Jonah Goldberg makes some very good points about human welfare and markets:

I’m no unmitigated fan of Wal-Mart, but it can’t be denied that Wal-Mart—and stores like it—have improved the lives of a lot of low-income families by making life’s necessities, and even its luxuries, affordable. Lightbulbs put a lot of candle makers out of business[*], but lightbulbs also made indoor lighting cheaper, safer, and more widespread. That’s a good trade.

Indeed, the market is the only thing that transforms luxuries into affordable indulgences. A low-end car today has features that the best Mercedes didn’t have a generation ago. Teenagers have phones that are more powerful than the computers that NASA used to put men on the moon. Indeed, even leisure has become democratized.

[…]

One last point. I love the Templeton Foundation and I think they do fantastic work. But questions like “Does the Free Market Erode Moral Character?” bother me a great deal. As opposed to what? Socialism? Socialism certainly erodes moral character. Some of the most alienated, selfish, deracinated people I’ve ever met were people who grew up under the yoke of Communism. Arthur Brooks’s work has definitively shown that large welfare states siphon off philanthropy and erode altruism.

Adam Smith’s case for the free market rested on the fact that it encouraged good character (as Yuval Levinrecently detailed), and I think Smith won that argument a long time ago. A more fruitful question, with deep religious and philosophical implications and precedents, would be “Does wealth erode moral character?” Debating that would still allow for some healthy attacks on the free market, because without free markets, wealth really isn’t something to worry about.

First of all, I know citing Goldberg round these parts will earn me a whole host of angry comments.  How dare I quote the man who wrote Liberal Fascism!?  He’s a fascist!  He’s not very nice!  He strawmans liberals!

I admit, I have a fondness for Goldberg which allows me to ignore our many points of disagreement long enough to point out the many smart, sensible things he does write.  And this is one of them.

[Read more →]

Some hail the 1950s as America’s golden decade.  It was boom time in America, and like the Big Automakers, Big Government continued what was begun during the Great Depression, adding notches to the belt of the New Deal through expansions of Social Security and other entitlement programs, culminating the next decade with the passage of Medicare.  Times were good for American manufacturing during the post-war years as well, and America looked to be on its way toward perpetual prosperity.

However, the intervening years have been more of a mixed bag for Americans.  Free trade and globalization as well as the constant advancement in technology have led to an entirely different workforce than the one we had six decades ago.  Similarly, immigration, the civil rights movement, and the society-wide integration of women into the labor force have changed the face of American jobs entirely.  Many people look at all these changes and point only to free trade or globalization as the culprits in trying to understand why the world has changed so drastically, but this misses all these other changes which have occurred since the days when American made vehicles were really the only ones to choose from, and the concept of a two-income household was as strange as the idea of rearing children out of wedlock.

So what would have changed if the American people had decided to enact protectionist policies instead of free trade agreements?  And to what extent would we have needed to go to maintain the sort of civil society we had in 1950 or 1960?  Could we have, through protectionist and greater redistributive policies, created a society wherein the same level of economic prosperity and indeed preeminence could have continued to present day while at the same time bringing minorities and women into the work-force?  Would this be possible (is it possible even now?) to sustain without also maintaining a large, even global standing army?

Furthermore, to what degree is the perceived prosperity of the 50’s and 60’s in fact merely an illusion of the ‘good ol’ days’?  There is a widespread belief that this was an era of prosperity, and that in recent times people have become worse off, poorer, less able to achieve the American dream.  A college degree is the new high school degree.  There are not as many good blue collar jobs, etc.  But could we have enacted policies to counter this?  Could we have kept the lumber jobs, the fishing jobs, the manufacturing jobs?  What policies would this have demanded?  Less strict environmental regulations, to begin with. Some cap on innovation of new technology.  Much higher taxes, and very strict protectionist policies.  The protection, even, of very big corporations against competition – especially automakers, but other industries as well, such as telecommunications.  Then the question becomes, what would have been the side-effect of these policies?

These are the questions we need to ask when we begin to question free trade.  It is only one component in the change the world has undergone in recent decades.  Many of the changes are far more egalitarian in nature.  How much has the two-income family had an effect on home prices – effectively pricing out single-income families from the housing market?  How much has federal tuition assistance led to much higher college tuition?  The dead lumber towns are the result of legislation aimed to save forests.  And on and on.

So went the agrarian society.  So goes manufacturing.  Why staff a mail room full of mail runners and sorters when machines can do it better?  Why hire elevator operators when elevators are pretty easy to operate on our own?  Why charge more for a product, when you can undercut your competitor by making large capital investments in computers and machinery which save on costs in the long run?  In the end all these changes lead to a new sort of economy, and they can be a painful process, but there is really no stemming the tide.

Certainly the cost of stemming the tide would be much greater than merely enacting some stricter tariffs.  I don’t think economic populists have a clear vision of the America they imagine could be preserved through protectionism, or a good handle on the lengths such protectionism would truly need to go to do the trick.

P.S. – all this being said, I think that Randian advocacy of markets with no regulation, etc. is at least as Utopian.  Few people actually believe that no regulation would be the best policy, only that regulation should be efficient and limited because it is subject to capture and manipulation.  Also, this is not really an argument against taxes or anything of that nature.  Countries like the Netherlands or Denmark have very free trade and very high taxes, managing to keep government out of the economy while still providing strong safety nets (indeed, perhaps too strong!)  The trick, I think, is figuring out how to maintain as much economic liberty as possible while still providing effective state services and safety nets.  This is impossible when both parties spend all their time talking past one another or come up with healthcare plans that are “bipartisan” only inasmuch as they are good ideas stripped down to rather watery ones, diluted to the point of being almost entirely worthless.

Here’s a provocative post from Felix Salmon on why local self-sufficiency is preferable to free trade in the context of agricultural production.

Will asks a few good questions about markets and economies of scale, to which Kevin Carson (among others) provides some very good answers from his own unique, mutualist perspective.

Will asks, “are localism and a free market economy reconcilable?”

This is a good question.  When I began blogging at the League I was on a big localist kick, and walked down the localist/protectionist path about as far as I could before I bumped up against too many inconsistencies in that philosophy to ignore.  Nevertheless, I remain convinced that local politics and strong communities are essential to a prosperous, healthy society, and that decentralization – though not a perfect solution for every problem – remains the best way to avoid amassing too much power into specific regions, entities, or industries.  To my mind, free markets are the best way to ensure this, though the sad fact is that rarely are markets truly free, and so we continually find ourselves in semi-free market situations, with large corporate interests and “too-big-to-fail” players reaping far more benefits from the state than they should.

Nevertheless, I do think localism and free trade are reconcilable, even if we can never feasibly return to the counterfactual Carson imagines – to a world without state-subsidized roads and rail (and so on and so forth).  Government, whether we like it or not, will remain involved in our infrastructure and I doubt that the state has any plans to further disentangle itself from the web of protectionist policies now in place.  The special interests have a pretty tight hold over those policies – whether we’re talking about agribusiness or tire manufacturers or Goldman Sachs. [Read more →]

A day or two ago, I offhandedly endorsed an article from Jagdish Bhagwati on the continued relevance of global free trade. This provoked a few heated responses from Kevin Carson, who has long argued that economic globalization is almost entirely a result of an elaborate web of state-subsidized networks like public transportation. A truly free market, Carson argues, would privilege locally produced goods and services over  long-distance competitors, who rely on an artificial network of state intervention to sustain their business model. It’s an interesting hypothesis, though absent a visit to some alternate universe without railroads and the interstate highway system, I don’t think we will ever be able to conclusively test the merits of his argument. Carson’s comments have provoked a few of my own thoughts on the intersection of local concerns and the free market, however:

[Read more →]

I want to reuse this title sometime, because I think it’s really good.  I got it from this really good post by JL Wall over at Upturned Earth, responding to both myself and Nathan about the pitfalls of localism, free trade, and so forth.  More on this later….

Nathan has returned to blogging with quite a bloggy manifesto on some of my favorite topics – namely, localism, capitalism, and the struggle between free trade and the cultural side-effects of a consumerist, corporatist society.  It’s a long piece, and I’m not sure where to draw out bits from exactly (just read the whole thing).  Suffice to say, Nathan struggles with much of what I struggled with in the early months of this blog.  I dabbled a bit in distributism; pondered the ill-effects of corporations and consumerism on communities; and even, for a while, argued that perhaps it was our duty to obstruct free trade in order to somehow prop up an ailing blue-collar workforce.

Distributism, in the end, came to feel more like an ideal than a practical solution.  What insufferable inequities exist in modern capitalist societies often do because of statist interventions into the market – corporate welfare and subsidies, protections of industries and bailouts, and so forth (crony-capitalism to put it bluntly).  Governments are far better at shoring up power than at providing truly meaningful safety nets.   What little the state can do to reverse these inequities, almost always communities left alone to self-govern can do better.  [Read more →]

Girls in bikinis, after the leap…. [Read more →]

How can anti-statists reconcile themselves with protectionism?

This has become a kind of stumbling block for me.  I have slowly become more and more disillusioned with protectionism as policy because it seems that it would: A) enlarge or empower the state through regulatory measures and/or B) be subject to the worst sort of regulatory capture.  Not only certain industries but certain players within certain industries would inevitably benefit the most from these protections.  This strikes me as anathema to many of the purported anti-statist beliefs held by many protectionists.

(I realize that this is what a lot of free trade advocates have been telling me, but I guess I’m just slow, or perhaps my concern for our working class motivated me, though the more I think about it the more I see that the axe that is protectionist policy is hardly the sort of tool needed to protect our workers.  Increasing state power and the power of a few “protected” industries or industry players is hardly the way to approach our labor problems.) [Read more →]

Mark points us to this very fun and persuasive article by Radley Balko on the wonders of free trade and markets which warns, quite astutely, of the dangers of central planning and too much government intervention in the economy.  I’d just like to lay out a few of my beliefs on free trade, protectionism, government intervention and all that nonsense because I think on more levels than not I agree with much of what Mark believes.  This is Part One in a (tentatively) four part series.

Free Trade vs. Protectionism

I share the larger, long-term goal of free trade with my libertarian counterparts.  I think that a world highly interconnected by trade will be a more peaceful and prosperous world, so long as we can also determine ways to adequately protect our environment and find sustainable resources and energy to continue to drive the economy forward.   However, I am more cynical as to the implementation of such widespread trade.  I think that the reality is, with capitalism comes pain.  The formula requires failure, because competition dictates that there be losers and winners.  This is fine when it comes to corporations – a failed corporation, theoretically at least, will be replaced with a better competitor and that’s good for consumers, workers, and investors alike.  However, failure does not stop at the company level, it also effects the human beings who work for these belly-up companies.

This leads to the necessity of social safety nets (discussed more in part 2) but also to the need for some sort of, for lack of a better word, pacing.  I don’t believe in protection as an end in and of itself, but rather as a means to an end.  Protection of national industry should be about maintaining a safe trade balance, a stable employment rate, etc.  And it should be implemented in a temporary fashion, not ensuring the protection of one industry indefinitely, but rather promoting economic stability here at home while we achieve, gradually, freer trade globally. [Read more →]

Then again, simply because the United States ceased to be a ‘real’ republic does not mean that it ever became an empire. Of course, the United States did become an empire, complete with colonies, and from the perspective of the supposedly far more corrupt and imperial era we are now living in, it actually turns out that America is less of an empire now than it was then, which is to say not really an empire at all. ~ James Poulos

The problem with the interpretation of empire in James’ post rests in the notion that to achieve empire a nation must, in some sense, construct colonies in the manner of the British empire, or occupy militarily large swaths of the globe as the Romans did, or in some sense conquer.  This is certainly one form of empire.  So, all morality or practicality aside, it’s important to first distinguish what empire has become in the 21st century.  America, after all, does not have colonies.  Even the territories we now occupy – namely Iraq and Afghanistan – hardly qualify as colonies.  We are not settling Americans there.  We have no intent to extend to our citizenry settlements in Baghdad or plantations in the Afghani poppy fields.

This is, of course, because we no longer need to.  Globalization has changed the face of empire entirely, which is why Freddie’s description, I think, falls a bit short:

“Here is what imperialism is: we come to your country, and we exert our control over it, and if you try to stop us, we kill you.”

This is not to say the ends of imperialism have changed, but only the means. The British, to reap the benefits of a global empire, needed to establish some sort of military and civilian presence in many of their colonies.  In their effort to extend the British way of life to the world they had none or at least very few of the modern tools we Americans possess today.  But their ends and ours were very similar – that is, to take possession of the economic benefits of the less-developed world to enrich their own population.  [Read more →]

Let’s start with “isn’t” first:

________________________________________

• It’s not a war just about spreading democracy.
• It’s not a war just about oil.
• It’s not a war just about stopping a brutal dictator who supposedly had weapons of mass destruction.
• It’s not a war of humanitarian intervention.
• It’s not a plot cooked up by some secret cabal of Israeli Zionists and American neocons.

***

• It is a war partially about oil, partially about spreading democracy, and partially about ousting a brutal dictator.
• It is a war that reflects poorly on the cultural shift toward perpetual growth and expansion of American economic and military interests.
• It is a war fueled by skewed notions of national security and humanitarian intervention.
• It is a war about American military dominance in a region that has American economic interests – in oil, trade and so forth, at its heart.
• It is a war pushed very strongly by the brand of politics known as neoconservatism, which most blatantly embraces such military and economic expansion, but which is certainly not unique in this – only, perhaps, more unabashed.

Look, I opposed the Iraq War in the beginning.  I thought it was ludicrous, and the government’s case seemed paper thin.  Later, I opposed artificial time tables for withdrawal of American troops, because it struck me as cruel and imprudent and even cowardly to leave a nation in a state of civil war that we essentially instigated.  I still oppose withdrawing too quickly, lest the country be sucked into an ever more brutal cycle of civil war and chaos.

But I become more and more dubious that our continued presence is anything more than prolonging the inevitable; that no matter how long we stay, in the end we’ll have to exit, and when we do, the Iraqis will simply have to figure things out on their own.  And it will be bloody, and awful, and the violence will last a long, long time.  Likely enough, the “democratic government of Iraq” will become ever more despotic, and the country will become even more divided along sectarian lines.  No length of stay on the part of the American military can avoid that.  Even if we do achieve stability that lasts beyond our own occupation, the only way that stability will be achieved for long will be through the suppression of the Sunnis by the Shiite majority.

[Read more →]