Trade as a Humanitarian Force

[Universe Prince]

According to Gabor Steingart:

With each purchase of a product from the Far East, the consumer delivers a blow to the domestic social cartel and its terms of sale. Shoppers compare a product's price and service, but they don't consider the price and service of the nation that produces the item. Thus consumers across the Western world become executors of globalization. In the world war for wealth, they are the most important combat troops for the aggressor states. Though they carry no weapons, they still destroy domestic production with their cold-hearted purchasing decisions. Nowadays, almost everything money can buy can be produced without the extra ingredient that we call the welfare state.

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The question here is not about what's wrong or right. What is important at this juncture is simply the realization that the global labor market, as we have invented it up to now, has created a unified sovereign territory for goods producers. The demand for labor now moves from one land to another, and naturally prefers those states with the lowest possible supplementary social costs. Many who considered the social market economy to be the final stage of history are now being forced to admit they made a colossal error. Capitalism has, thanks to a global labor and finance market, increased its range, while the social safety net has lost ground. The market has gained power, speed and apparently also inevitability. But the social triumph of yesteryear has faded. Indeed, capitalism is going back to its roots.

Compare that to this from Frank Chodorov:

The perimeter of Society is not fixed by political frontiers but by the radius of its commercial contacts. All people who trade with one another are by that very act brought into community. The point is emphasized by the strategy of war. The objective of a general staff is to destroy the marketplace mechanisms of the enemy; the destruction of his army is only incidental to that purpose. The army could well enough be left intact if his internal means of communication were destroyed, his ports of entry immobilized, so that specialized production, which depends on trade, could no longer be carried on; the people, reduced to primitive existence, thus lose the will to war and sue for peace. That is the general pattern of all wars. The more highly integrated the economy the stronger will be the nation in war, simply because of its ability to produce an abundance of both military implements and economic goods; on the other hand, if its ability to produce is destroyed, if the flow of goods is interrupted, the more susceptible to defeat it is, because its people, unaccustomed as they are to primitive conditions, are the more easily discouraged. There is no point to the argument as to whether "guns" or "butter" is more important in the prosecution of war. It follows that any interference with the operation of the marketplace, however done, is analogous to an act of war. A tariff is such an act. When we are "protected" against Argentine beef, the effect (as intended) is to make beef harder to get, and that is exactly what an invading army would do. Since the duty does not diminish our desire for beef, we are compelled by the diminished supply to put out more labor to satisfy that desire; our range of possibilities is foreshortened, for we are faced with the choice of getting along with less beef or abstaining from the enjoyment of some other "good." The absence of a plenitude of meat from the marketplace lowers the purchasing power of our labor. We are poorer, even as is a nation whose ports have been blockaded. Moreover, since every buyer is a seller, and vice versa, the prohibition against their beef makes it difficult for Argentineans to buy our automobiles, and this expression of our skills is constricted. The effect of a tariff is to drive a potential buyer out of the marketplace. The argument that "protection" provides jobs is patently fallacious. It is the consumer who gives the worker a job, and the consumer who is prevented from consuming might as well be dead, as far as providing productive employment is concerned. Incidentally, is it jobs we want, or is it beef? Our instinct is to get the most out of life with the least expenditure of labor. We labor only because we want; the opportunity to produce is not a boon, it is a necessity. Neither the domestic nor the foreign producer "dumps" anything into our laps. There is a price on everything we want and the price is always the weariness of toil. Whatever causes us to put out more toil to acquire a given amount or kind of satisfactions is undesirable, for it conflicts with our natural urge for a more abundant life. Such is a tariff, an embargo, an import quota or the modern device of raising the price of foreign goods by arbitrarily lowering the value of our money. Any restriction of trade, internal or external, does violence to a man's primordial drive to improve his circumstances.

When Mr. Steingart says "capitalism is going back to its roots," I can in good conscience reply, "I certainly hope so." If we wish to exert change on other cultures that are poor and in need of ideas about human dignity and worker's (i.e. human) rights, then we need not to stop buying their products but to continue and perhaps expand our trade with those people. Capitalism, at its roots, is humanitarian in nature. Capitalism, trade, creates cooperation between people and diminishes sectarian barriers between people of differing classes, cultures and countries. If we have established domestic welfare policies that suffer from trade with other countries, that is our problem, not that of people who live in those other countries. To punish them for our mistake is neither humane nor in our best interests, and it suggests a severe misunderstanding of the situation. I would suggest to Mr. Steingart that the social "triumph" of the welfare state needs to fade so as to make way for the social triumph of trade. Getting humans to cooperate peacefully is always going to be better than creating a way of life that separates people and make enemies of outsiders.

Or to put it another way, make money not war.