What’s the deal with this misappropriation of otherwise perfectly serviceable words? Community ought rather being construed as that group of persons, many of whom you’d prefer not to embrace, but that you put up with anyway.

Sabin’s comment hits the nail right on the head! If you spend $trillions (highways, wars, regulations, &c.) in order to facilitate “free” trade, then one thing it is not is free.

I have pulled back some of my argument pretty significantly at the link with my name above. Also at that link, I have responded more directly to some of your points in your comments above.

The big disagreement I have with your argument is that it assumes that the US Government is a meaningful representative of an individual society or community. If a community thinks that its interests are best served through some form of protectionism, then I ultimately have little objection to its doing so. But as a practical matter, local governments lack the Constitutional authority to maintain a formal trade policy; even if they had such authority, the implementation of tariffs and/or subsidies would ordinarily require implementation on a much wider scale than the community level to be effective. An official US national policy of free trade alleviates (though it does not eliminate) these problems because it permits localities to engage in self-help, both official and unofficial, short of tariffs and subsidies (though informal subsidies may be possible on a local level) without nationalizing the costs of that self-help.

Also, I think it is simply untrue that I assume “protectionism” to mean a prohibition on trade – quite the contrary, I explicitly associate it with tariffs and subsidies, which obviously reduce but do not eliminate trade.

It is entirely possible that a true form of free trade could be the result of a prudential decision — as could, for that matter, certain kinds of subsidies that his strict advocacy of a true free trade might forbid. Between the two — a local, prudential decision for free trade or one for subsidy — I would tend to agree the former is more likely to fortify a lasting kind of prosperity.

To mention my “Empire of Addiction” essay one more time (!), it is the kind of “free trade” we have developed that has made any real free market unmanagable and has consequently necessitated the growth of the welfare/warfare state.

Your mistake (and Mark Thompson’s mistake as well) is equating corporate globalization to “free trade.”

What we have is subsidized trade and corporate protectionism on a massive scale.

Government subsidizes the export of capital through foreign aid and World Bank loans to build the utility and road infrastructure overseas without which offshoring couldn’t be profitable.

Government subsidizes long-distance shipping (highway and civil aviation subsidies, keeping the sea lanes open at taxpayer expense, etc.).

Perhaps most importantly, so-called “intellectual property” serves the same protectionist function, for TNCs, that tariffs did for the old national industrial economies of a century ago. They create artificial “comparative advantage” by erecting toll gates against the free flow of technology and information, and secure corporate ownership of the latest generation of production technology.

It’s probably no coincidence that the dominant profitable sectors in the corporate global economy all pursue business models that rely heavily on “intellectual property” (software and entertaiment), direct government subsidies (agribusiness and armaments), or both (electronics and biotech).

If you take a look at the largest TNCs, they’re only nominally private. What we have is an interlocking directorate of corporate and state bureaucracies. To call the corporate bureaucracies “private” is as misleading and meaningless as to say the feudal nobility were private landowners.

There’s a difference between “trade” and “free trade.” When you subsidize something, you get more of it. And we’ve got a lot more trade now than we’d have in a free market. If we had genuine free trade (everybody free to do business with any willing party, on whatever terms they could negotiate on their own, with no subsidies, no patents and copyrights, no trademark law, no protections of any kind, and no government role in forcibly opening up foreign markets for American business), we’d have the optimal market quantity of foreign trade–in other words, a hell of a lot less of it. We’d have relocalized economies of small-scale production for local use.

Unfortunately, the establishment left and establishment right seem to have a mirror-image vested interest in the “globalization=free trade” meme. The right benefits from the pretense that all those corporate turtles got up on those fenceposts by being such good climbers in the “free market.” The left benefits from the pretense that a big government controlled by liberal social engineers is necessary to stop the turtles from climbing up there.

In fact big business wouldn’t even exist if the corporate economy hadn’t been created by a top-down government revolution in the late 19th century.

The ostensible enmity between big business and big government is about as phony as the “good cop/bad cop” routine in an interrogation room. The folks on the right who squeal about big government are a bit like Bre’r Rabbit hollering “Please don’t fling me in that briar patch.” And liberals who regulate the economy for “progressive” purposes almost always wind up being useful idiots for big business (Google “Baptists and Bootleggers”).

My original post arose as supplementary reflection to my “Empire of Addiction, Part I” essay, and I shall delay detailed response to the material here or elsewhere until I publish “Part II” next month. However, I should like to second Sabin’s fine observation that Thompson’s argument and most other pro-free trade arguments reduce the question to a misleading dualism.

As my “Empire” essay intimates, for free traders to assert that “protectionism” is a uniform, thoughtless, and dull minded response to the rising inequalities and economic instabilities of a global free trade regime is the least excusable of libels. To the contrary, it is free trade (and for that matter, most forms of free market theory) that is most “thoughtless” or anti-intellectual. Human reason cannot really create communities or societies on its own steam, and to that extent it is a relatively limited force. The more we exercise it boldly, the more aware we become of natural laws and limitations that guide its proper functioning and punish its ill use. But we can see that the constant use of practical and prudential reason is part-and-parcel to social and political life. Theories, or, I should say, ideologies like “free trade” as well as its straw man antagonist, “protectionism”, both suggest that the human reason normally opperative in the self-government of a society should be turned off, that it should, by a leap of faith that contradicts all experience, simply allow supposedly impersonal, universal, and benevolent processes to unfold; the rising tide, we are told, will lift all ships.

Far from being a mere “protectionist,” I would argue that “free trade” is a great evil not only because of its consequences for societies (and these are abundant), but because, after the fashion of all ideologies, it tries to create a uniform, minutely regulated system to substitute for the natural and prudential exercise of the human reason. As a critic of “free trade” I do not necessarily recommend the banning of all imports and exports. No one does! That’s why accusations of protectionism are always directed at a straw man, not a a real one. Rather, the problem with free trade is that it eliminates prudential reasoning entirely by replacing it with a legalistic bureaucracy that works to eliminate all variation in the nature and administration of laws. It has to, since such a regime’s goal is to eliminate the variation of laws in local and particular circumstances.

Therefore, it takes all agency away from individual societies and communities affected by such policies. In some localities, a free trade arrangement might be advantageous, in many it would not; in most, some prudently negotiated open and closed trade policies would likely emerge — were the people actually affected by such policies allowed to shape them. This kind of self-government in commerce for individual polities may be in some ways inefficient, because it requires the regular and particularly applied use of human reason. As Tocqueville observes, this is frustrating to the half-intelligent and harrassed who seek shelter in the great shadow of generalized ideas. But if politics is an exercise in practical reason, any blanket theory that robs that reason of its power and relieves it of duties is likely to result in an insidious kind of tyranny.

Contrary to Thompson, I do not see the destruction of local culture as the one, or perhaps even the main, entity under threat in a free-trade global regime. Even North Korea is infested with American mass cultural kitsch of the type Thompson celebrates as “local” culture. The worthy exercise of the practical reason through local self-government is also threatened. But my arguments were mainly targeted at the stratification that occurs in a free trade regime: property and wealth necessarily become concentrated even as in gross they may increase; inevitable and desirable inequalities get exacerbated and become grotesque and injurious; and, finally and above all, a country like the United States positions itself for short term capital growth that, in the long term, undermines the core infrastructure of a sustainable and stable economy.

The champions of unfettered globalism who assert that Walmart is wonderful because people were “sick of the local dry goods operator who robbed them blind” generally refuse to factor in the costs of deteriorating building stock and infrastructure….and the life within them that failed to see anything but a whispering hint of the boom gone recently bust. Drive the interstate stem to stern…the sinew that is the frontier of globalist reveries and you will be hard-pressed to find a downtown restaurant, let alone a functioning downtown once you run the plastic gauntlet of the chain eateries flanking gas stations and motels along the artery originally designed to move military personnel and hardware across the continent efficiently.

Once again, it is an either-or proposition tied intimately with military projection. One is either pragmatic and forward thinking and in support of globalism or a luddite romantic, tethered to resentful dreams while living a prosaic life in the hinterland. It would even appear that the Boosters of Globalism take it as an article of faith that we must liberate other cultures and produce a consumptive military chamber of commerce that is bankrupting us while manufacturing generations of resentful wogs with a kind of factory line precision.

That we remain, as a culture.. unable to critically appraise the costs and benefits of the recent global bubble even as we suffer from its intemperance is about as good a reason as any that I can think of to refute the addled definition of a community that it can simply be an embrace of those who are scattered geographically. If this armed adventure into penury be globalism, I’d say the globe has a good case for the prosecution of a libel complaint.

That seems just completely false to me. It looks at the issue completely backwards concentrating on what the region imports versus what it produces. Localities come to see those things that they produce themselves as part of their identity. Thus, the Green Bay Packers, the Pittsburgh Steelers, the Milwaukee Brewers. Cities used to refer to themselves as The Motor City, the Furniture City, the Brass City, etc. Globalization it creating a case where either the entire US actually produces nothing other than “services” and where everywhere in the US we produce that exact same thing.