#Free Trade

[phoenixyfriend]

Tom Nicholas just posted a video that summarizes like half a semester of business school and honestly teaches it better than a lot of my professors, while also ensuring the viewer is aware of the moral and ethical failings of free trade in the name of comparative advantage and global efficiency.

(Yes, for the unaware: I have a bachelor's degree in international business. I am also one of those people who graduated with a distinct distaste for much of the business world, related directly to the 'taking advantage of cheap labor and bullying less powerful entities is good, actually' model of economic theory that a lot of my classes pushed.)

[probablyasocialecologist]

Free trade as a general abstract principle was bound to have complex global environmental consequences in the long run. Ricardo's famous doctrine of comparative advantage leaves no room for any consideration of the possible harmful ecological effects of increasing international specialization (for example, through monoculture, or other gross simplifications in farming systems).

Colin A. M. Duncan, The Centrality of Agriculture: Between Humankind and the Rest of Nature

[barrydeutsch]

Free Trade Is For Peasants, Not Cartoonists

Transcript, discussion, and a gross anecdote about Hugh Hefner at: https://www.patreon.com/posts/free-trade-is-98677035

We can keep making these cartoons because lots of people support us with $1-3 pledges! Join them at patreon.com/barry

[drethelin]

Good evening, sir. May I ask you to explain why capitalism is a force for good? This is a genuine question. Thank you, have a good day.

^_^

Trade means different resources can be combined to achieve results greater than the sum of their parts. It also means shortages in one place can be alleviated by trading with other places. It also means people can specialize and gain the ability to provide services that no one could provide if they had to do everything for themselves. Money means you can do trade between many many more people without having to do billions of barter negotiations deciding on the value of every good and service in an ad-hoc way. Capitalism, ie financialization and debt and large-scale transactions and corporations, allow all of this to be multiplied across civilization and to take place on national and international scales. You have not just the town blacksmith making metal tools for a few hundred villagers, you have factories making machine tools which allow other factories to make cars or farm tools which allow a relatively tiny amount of labor to feed billions of people. Capitalism's ability to produce greater returns on labor and capital also enable science and engineering research which increases health and wealth for everyone

[dancesingay]

Hi, I'm native American and instead of spirit animals, I propose we buy Otomi hand embroidered masks to see which animal represents us. They're $17 and the money goes towards the Otomi tribe and supports the women who make these beautiful pieces of wearable art. It's free trade, despite it being so cheap, and each design is original and unique. The animal you get is random, I got a Turkey, which I loved so much, but I lost it in San Francisco, so I just got a new one...

It's a deer... are you kidding me? I'm in love 💗

[daily-lego-sets]

LEGO Star Wars:

Trade Federation MTT

Set: 7662

2007

Pieces: 1330

[objectivistnerd]

[argyrocratie]

"The corporate ruling class’s approach to “free market reform” is a sort of mirror-image of “lemon socialism.” Under lemon socialism, the political capitalists (acting through the state) choose to nationalize those industries that corporate capital will most benefit from having taken off its hands, and to socialize those functions the cost of which capital would most prefer the state to bear. They shift functions from the private to the state sector when they are perceived as necessary for the functioning of the system, but not sufficiently profitable to justify the bother of running them under “private sector” auspices.

Under “lemon market reform,” on the other hand, the political capitalists liquidate interventionist policies after they have squeezed all the benefit out of state action. A good example: British industrialists felt it was safe to adopt “free trade” in the mid-nineteenth century,after mercantilism had served its purpose. Half the world had been hammered into a unified market by British force of arms and was held together by a British merchant fleet. Britain had stamped out competing industry in the colonial world. It had reenacted the Enclosures on a global scale, stealing enormous amounts of land from native populations and converting it to cash crops for the imperial market. The commanding position of British capital was the direct result of past mercantilism; having established this commanding position, it could afford “free trade.”

The so-called “free trade” movement in the contemporary United States follows the same pattern. A century ago, high tariff barriers served the interests of American capital. Today, when the dominant corporate interests are transnational, tariffs are no longer useful to them. They actually impede the transfer of goods and partially finished products between the national subdivisions of a single global corporation, or the importation of goods produced offshore by nominally independent sweatshops producing on contract for American corporations.

On the other hand, so-called “intellectual property” today serves exactly the same protectionist function for transnational corporations that tariffs used to serve for the old national corporations a century ago. Patents and trademarks enable corporations that no longer actually produce anything to outsource all actual production to factories in other countries, but to maintain a legal monopoly on the right to dispose of the product.

Patents and trademarks servethe same basic function of enabling a corporation to monopolize the right to sell a given product in a given market area -- the only difference is that the protective barriers operate along corporate boundaries instead of national boundaries. So the political capitalists promote a version of “free trade” that involves doing away with outmoded tariff barriers while promoting “Free Trade Agreements” whose main purpose is expanding the new protectionism of “intellectual property” law."

-Kevin Carson, "Formal vs. Substantive Statism: A Matter of Context" (2019)

[eretzyisrael]

On Monday, July 24th, Israel's Foreign Minister met with the Vietnamese Deputy Prime Minister in Jerusalem to commemorate 30 years of bilateral relations and finalize preparations for a free trade agreement between the two nations.

We are looking forward to seeing the ties between Israel and Vietnam deepen and expand!

StandWithUs 

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"Reciprocity Benefits" cigar

"Uncle Sam - I'll smoke it, you may smell it."

From the Berlin (Kitchener) News Record, September 6 1911

[Context from my pal DN]: The 1911 federal election was the first "free trade" election. In office since 1896, Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier's Liberals sought their fifth consecutive sweeping majority. President Taft's proposal of lowering tariffs became the central political issue. Wrapped in the Union Jack, Robert Borden's Conservatives opposed free trade and argued that Canada would be taken over by the United States.

The election was close but the Conservatives came out ahead. The entrenched Liberal machine built around Laurier ensured the Liberals carried Quebec, but with a significant loss of seats to the Conservatives. The Liberals also carried Atlantic Canada, but just barely, signalling the crumbling of the old opposition to Confederation in the 1860s in which it was correctly predicted that losing free trade with New England would result in Atlantic Canadian industry being swallowed up by Montreal capital. The predictions came true, and Nova Scotia in particular suffered through a wave of deindustrializatoin in the 1880s and 1890s as Montreal capital bought up local concerns and shuttered them in favour of greater concentrations of industry in Montreal and the St. Lawrence Valley.

In the new prairie provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan, the Liberals continued to dominate as colonization rapidly expanded the number of farmers who quickly found themselves locked into an east-west trade cartel controlled by the rail monopolies of CPR, Canadian Northern, and the Grand Trunk Pacific (the latter two would be nationalized and form Canadian National in 1919). The farmers were incensed that they were blocked from trading south to American markets at cheaper freight rates.

The Conservatives cut into Liberal support in Quebec and Atlantic Canada, but the bulk of its support came from Ontario, Manitoba and British Columbia - the three Anglo provinces where industrial capitalism had taken hold during the "Second Industrial Revolution" that began in the 1890s. Not only that, but Ontario, Manitoba and BC were politically dominated by the most militant Anglo founders of Confederation. Through the Orange Terror of the 1870s against the Métis and their democratic allies, and a sustained political struggle against French language schooling rights, the bilingual and multicultural character of Manitoba had been legally and politically extinguished by the mid-1890s (and was a contributing factor to Laurier's Liberals winning the 1896 election, ending 18 years of Conservative rule).

Likewise, British Columbia was politically loyal to the project of Confederation. It had been aggressively established as a British colonial outpost in the 1850s for the Empire's project of a united British North America and establishing a British base in the northwestern Pacific. The 1860s was marked by a series of colonial wars and punitive expeditions by British gunboats, redcoats and settler terrorist groups. Colonial victory was achieved with the deliberate smallpox genocide of Indigenous peoples on Vancouver Island which spread to Haida Gwaii and the mainland. Estimates of 15,000 to 30,000 Indigenous peoples died in a year - half the Indigenous population of Vancouver Island and Haida Gwaii. White people in Victoria, population 5,000 in 1862, were busy getting vaccinated, the smallpox vaccine having been discovered decades before available in the Pacific Northwest by the 1850s. By 1911, British Columbia had become a major coal and lumber exporter and the terminus of three new transcontinental railroads (CPR at Port Moody and Granville; Canadian Northern at Port Mann and later Pacific Central Station; Grand Trunk Pacific at Prince Rupert).

It seemed like the Conservatives had re-established their once-powerful "National Policy" coalition of British imperialists, Canadian capitalists and the Anglo working class. However, the Second Industrial Revolution, the two new transcontinental railways, and colonization of the prairies had radically expanded and altered the character of the industrial working class and the role of the state in society. The brewing rebellion of farmers, the Vancouver Coal Wars of 1912-1914, the great IWW strike of the Grand Trunk Pacific in 1913, and the success of state capitalist development (Ontario Hydro Commission - 1906, Temiskaming and Northern Ontario Railway - 1902, King's Industrial Disputes Investigation Act - 1907) were all harbingers of radical change that exploded with the pressure cooker of the Great War.

Farmers struck out on their own after the war with farmer parties taking power in Ontario (1919), Alberta (1921) and Manitoba (1922). The working-class insurgency of 1919 shook the ruling class and forged a broad and complex vanguard of radical working-class politics and action that formed a foundation for the great class struggles of the 1930s and 1940s.

The Conservatives, during and immediately following the war, were pressed to concede the vote of women, albeit through opportunistic means to win the 1917 election in favour of conscription, nationalize the CNoR and Grand Trunk in 1919, and lose its popular "producer" base that had won it power in 1911 and undergirded its electoral success during the first 30 years of Confederation.

Ever the opportunists, the Liberals under King abandoned the free trade mantra and spent the next 30 years overseeing the renovation of the Canadian state in the interest of capital while playing a ruthless game of stick, carrot and more stick against the growing insurgency of the "producer" classes which had grown too large and self-conscious to contain within a bourgeois two-party system.

The next seventy years would hold to this pattern until the economic base of the farmer and labour movements had sufficiently crumbled by the 1980s, at which point the Progressive Conservatives (a name courtesy of a 1940s merger of the Conservatives and a section of the farmer-based Progressives) pulled the plug on the National Policy of protective tariffs and home market development in favour of free trade with the United States.

With Mulroney's victory in the 1988 "free trade" election and subsequent refusal of provincial governments to challenge the free trade agreement (Bob Rae promised he would during his successful 1990 election campaign), the old 20th century political arrangements have collapsed. The small farmer class has disappeared to political insignificance. The working-class has been radically transformed since deindustrialization and free trade. The three-party political system that dominated the 1919-1990 period has collapsed and been remade with new coalitions of forces and factions - even if the party names carry forward into a new century.

With one "producer" class still standing - the working class - and the colonial and capitalist failures of Confederation coming home to roost at home and abroad, can a new vision and program for Canada be forged by a new working-class movement?

[lutnistas]

Chinese side of Khorgos Free Trade Zone ( Kazakhstan - China border )

[probablyasocialecologist]

Consider how “rational optimist” Steven Pinker paints the history of trade in his billionaire-beloved good-news-bearing bible, The Better Angels of Our Nature (its “the most inspiring book I’ve ever read” gushed Bill Gates, the prominent predatory philanthropist). In it Pinker preaches thinking “like an economist” using “the theory of gentle commerce from classical liberalism,” under which trade becomes “more appealing than … war.” Rationally-enlightened leaders reasoned that your “trading partner suddenly becomes more valuable to you alive than dead.”

Compare that glorified life-affirming tradeoff to the views of a frontline practitioner of that so-called gentle commerce: “There can be no trade without war,” declared Jan Pieterzoon Coen of the Dutch East India Company. That’s a quote from Amitav Ghosh’s The Nutmeg’s Curse (an eloquently alarming book about gigantic ideological gaps in climate crisis discourse). Unlike Pinker’s, Coen’s words weren’t abstract theorizing, and he concretely came to the opposite conclusion on the value of trading “partner” lives. He ordered a monopoly-securing massacre of the Banda Islanders. This involved 50 vessels, and 2,000 men (including 80 Japanese ronin, masterless samurai mercenaries) who displaced, “killed, captured, or enslaved” 90% of the 15,000 indigenous “trading partners.” This “almost total annihilation of the population of the Banda Islands [was] clearly a genocidal act” (concluded a 2012 paper in the Journal of Genocide Studies). The cursed spice of Ghosh’s title was so valuable that a handful of nutmegs “could buy a house or ship.” which sadly meant Coen’s gentle-commerce genocide made greedy profits even at the cost of 5,000 slaves per year (“labor” didn’t last long under gentle-commerce conditions).

Pinker isn’t wrong in reporting Enlightenment views. Economist Albert Hirschman, in The Passions and the Interests, an influential book on the long process of alchemizing the once-deadly vice of avarice into plainly-rational “self-interest” during the rise of early capitalism, confirms there was “much talk… about the douceur of commerce.” Douceur translates to “sweetness, softness, calm, and gentleness… the antonym of violence.” Hirschman and Pinker cite a long list of Enlightenment luminaries, for instance, Kant in 1795 wrote that “The spirit of commerce … can not exist side-by-side with war.” Pinker concurs, “commercial powers …tended to favor trade over conquest.”

But this majestic myth-making of modernity—the Enlightenment as a triumph of rationality and humanism—must not be allowed to mask that the Age of Reason ran parallel to and often justified the vast violent plunder of imperial economics (now often euphemistically called “free trade”). One reason this hushed-up history matters is that even today economic “rationality” and plunder often remain partners in crime. For all of Pinker’s elegant-stats-wielding elite-soothing sermons that “in fact a free market puts a premium on empathy,” there was little empathy, empirically evident, for the likes of the Banda Islanders. Or for many millions more lives ended or blighted by “gentle commerce” and “free trade,” which as we’ll see could materialize at your border in the form of a genocidal corporate army bent on “premium-empathy”-ing your way of life into your own blood-soaked dust.

[dailymarx]

To sum up, what is free trade, what is free trade under the present condition of society? It is freedom of capital. When you have overthrown the few national barriers which still restrict the progress of capital, you will merely have given it complete freedom of action.

Marx, On Free Trade, 1848

[arthropooda]

[masgwi]

I don't understand how political debates don't turn into fist fights more often.

[afrotumble]

Ethiopian Aviation University welcomes 200 students from Gabon. African countries building each other 💪🏾💪🏾