Libertarian Links Free Trade to Freedom, Peace
By Alexander J. Finerman, The Harvard Crimson, April 23, 2003

Globalization “creates incentives for harmony and peace, which is about as good as we can do in this life,” Tom Palmer, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, told a crowd of 50 that gathered yesterday for a discussion sponsored by the Harvard Libertarian Society.

Palmer laid out an argument in favor of globalization and free trade and addressed many of the criticisms leveled against it in his talk, which was also sponsored by the Institute for Humane Studies and the Cato Institute, two libertarian think tanks based near Washington, D.C. According to Palmer, globalization boils down to the question, “should the political border decide whether exchange should be blocked, or not?”

For Palmer, the answer is a definitive no. “Through trade, we can consume more than we can produce,” he said. Palmer rebutted arguments that globalization “exports” jobs to poor countries and promotes a “race to the bottom” where poor countries compete for capital by offering worse working conditions.

Foreign capital and plum manufacturing jobs do not go to the countries with the lowest wages, he said. Rather, investment travels to where labor productivity is high, and this is where wages are higher and workers happily give up part of their wages to pay for better working conditions. Eighty-one percent of American foreign direct investment goes to “starving Canada, desperately poor Japan and impoverished Western Europe,” he quipped.

Palmer also countered the argument yesterday that globalization is facilitating the global hegemony of American youth culture. Every generation thinks that the youth culture of its successors is venal, he said, adding that “Ralph Nader and Pat Buchanan should wake up and realize they are old.” Palmer also said that the notion of a cultural purity that must be preserved is “a myth,” and all cultures are a product of mixture, adopting and adapting.

For Palmer, anti-globalization activists are missing the bigger picture. Bolstering his argument with evidence from the Classics, Palmer read a passage out of Homer’s Odyssey and said that Homer is telling the reader that “the cyclops is a savage because he doesn’t trade.” “He lives in the preferred world of the anti-globalization activists,” he said.

Palmer used an anecdote about Mayan women in Guatemala to further illustrate his characterization of anti-globalization activists. “Foreign visitors were horrified” that the women in Guatemala were wearing contemporary dress instead of traditional dress, he said. When asked why the women chose not to wear the traditional clothes, their reply was that traditional clothes were too expensive. “For the first time in history,” he said, “the labor of an Indian woman has increased in value.”

It is better for the women to produce traditional clothes for sale abroad, from which they earn enough to buy five modern outfits and new things such as eyeglasses and medicine. “The group that has been worse off [from globalization],” he said, “are the poverty tourists.”

Palmer cited evidence to draw a correlation between openness to trade and freedom. He said that according to Freedom House statistics, 90 percent of those living in the top 40 percent of countries in terms of economic opennesswere classified as free, and not one was unfree. In the lowest quintile, however, fewer than 20 percent were rated as free, while over 50 percent were rated as unfree.“Every time you add more people engaging in exchange,” he said, “you create more incentives for peace.”

What a pile of crock. The greatest example of free trade that ever existed was the slave trade, which helped to finance the industrialization of both Britain and the United States. That was freedom, all right - the freedom of human leeches to enslave people and sell them and their labor. The British Empire was another wonderful example of free trade. Ireland experienced a kind of genocide in the 1840's when, during the Potato Famine, Britain refused to send food to its colony on the grounds that this would violate the sacred laws of free trade. And the US has opposed UN resolutions that people have a natural human right to food on the same grounds. Free trade = capitalism. Capitalism = enslavement of the human spirit and often the human body. Free trade has nothing to do with freedom and everything to do with oppression, authoritarianism, exploitation, imperialism, destruction of the envioronment, and child labor.

The Cato Institute

WELFARE REFORM -- "Tinkering with the current system can make modest improvements, leading to both reduced welfare usage and improvements in both economic and psychological well-being of recipients. But welfare reform by itself will do little to end dependence or lift large numbers of people out of poverty," he concludes. "When it comes to welfare, we should end it, not mend it."
http://www.cato.org/new/04-03/04-16-03r.html

CORPORATE REFORM -- The collapse of Enron was not the result of accounting fraud, but rather the direct result of the firm's failure to apply its "asset lite" business model in its ventures into non-energy markets, according to a new Policy Analysis released today by the Cato Institute. In "Empire of the Sun: An Economic Interpretation of Enron's Energy Business," Christopher L. Culp, of the University of Chicago, and Cato Institute Senior Fellow Steve H. Hanke argue that Enron's fall should not encourage new regulations aimed at preventing risk-taking and economic failure. Rather, the company should be recognized for its innovative asset-lite business strategy, and its executives prosecuted for their illegal actions.
http://www.cato.org/new/02-03/02-20-03r.html

AFFIRMATIVE ACTION -- "The time has come to put an end to the use of racial preferences in the admissions process of public colleges and universities," explains Roger Pilon, Cato's vice president for legal affairs. "They are demeaning to those whom they allegedly benefit. They generate racial animosity. And, from a legal perspective, they are at war with the constitutional guarantee of equal protection under the law."
http://www.cato.org/new/01-03/01-16-03r.html

NUCLEAR WEAPONS PROLIFERATION -- Preemptive war and economic sanctions are also dangerous and ill-advised strategies, according to Carpenter. The most well suited approach, he writes, would be to "raise the possibility of a regional nuclear balance." Allowing more nuclear proliferation is the best way to deter North Korea's nuclear program... Carpenter concludes that although additional nuclear proliferation may not be an ideal outcome, it is better than having U.S. forces defending weak allies from an unpredictable, nuclear North Korea.
http://www.cato.org/new/01-03/01-06-03r-2.html

SUSTAINABILITY -- Although global leaders convened today in Johannesburg, South Africa for the start of the United Nations World Summit on Sustainable Development, concerns about a lack of natural resources have been exaggerated as the world is already on a glide-path for sustainable development. Jerry Taylor, Cato's director of natural resource studies, argues in a new policy analysis, "Sustainable Development: A Dubious Solution in Search of a Problem," that those who favor central planning as a prerequisite for sustainable development in effect make environmental protection more expensive and even exacerbate problems. "A review of data concerning resource availability and environmental quality clearly illustrates that the developed world is on an eminently sustainable path -- resources are becoming more abundant, environmental quality is improving, and per capita incomes are rising," writes Taylor, who has done extensive research on national environmental policy.
http://www.cato.org/new/08-02/08-26-02r.html

GLOBALIZATIOM & WEALTH -- Controversy surrounding globalization has focused on whether it exacerbates income inequality between the rich and the poor, but Goklany examines whether globalization is improving human well-being. "For every indicator examined, regardless of whether the rich are richer and the poor poorer, gaps in human well-being between the rich countries and other income groups have for the most part shrunk over the past four decades," writes Goklany. For example, the infant mortality gap between rich and poor countries has been cut in half during the past 50 years. Trends indicate that as countries become wealthier, human well-being gets better "with improvements coming most rapidly at the lowest levels of wealth," according to Goklany.
http://www.cato.org/new/08-02/08-22-02r.html

ENVIRONMENT & LAND USE -- "The showdown over whether or not to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is more show than substance. Unfortunately, both the pro-drilling and anti-drilling factions are right about the other. "The environmentalists are right that drilling in ANWR would not do much to bring down oil prices. Industry's best estimate is that ANWR could produce about 1 million barrels of oil per day at its peak. That's a 1.25 percent increase in global production. "On the other hand, the argument that drilling in 2,000 acres of barren tundra during the winter months only would significantly harm the wildlife in the Refuge is hard to believe given our experience in nearby Prudhoe Bay. And while the reserve may not produce the volume of oil produced in Middle Eastern fields, most experts believe that the value of oil there is somewhere in the neighborhood of $30 billion. "The only way to really know whether those 2,000 acres in ANWR are best used as an oil platform or a wilderness preserve is to auction off the land. Letting politicians decide how best to use the land means that interest group politics rather than economic common sense will rule the day."
http://www.cato.org/new/04-02/04-17-02r.html

"Eighty-one percent of American foreign direct investment goes to “starving Canada, desperately poor Japan and impoverished Western Europe,” he quipped. "
he's quipping, for sure. retarded.
tho i agree with the global trade but minus the corps.

Every time I read these evangels of free trade and untrammelled capitalism I remember John Locke's excuse in his day for the way things are: "In the beginning, all the world was America." [Two Treatises, chap 6.] In other words, at some Cartesian point each acquisitive possibility was an option and the sky was truly the limit, but YOU missed out, baby, and so tough luck if you have to suck the pipe. Since ownership and possibility in some imagined mists of time WERE available to all--and surely you would have been just as much a greedy bastard if you had been there--you just have to accept your subjugation in the current order.

Do any of these assholes ever have a resort to anything besides dead political economists or the Wall Street Journal? How long do they expect anyone to ignore that white, old-moneyed families and their corporations rule the roost, and swift the retribution to any who point it out or question their legitimacy? People are dying for the sake of sad abstractions and idiot-logical purity and these third-tier, stipended pundits accept the collaborator's task to sway the suffering that it's nothing personal so be merry for their fate, because they're making out just enough and damn don't m'ladies jewels glitter pretty.

It almost makes one long for the days of simple Christian charity--but only because Jesus never had accountants and lawyers to drag into court everyone who prayed and didn't pay royalties.

The truest definition I ever heard: "A compassionate conservative is someone who is always willing for others to suffer for his principles." Op cit. the economic libertarian.

They want the third world to be liberal in trade orientation, and the first world to keep restrictions (great examples in technology/gmo and farm subsidies)

Cato is a disgrace to Jefferson, who they picture in their logo. Cato's ideological butchery of real libertarian principles is rich with Orwellian redefinition of the political lexicon and other obfuscation.