Contribution No.6 to the debate on FREE TRADE:
The "Free Trade" Question
In the Spring 2001 issue of "The Georgist Journal",
No. 93, the editor, Lindy Davies, wrote this summary:
There has been lively debate in recent months about the georgist
movement’s use of the term “free trade”. Is it a liability to our outreach and
networking efforts? Does it mean what it used to mean? Is it a central tenet of
the georgist philosophy, deserving equal billing with the collection of land
rent for public revenue? This issue will be on the agenda of the business
meeting of the International Union for Land Value Taxation and Free Trade at
the conference in Edinburgh — and the call has gone out for preliminary
discussion, to help focus the upcoming debate.
“We all
need to be doing some serious thinking” writes Barbara Sobrielo, “about the
words ‘free trade’”. Regrettably, this term has been hijacked — and it has
become linked to merciless big business practices that penalise the poor. The
days when it was a clarion call and conference halls were named for it, like
the Free Trade Hall in Manchester, seem sadly to have gone. The logo for the
International Union was FREE LAND — FREE TRADE — FREE MEN. What a banner to
walk behind! But that was yesterday. We have to deal with the present.”
Many
colleagues complain that the term “free trade” hampers our efforts to connect
with other reformers who share our goals of economic justice and sustainable
prosperity. Hanno Beck, for example, points out that to many people in today’s
political climate, free trade means “allowing secretive supragovernmental
groups to hand special privileges out to large corporations, to the detriment
of democracy, to the detriment of economic efficiency, to the detriment of
workplace safety, and to the detriment of the poor and middle classes.”
However,
many georgists take umbrage at this characterization, saying that if this is
indeed what people mean when they say “free trade” today, then they are
mangling the term’s meaning. Critics of today’s “free trade agreements” such as
NAFTA, GATT, and lesser agreements such as the “Trade-Related Aspects of
Intellectual Property Rights” (TRIPS) complain bitterly about their erosion of
people’s rights. Such “free trade” pacts actually limit consumers’ access to
information about genetically modified foods, or products produced in inhuman
or environmentally destructive ways. They seek to ban health, safety or
environmental regulations as “nontariff barriers to trade”. It soon becomes
clear that such interventions have very little to do with the unhindered
voluntary exchange of goods that people have always called “free trade”.
In fact,
as Fred Foldvary points out, such aspects of international “free trade”
agreements are actually protectionist. When someone profits from selling a
product made by sweatshop labor, or by the destruction of habitat, or
containing untested, potentially harmful genetic manipulations, they are
actually inflicting coercive harm on consumers and workers. The opportunity to
coerce and harm others, without cost or penalty, is a privilege — and this
privilege is being bestowed upon multinational corporations by today’s “free
trade” agreements. George Orwell would get it: in 2001, “free trade” has
actually become protectionism.
How
should georgists respond to this conundrum? Should we expunge Protection or
Free Trade from our curriculum? Should the International Union change its name?
It seems clear that we ought not use a slogan that potential supporters find
repulsive. And yet part of our task must be to deepen public understanding of
the real nature of trade, to expose the lies that are being foisted on people
and nations, in the name (also stolen) of “progress”. That is not an easy task,
of course — for our access to media, our weight in today’s public dialogue, is
practically nil — and it is precisely in order to gain that access, and broaden
that influence, that our colleagues urge us to watch our language!
While the
discussion has gone on, a dual strategy has emerged among georgist activists.
Those on the cutting edge of coalition-building are crafting their message in
terms that suit their purposes. Meanwhile, georgist educators continue to
insist on the clarity and consistency that distinguishes our economic analysis.
Many see a need to guard against any watering-down of the georgist message.
Fred Harrison, for example, writes that “before I support the deletion of Free
Trade from the IU title, I would campaign for the deletion of the words Land
Value Taxation from its name. This is because a) we are not proposing a tax,
and b) we are not proposing to impose a levy on land values — if this concept
is taken to represent capitalised rents — because there would be no rental
income left to capitalise, if we implemented the Georgist model. And if the IU
is a Georgist organisation, it is not campaigning for anything less than the
full rent as public revenue.”
But many
warn that to insist, from the start, that everyone must use Our Definitions is
to doom us to irrelevance. “There aren’t very many georgists in the first
place,” Hanno Beck writes, “and if we say that “free trade” is good, we will
connect with approximately no one and will continue to be ignored.... On the
other hand, if we proclaim that we oppose corporate privilege and global
monopoly (we don’t have to say we support or oppose free trade, just don’t use
the term), we have spoken the truth and we will connect with more people...
those opponents of global monopoly and corporate privilege who notice us will
remember that we are among the “good guys.”
If so,
then perhaps we can get some of them, eventually, to enroll in the HGI’s course
in Applied Economics — which asserts both our ability and our responsibility to
cut through the mass of doubletalk that engulfs today’s talk of international
trade, wages, sustainability and development.
Lindy Davies
We do well to recall that true
free trade, as Henry George said, is far more than merely the lifting of
tariffs and other restrictions on the trading of goods. The benefits of that
policy are no greater — and no less — than those of other labor-saving
processes. True free trade is the removal of all monopoly, taxation and other
coercive restrictions on producers. The lifting of tariffs is only one small
step toward that great goal. — Sydney Mayers
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Georgist Union, 212 Piccadilly, W1J 9HG, United Kingdom, or e-mail to iu@interunion.org.uk
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