G'day Paul, > What I do not have is a comprehensive critique > of so-called free trade, all the agreements etc. What I would like to > see is pen-l put together a comprehensive critique of 'free trade' > (sic) that we could use in classes, public protests, media, etc. with > all the appropriate academic references to studies, reports, etc. > > I know of a number of studies (such as the excellent one by CEPR) > on globalism and (the failure of) growth. But I don't know them all. > Nor do I know of all of the studies on NAFTA and job destruction > such as the one by EPI/CCPA. What I would like to see is a > series of reports, not overly long, by interested pen-l members of > the evils of 'free trade' and its effects. Something that we could put > together and download (or get students to download) that would > give a comprehensive theoretical and empirical critique of the 'free > trade conspiracy' with all the appropriate footnotes/URLs to relevant > studies/reports/websites.
I suppose Ricardo might be a good place to embark. If it's a first-year course (beyond which level I'd have nothing to contribute) we could contextualise Ricardo's moment, juxtapose ours, and ask some currently pressing questions. (Apologies for disorganised thoughts, but I'm in a monstrous hurry). If post-Napoleonic-War Britain produced just about everything more cheaply than the rest of the world, why did trade persist? Ricardo, as all here know, proposed that, even in conditions of across-the-board absolute advantage, a national economy (and every other participating national economy) would be best served if it confined the allocation of its productive resources to the production of goods at which it was most efficient in comparison to other economies, leaving the least blessed economies to concentrate on producing stuff at which it was least relatively inefficient. As Paul Ormerod pointed out in his critical romp *The Death Of Economics*, Ricardo very explicitly qualified this assertion with the observation that 'every man' is disinclined to entrust himself and his assets to 'a strange government and new laws'. Furthermore, he expressed approval of the spatial inertia of capital, saying he'd be 'sorry' to see such restrictions weakened. Anyway, by way of formal kick-off; some things I'd like to hear penpals on include the following considerations: * The 'that was then' argument: Under the 'free trade' environment envisaged by the mainstream media and the US State Department, capital dances around the world instantly and costlessly, with governments everywhere dropping their knickers to attract FDIs. * The Galbraithian institutionalist argument projected into a Marxian value argument: Even if markets tend to efficiency in the abstract, the capacity of big corporations in the real world (whose particular access to capital affords them an absolute advantage in both information expoitation and capital-mobility exploitation) to make, rather than take, prices has (inevitably) distorted the free-market ideal. Where goods trade at way above exchange value (eg M$), other goods in play must sell below their exchange value, creating debt-dependence, political distortion, uneven development, and incipient underconsumption. * The M$ example also reminds us of Frank Graham's (and Ethier's 60 years later) comparative economies of scale argument. A national economy doing the right Ricardian thing, and concentrating on producing something at constant return to scale (as many LDCs would be encouraged to do, given their current comparative advantage location) would be bound to protect its rent by through protection if it were confronted by a trading partner specialising in a good of increasing return to scale. * There actually being no such thing as 'free trade', the question is really one of mode of regulation. Keynes' International Clearing Union argument (that both deficit and surplus national economies needed to be disciplined) implies that incentives are all wrong under Bretton Woods institutions if free trade's advantages are to be optimised, because investors are not encouraged to develop. Keynes would be even less comfortable with the chaoplexic charges and retreats of capital around the world, as the dangers of this were precisely whatthe Bretton Woods talks were initiated to avoid. And the greenback as international currency affords the hegemon unfair advantages (hence Keynes' bancor: http://www.globalpolicy.org/socecon/bwi-wto/2001/braithwa.htm ). *The Martin Wolf 'you don't and can't have free trade until labour is as mobile as capital' argument Ian just posted. Cheers, Rob.
