postpaid from Mountain Media, P.O. Box 271122, Las Vegas, Nev. 89127. Or: dial 1-800-244-2224, or visit web site http://www.thespiritof76.com/wacokillers.html.
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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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