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 →]

…everything is scarier, more urgent.  Like this swine flu epidemic.  I’m really nervous about this, especially living in Arizona.  Roque – keep healthy down in Mexico, man…. (you are in Mexico, right?)

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 →]

UPDATE, 3/25: In response to some accurate criticism, I have pulled back some of the arguments made in the below post; my revised argument can be found here.

The good Mr. Dr. Larison has some tough but thoughtful words in response to my defense of free trade.  They are well worth reading.  I would like to address some of his arguments, especially because, much like many other free trade libertarians, I find myself agreeing with Larison far more often than not. 

At the outset, he notes that:

Localists tend to take for granted that dependence on distant centers of wealth and power, which the interdependence at the heart of globalism requires, is antithetical to a decentralized political and economic order. I can imagine why someone might want to reject such a decentralized order, but I simply don’t see how someone maintains that it is compatible with the results of globalist policies.

I’m not so sure about this claim, as I noted in my original post.  The protectionism advocated by localists is not a localist protectionism, but is instead one that relies heavily on tariffs instituted by a distant centralized government.  Admittedly, this may simply be a result of Constitutional realities, but as a practical matter, a one-size-fits-all tariff imposed by bureaucrats in Washington seems like an awfully blunt instrument that is likely to negatively affect just as many local interests as it protects. 

Larison continues:

If regional differences remain in the U.S., they are much less pronounced today than ever before thanks to a combination of mass mobility, technological advance facilitating rapid transport and communication across the continent and shared consumer culture. Minnesotans may not eat fatback and Vermonters may not eat rellenos, but everyone is importing the same pork from the same factory farms in the Midwest, and perhaps the less said about the homogenizing effects of the national Buffalo wing phenomenon the better. We are steadily moving towards the economic, cultural and political monoculture that Thompson claims we are avoiding.

First, whatever the homogenizing effects of the Buffalo wing, the cuisine of my quasi-but-beloved-hometown has far more going for it than a few pieces of chicken scraps – witness the magnificent Beef on Weck sandwich, amongst other things – though what is called a “Buffalo Wing” in the rest of the country is often little like the wing you will get at, say, Duff’s.  Second, Larison specifically talks here about our food coming from the same giant factory farms in the Midwest, no matter where we happen to live, which is certainly and sadly true; but this ignores the fact that those giant factory farms in the Midwest are amongst the biggest benficiaries of protectionist policies that remain. 

[Read more →]

UPDATE, 3/25: In response to some accurate criticism, I have pulled back some of the arguments made in the below post; my revised argument can be found here.

Over the last few weeks, some of my ordinary fellows – and especially E.D. - have been making a case against free trade and globalism while making the case for protectionism, with the support of some noteworthy communitarians.  Scott has had some excellent responses, but the free traders among us haven’t directly addressed the fundamental objections raised in favor of protectionism. 

The roots of the arguments against free trade and globalization seem to be that they make war more rather than less likely because it allows countries to use trade as a weapon that can only be combatted with force, that outsourcing kills local communities and cultures regardless of whether it creates greater growth on the aggregate, and that access to various cheap goods leads to a consumerism that devalues the community.  In the above-linked post, James Matthew Wilson expresses this attitude in his argument that free traders falsely assume:

“the specific is dangerous, the particular a menace, the exclusive “unfair.”  Local government is a recipe for injustice; local customs are benighted; local attachments are “clannish” and violent; local economies are inefficient, and their defenders “protectionist.”  These items lead to more expansive ones directed against the particularities intrinsic to authority: religion endangers public order because it makes specific claims about the identity of truth and goodness; families oppress, because they make specific claims about the role of individual persons; and above all nations and nation-states confine the moral imaginations of their people and consequently serve as the necessary ingredients for war.” 

Along these same lines, Daniel Larison argues that free trade leads inexorably towards the creation of uniformity of government around the globe, and thus undermines national sovereignty. 

I don’t think these arguments are quite right.  To the extent that the criticism is that free trade ultimately leads to greater uniformity of regulation across international boundaries, there is probably much truth in that belief.   In fact, it’s probably a truism that free trade demands a certain degree of uniformity of regulation since it requires nations to adopt more or less identical trade policies.  The problem with this line of argument is that it confuses culture and governance, localism and nationalism.  It is culture and localism about which Front Porch Republicans are concerned about protecting. 

In other words, for the localist, protecting American political sovereignty is important only insofar as it results in the protection of local culture and governance.*  But a look at American history demonstrates that free trade has proven the best way of protecting local culture and preventing a national monoculture. 

The arguments against free trade ignore that free trade amongst the American states has existed since the Founding, even as they note (correctly) that the federal government imposed high tariffs for over a century after the Founding.  Thus, according to the anti-free trade argument, free trade amongst the individual states should have created a national monoculture.  That is not what has happened though – to be sure, the differences amongst state governments are often quite slight, although differences most definitely exist.  But how similar, really, are the important aspects of community and culture in Utah and New York City, or Alabama and New Jersey, or Ohio and Texas, etc.?  The sports that are most popular in Boston are a far cry from the sports that are most popular in Texas, which are in turn a far cry from the sports that are most popular in Minnesota.  The food of upstate New York is distinctly different from the food of the Mississippi Delta, which is distinctly different from the food of the American Southwest.  And the sounds of Pat Green are nothing like the sounds of the Red Hot Chili Peppers which are nothing like the sounds of Billy Joel, yet all of them rely heavily on love of their home region.  All of which says nothing of the cultural differences that can exist even within a given state. 

Instead, I would argue that it is protectionism, with its one-size-fits-all nature that most threatens to create a sort of monoculture to which the only solution is expansionism.  Protectionism on a federal level (which is the only level at which it can take place) forces us to rely ever-more heavily on producers in other areas within a limited realm.  It is difficult for a culture to maintain its identity when it must rely on everything it cannot produce itself from a highly limited number of other cultures – the more the Northeast must rely on the Midwest for not only some agricultural products, but also for its cars, its clothes, etc., the more the Northeast will become like the Midwest – and vice versa.  Or, to take another example, the more the Scots are forced to rely on the English for that which they cannot produce themselves, the more the Scots stop being Scots – and vice versa.  Therefore, the only way to protect the local becomes to expand the territory that is subject to the protectionism. 

[Read more →]

I’ve been pushing back against E.D.’s localizing tendencies of late not so much because I disagree with him, but because I think that in doing so we probably get closer to an accurate answer about any of the variety of elements that we seek to better understand: value, liberty, place, meaning, life. In doing so, it is incumbent upon me not to be the League’s “party of no”, but rather to try to establish and articulate an alternative vision for how we are to live in the world. My soul is most content when in doing so I am able to harvest the stock of wisdom that E.D. provides in his analysis, separating the wheat from the chaff as I see it, and fill in portions of the picture that I see as missing with what might seem like contradictory images, but come into focus as ultimately complimentary with enough perspective.

So it is that I re-read E.D.’s post about home and a sense of place in the world in light of my recent admission to myself that I think very highly and appreciate greatly our hyper-connected world. You see I found myself filled with a surprising degree of excitement when I read about the latest round of renovations that Facebook had planned (h/t: Poulos), which have ultimately caused me to decide to let my twitter account go unused and switch my network solely over to Facebook. My excitement was not so much rooted in the fact that Facebook was changing things for the sake of changing things, as many have attributed to the decision, but rather that the changes seemed to represent an inching closer towards a kind of interconnectivity that portends what I take to be a potentially great benefit in resolving the seeming conflict between embedding and strengthening a sense of locality and acknowledging and working with our ever fleshing contexts of globalism.

I, like E.D., moved around a lot as a kid and have moved around a fair bit as a young adult. During my childhood I lived in three different towns, though all in same basic geography, and moved about further within those towns, changing the neighbourhoods to which I could claim to be a member. In young adulthood I moved out of that basic geography to a little island off the coast of my geographic homeland (it’s not as Robinson Crusoe as it sounds) and moved around a great deal within the city on that island that I called home for seven years. I then moved back to the “mainland” and moved within different and distinct segments of the city three times in as many years. And finally, I moved over an entire province roughly a year and a half ago to land in the city I now call home, which is largely removed from most of my creature comforts (friends, family, haunts, etc.).

That last move I made very consciously, deciding that I needed to try living somewhere else, to open myself to a different class of experiences by changing my locale. The logic of this decision was a residual wisdom from my having moved a bunch as a kid and informs the basic idea around why people take mobility to be such an important freedom: the ability to move around and live in different places exposes one to a greater breadth of experience and helps to round one out as a human being in important and useful ways. To be worldly is a good thing in many peoples’ eyes, cultivating a certain tolerance and broad understanding of the world in which one lives and the diversity of one’s fellow inhabitants. Indeed, I too lament how poorly traveled I am in the grand scheme of things, having opted for other elements of my life to take precedence.

But E.D. is quite correct when he notes that all this moving has its downsides and that something is lost when the rootedness of having a home and living in it for extended periods of time is forsaken to proverbially, “Go west, young man/woman”. And I too can feel the sedentary impulse as my life draws closer to marriage and children and home ownership, the benefits of a headquarters, as it were, with a community of substance with which to surround one’s self seems a key element in family raising.

Yet and still, there continues to be a big old world out there acting as the backdrop against which our lives unfold and it seems folly to simply ignore it as a real understanding of the world we seek to decode involves those contexts of glacial, geo-political/cultural movement. Our picture is ever widening in its scope and parameters, there is more information available than ever, and if we wish to really get a sense for what is happening I think we need to find a way of bridging this seeming chasm between worldliness and placefulness so as to realize the benefits of both to the best of our ability. [Read more →]