The unlikely rise of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump has focused public attention on an issue that hasn’t gotten much attention since the Civil War era – international trade.
One of the biggest controversies in nineteenth-century American politics was tariffs – with Big Business manufacturers for them, and farmers and producers of other commodities against them. Corporate behemoths wanted protection from foreign competition while ordinary consumers wanted lower prices. Furthermore, tariff revenue was used to enrich crony capitalists in the industrialized North: the federal government subsidized the building of railroads, canals, and other infrastructure while the beneficiaries of this largesse turned cheap tariff-free commodities produced in the South and West into high-priced manufactured goods.
These days, however, the ‘free trade’ versus ‘fair trade’ debate is seemingly reversed, with the big corporations supposedly favoring the former while the latter is championed by leftists like Sanders and right-wing populists of the Trumpian variety. In reality, however, nothing has really changed.
It would be very easy to institute a free trade regime in the United States, and you wouldn’t need a thousand-page treaty to do it. You’d only have to abolish all tariffs, subsidies, and other government-imposed impediments to the free passage of goods across our borders. That’s free trade.
This post was published at Lew Rockwell on May 7, 2016.
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