Sorry to be late getting back to you.
"Fair and "free" are perfectly good words, as are table, and chair, and knife, and fork.
What's to argue?
The issue is free trade and surely by now you know what I mean by the phrase - the absence of intervention by government in the free flow of goods between people and peoples.
That is what free trade has meant for perhaps a couple of hundred years.
So, the only question you need answer is are you against the free movement of goods, services, and ideas between people? (We'll forget about the machine guns, anthrax and powdered plutonium that in silly fashion intrude on this kind of discussion. Let's stay with the 99% of goods, services, and ideas that people want.)
I already have the Stiglitz interview in my archives. It's good. It describes an unholy combination of left and right wing interference in economies on a large scale. The very antithesis of free trade.
He bitingly refers to Free Trade WTO style, which means barricading borders. Free trade is removing the barricades. Interestingly, a California professor has just written a paper in which he says the WTO has done little or nothing to break down barriers. This has mostly been done with Custom's Unions, specific treaties between two nations. Well, this is bad too and has nothing to do with free trade.
Just remember we are lucky to have free trade between the states. The US would be a fourth class power had the states been allowed to "protect" themselves from each other.
Free trade increases and improves the quality of production. Just like machines, inventions, and innovations, it allows more to be made for less work - but, it doesn't justly distribute that production.
For that one leads to handle the land problem - the tendency for produced wealth to go toward land-holders rather than labor or capital. This is not something new. It's been known for centuries. Even Marx in Volume III of Das Kapital points out that his so-called "surplus value" disappears into land Rents.
Stiglitz suggests the most important thing we can do is deal with the land problem, but notes the IMF is unlikely to try - for they would be dealing with the elites, the powers in every country. He implied lords of the land were too tough for the IMf to tangle with.
They are.
Harry
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Eric wrote:
----- Original Message ----- From: Harry Pollard Date: Thu, 05 Dec 2002 21:21:37 -0800 To: "eric stewart" , [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Non-price competition > Eric, > > Unfortunately, you have it the wrong way round. > > "Fair trade" means that someone meddles with trade to provide benefits for > someone at the expense of the traders.
I was actually referring to the words 'fair' and 'free' themselves, specifically trying to avoid the politically charged phrases. Granted, citing such phrases was not, perhaps, the best way to do it. To many, 'free trade' refers to my right to subjugate whole peoples and destroy whole economies for my right to more bucks.
> > "Free trade" means that no-one meddles with the exchanges between people. > They may exchange, cooperate, interact without interference.
This is not how it is practiced. Joseph Stiglitz is the former CHIEF ECONOMIST for the World Trade Organization. Here is what he says:
<http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=12652>http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=12652
Stiglitz "was inside the game, a member of Bill Clinton's cabinet as chairman of the president's Council of Economic Advisers."
****************************** Harry Pollard Henry George School of LA Box 655 Tujunga CA 91042 [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tel: (818) 352-4141 Fax: (818) 353-2242 *******************************
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